The pitch for SEO usually arrives before any look at your actual data. Someone offers a monthly retainer, or an audit, and the case for it is made in general terms: rankings, visibility, growth. What is almost never said is that you can do a meaningful first pass yourself, for nothing, in the same tool the professionals open first. Doing it changes the conversation. You stop buying SEO on faith and start buying it against numbers you have already seen.
This guide is a short, honest pre-audit. Three checks, all in Google Search Console, each pointing at a different part of the picture: are you getting traffic, is it the right traffic, and are your pages even in Google at all. None of it requires a login to anything but your own account, and none of it tells you how to fix what you find. That part is a real audit. The point here is to decide whether paying for one is worth it, and to walk in knowing what you are looking at.
If you are not sure you have Search Console access, fix that first. It is free to set up, it belongs to you, and an outside reviewer only ever needs read-only access to read it. (More on that in what access an SEO audit actually needs.)
Check 1: The four numbers that say whether anything is working
Open the Performance report and set the date range to the last three months. A single month swings with seasons and holidays, so a trend tells you far more than a snapshot. At the top sit four tiles. These four numbers are the whole headline.
- Clicks are people who saw you in Google and came through. This is the closest thing to a result on the screen. Here it is 72 over three months, roughly 24 a month, which for a business that sells things is close to nothing.
- Impressions are how often your pages appeared at all. Here it is 12,200, so the site is not invisible. Google sees it and shows it.
- CTR is the share of those impressions that became clicks. At 0.6%, fewer than one in a hundred, something is wrong between appearing and being chosen.
- Average position is roughly where you rank. At 36.6, that is page four, and almost nobody scrolls to page four.
Read together, the four numbers diagnose the site in one line. It is not invisible, it just sits too deep to be clicked. That is your first signal. Lots of impressions with almost no clicks is a position problem, not a content problem, and it is exactly the kind of thing worth paying to fix. If you want the longer read on telling a real result from busywork, that is the whole of how to read your monthly SEO report.
Check 2: Whether the traffic is the right traffic
Total numbers hide the thing that matters most, which is intent. Switch to the Queries tab. It lists the actual search terms people used, and it is where you tell buyer traffic from filler.
On this site the only rows with real clicks are brand searches, people typing the company name, sitting on page one with healthy click-through rates. Everything below is non-brand. "Vehicle graphics" was shown over a thousand times and got zero clicks from page four. "Business cards" drew more than a thousand impressions, again no clicks, stuck around page five. These are real commercial searches by people who want to buy what the business sells, and not one converted into a visit.
That contrast is the test you run yourself. For each query bringing real impressions, ask two things: could this searcher plausibly become a customer, and where do we rank for it. Commercial terms with impressions and no clicks, sitting on page three or worse, are opportunity sitting on the table. Filler terms that would never convert are not worth chasing no matter how many impressions they show. If a future report leans on total impressions without separating buyer queries from filler, you will already know to push back.
Check 3: Whether your pages are even in Google
The first two checks assume Google has your pages to show. This one tests that assumption, and it is the check most owners never run. Open Indexing, then Pages. The top of the report shows two numbers: how many pages are indexed, and how many are not.
Here 730 pages are indexed and 933 are not. At first glance that looks like a disaster, more than half the known pages missing from Google. But "not indexed" is not automatically bad. Google says plainly not to expect every URL to be indexed, because plenty of URLs are never meant to be: redirects, thank-you pages, filtered duplicates, anything you marked noindex on purpose. To know whether this is a problem, you have to open the breakdown.
Scroll the "Why pages aren't indexed" table and sort the reasons into two groups. The first is ordinary housekeeping. Page with redirect (162), Not found 404 (47), Soft 404 (10), Alternate page with proper canonical tag (5), Excluded by noindex (1), Blocked by robots.txt (1). On most sites this is normal background noise, the natural residue of moving pages around and keeping junk out of the index. None of it should keep you up at night.
The second group is the one that matters, and on this site it is enormous. Crawled, currently not indexed: 557. Discovered, currently not indexed: 115. Together that is 672 pages, far more than the housekeeping rows combined. These two statuses mean something specific. "Crawled, currently not indexed" means Google fetched the page, looked at it, and decided it was not worth adding. "Discovered, currently not indexed" means Google knows the page exists but has not bothered to crawl it, often a sign it is spending its limited crawl budget elsewhere. Read together, they say Google is seeing most of this site's content and judging it not worth showing.
That is the real diagnosis, and it lines up exactly with Checks 1 and 2. A site whose pages mostly sit unindexed or buried on page four does not have a visibility problem that more "optimization" will solve by itself. It has a quality and structure problem that a competent audit should name. To sanity-check it on your own pages, paste a few of your important URLs into URL Inspection at the top of Search Console and confirm they actually say "URL is on Google". If your money pages are not, you have found something worth paying to fix.
Red flags that mean yes, get eyes on it
Put the three checks together. If you see several of these, a one-time audit will almost certainly pay for itself by telling you what to fix first:
- Commercial queries stuck on page three or worse, with impressions but almost no clicks. The demand exists and you are not capturing it.
- Important pages not indexed, especially showing up under "Crawled, currently not indexed". Google has seen them and passed.
- Indexed count far below the number of real pages you publish. If you have 200 service and product pages and 40 are indexed, something structural is wrong.
- Impressions climbing while clicks stay flat. The classic "visibility went up" story that produces no business.
- CTR near zero on terms you should own. Appearing without being chosen is its own problem.
Green flags that mean you are probably fine for now
The honest version of this guide has to include the other outcome. Sometimes the pre-audit tells you to keep your money:
- Clicks rising on commercial queries quarter over quarter, not just impressions.
- Money pages indexed and ranking on page one or two for terms with real intent.
- A not-indexed bucket that is mostly housekeeping, redirects and 404s and intentional noindex, with few surprises in "Crawled, currently not indexed".
- Healthy CTR on the searches that matter, in the range your brand terms already get.
If that is your picture, you do not need to hire anyone this quarter. Keep reading your own data and revisit it in a few months. A provider who looks at this and still pushes a retainer is selling activity, not results.
What a pre-audit cannot tell you
This is where the free check ends and a paid one begins. Search Console shows you the symptoms clearly. It does not show you the cause. It will tell you that your commercial pages sit on page four, but not whether the reason is duplicated titles across a template, a canonical tag pointing the whole section at your homepage, parameter URLs eating your crawl budget, or thin content that genuinely deserves to rank lower. Those live in your code and your templates, where the dashboard cannot see, and several of them are exactly the technical fixes a dashboard-only agency will not touch.
A real audit takes what you found here, crawls the site to find the cause, and hands back a prioritized list of what to fix and in what order. It is also the context for judging an ongoing engagement: if you already pay a retainer, this pre-audit is a fair way to ask which of these numbers it has moved. For what those monthly engagements usually cover, see what a typical SEO retainer actually does.
The bottom line
Fifteen minutes in your own Search Console answers the only question that matters before you spend anything: is there a real problem here, and is it worth paying to solve. Read the four Performance tiles, check whether your commercial queries earn clicks, and open the Page indexing report to see whether Google is keeping your pages or quietly passing on them. If the picture is healthy, keep your money. If it is not, you now know precisely what to ask an audit to explain, and you will recognise a real answer when you get one.
Ran the checks and did not like what you saw? That is exactly what the fixed-price SEO audit turns into a plan: a full crawl plus your real Search Console data, with the causes named and a prioritized fix list you own. One report at a flat PHP 2,500, no retainer, no ranking promises. Get in touch to start.