Technical and content SEO audit of a local business website with a 90-day plan

Brightline Local wins most of its clients the same way: it sends a short, specific audit to a local business owner who knows their website is not bringing in enquiries. About one in five audits turns into a retainer worth the equivalent of $400–$900 a month. The agency’s lead consultant, Ruth Okafor, wants a new junior who can produce these audits without supervision.

Your test piece is a full audit of a real local business website. You choose it: a dentist, a bakery, a driving school, a plumber, a coaching centre, any small business with a site of roughly 20 to 300 pages that is not already well optimised. You do not need the owner’s permission to audit public pages, but you must not log in to anything, run aggressive crawls, or contact the business without your mentor agreeing.

The audit must cover: - crawlability and indexing: robots.txt, XML sitemap, status codes, canonical tags, duplicate pages; - page experience: Core Web Vitals and mobile usability on the five most important pages; - on-page and content: titles, headings, internal links, thin pages, and how well pages match what local customers search for; - keyword research for 30–50 terms with search intent and a page for each; - a prioritised fix list scored for impact and effort; - a 90-day plan with weekly actions and the numbers that will show whether it worked.

Done looks like an audit workbook, a ten-slide deck for the owner and a 90-day plan. Ruth will judge it on accuracy (every issue must be real and reproducible), prioritisation and whether a non-technical owner can understand what to do first.