SEO audit: what it should tell your estate agency, and what it must never promise

An SEO audit costs time, sometimes money, and above all it steers months of work. If its figures are wrong, everything that follows is wrong too. Yet most estate agencies receive their audit like a verdict, with no way to judge its quality.

Here are the rules we apply to our own audits. They also work as a checklist for judging the audit you received, whoever it came from.

The essentials in four points

• Nobody can guarantee a first place on Google: Google says so itself.
• A serious audit separates what it measured from what it assumes, and writes “not measured” when it does not have the data.
• Without access to your Search Console, no audit can state how many pages Google has actually indexed or where your traffic comes from.
• An audit that recommends disavowing links without a confirmed manual action is wasting your time.

An audit does not promise a ranking

Any promise of a first place is a warning sign. Google writes it in its own documentation: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google”, and advises caution with providers who claim otherwise. Source: Google Search Central, retrieved 31 October 2026.

An honest audit says something else: this is what stops people from finding you today, this is the order in which to fix it, this is how we will measure whether it worked. Less of a sales pitch than a promise, but verifiable.

Every figure must be checkable

Modern audits rely on automated tools, and those tools make mistakes. In one of our audits, the automated analysis reported 95.7% duplicate content on a website; our own measurement, redone page by page, gave 59.1%. On another site, the tool flagged twenty pages with multiple titles; it turned out to be a rendering artefact, not a real defect.

Both wrong figures would have led to useless recommendations. Since then, every significant claim from a tool is checked by a person before it goes into the report.

What you can ask of your audit:

• The source of each figure: which tool, which measurement date.
• The method when it changes the meaning: across how many pages, from which search location.
• Concrete examples: the exact addresses of the pages with errors, not just a total.

You can judge how we present figures ourselves on our Results page.

“Not measured” is an honest answer

An audit does not see everything. Without access to your Google Search Console, the free tool where Google shows how it sees your website, nobody can state how many of your pages are actually indexed, or how many visits come from Google.

A good audit says so, in a clear section such as “What we did not measure”. A less rigorous audit fills the gap with an estimate presented as fact. When you read a traffic figure in an audit, ask where it comes from. If it does not come from your Search Console or your analytics, it is a projection, and it should be presented as one.

Recognising risky recommendations

Some recommendations come up often and do more harm than good.

Disavowing links for no reason. Google's disavow tool asks Google to ignore certain links pointing to your site. Google intends it for sites that received a manual action for unnatural links, or expect one (Search Console Help, retrieved 31 October 2026). Without that action confirmed in your Search Console, the recommendation has no basis.

Mistaking traces of a hack for links worth recovering. On the website of an agency that had been hacked in the past, hundreds of inbound links pointed to old casino pages that have since been removed. Redirecting them to the agency's website would have brought that history back. We made the mistake ourselves of presenting them as “broken links to recover”, before correcting it. The right decision was to leave those pages permanently removed.

Scoring your backlinks without real data. Judging the quality of the sites that link to you requires reliable data. Without it, an audit should leave that section unscored rather than invent a score.

A useful audit ends with a plan, not a score

The overall score reassures or worries, but it does not tell you what to do on Monday morning. What matters in an audit is:

• A list of actions ranked by expected impact, from most to least urgent.
• The exact location of each fix: which page, which field, which text.
• A way to check that the fix is done and that it works.
• A dated baseline, to compare against at the next review.

That is how we run the audits in our real-estate SEO service.

What to remember

• Be wary of any promise of a ranking or a timeline.
• Ask for the source and date of every significant figure.
• “Not measured” beats an estimate dressed up as fact.
• Disavowing links only makes sense with a confirmed manual action.
• Judge an audit by its action plan, not by its score.

Already received an audit and want to know what it is worth? Send it to us: we will tell you what was measured and what was not. Request a free audit or get in touch.