Every marketing agency in Edmonton offers “a free SEO audit.” Most of them are one-page PDFs generated by an off-the-shelf tool, delivered a week after you ask for one, and used entirely as a hook to get you on a sales call. We built ours to be the opposite: useful on its own, delivered instantly, and honest about what it can and can’t tell you.
This post walks through exactly what our free SEO audit checks, what happens after you submit, and how it compares to the paid $99 audits from BrightLocal, Moz Local, and the standard GHL Local Marketing Audit template.
What “Free SEO Audit” usually means in Edmonton
Search for “free SEO audit Edmonton” and you’ll see three types of results:
- Automated PageSpeed wrappers — a form, a spinner, then a PDF that’s mostly Google’s PageSpeed Insights output with an agency logo slapped on. Delivered instantly. Useful for a rough performance number, useless for local SEO.
- Delayed manual audits — you fill a form, wait 3–7 days, and get an email that’s really a sales pitch with a “here’s what’s wrong with your site” section stitched to a “book a call” CTA.
- Lead-magnet PDFs — a downloadable guide with “audit” in the title. No actual audit of your site. Just checklists.
Our audit is a hybrid of #1 and #2 without the wait. The instant part is real. The follow-up is real. There’s still a sales pitch — we’re a marketing agency, we’d like to work with you — but you don’t have to book anything to keep the report.
What the instant audit actually checks
The moment you submit the form at /free-seo-audit/, we run two audits in parallel against your website URL:
1. Google PageSpeed Insights (mobile)
We call Google’s own PageSpeed API — the same one Google uses to score your site for ranking. You get:
- A composite score out of 100 — the average of Performance, SEO, and Best Practices scores
- Core Web Vitals — Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, Total Blocking Time, Speed Index. If any of these fail, you’ll see them flagged as speed issues in the report.
- The mobile score specifically — because Google indexes your site mobile-first, and most of your Edmonton customers are on their phones when they search.
2. Live on-page SEO check
We fetch your homepage HTML and check 10+ specific signals:
- Title tag — present, and between 25–65 characters (Google’s snippet limit)
- Meta description — present, and between 90–170 characters
- H1 heading — exactly one, not zero, not multiple
- Meta viewport — set for mobile responsiveness (Google’s mobile-first requirement)
- Canonical link tag — present, so ranking signal isn’t split across www / non-www / trailing-slash duplicates
- Open Graph tags — so Facebook, LinkedIn, and WhatsApp previews look correct when someone shares your site
- JSON-LD structured data — the signals that get you rich snippets, knowledge panels, and citations from AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity)
- Alt-text coverage — what percentage of your images have alt attributes (accessibility + image search)
- robots.txt — exists at
/robots.txtand can be crawled - sitemap.xml — exists at
/sitemap.xmlso Google can find every page - HTTPS — served over TLS 1.3
You get an instant on-screen report with the score, a top-3 issues list, and the wins you’re already banking. A full HTML copy is emailed to you within seconds (check spam if it doesn’t arrive in 2 minutes — Gmail sometimes filters new senders).
What the free bonus follow-up includes
Here’s where we go further than most “free” audits. Within 24 hours of you submitting, a member of our team personally runs your business through a full Local Marketing Audit — the same one the paid $99 audits from BrightLocal or Moz Local produce. You get:
Google Map-pack ranking (3–5 km geo-grid)
Where do you actually show up when someone searches “[your service] near me” from 20 different points around your business? We plot your ranking on a grid so you can see whether you dominate your neighbourhood or only rank when someone stands on your front step.
Listings coverage across 50+ directories
Every major citation source: Yelp, Bing Places, Apple Maps, Facebook, YellowPages Canada, 411.ca, Foursquare, HotFrog Canada, Cylex, and dozens more. For each one, you’ll see:
- Whether you’re listed
- Whether the Name / Address / Phone matches your Google Business Profile character-for-character
- Which specific ones are missing or wrong (the most common local-SEO drag)
Review score aggregation
Your star rating and total review count across Google, Facebook, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and industry-specific platforms. Compared against your top 3 local competitors so you can see the review gap.
Direct competitor comparison
We pick your three biggest local rivals — the ones actually showing up when a customer searches for you — and compare:
- Domain authority
- Backlink count
- Number of indexed pages
- Google Business Profile completeness
- Review score
Deeper on-page + technical SEO
Beyond the 10 checks in the instant audit, this deeper pass covers:
- Schema.org depth across every page type
- Backlink profile (referring domains, anchor text, spam ratio)
- Keyword gaps against competitors — the phrases they rank for and you don’t
- Broken links, redirect chains, thin content
- Page-level indexation status
What we don’t do (honest limits)
The free audit doesn’t include:
- Content strategy or editorial calendar — that’s a separate engagement
- Manual link-building recommendations — we surface the backlink gap but don’t hand you the outreach list
- Manual competitor keyword research beyond the top 3 — bigger audits cover 5–10 competitors and hundreds of keywords
- CRO analysis — we tell you what Google thinks; we don’t rewrite your headlines
If any of those matter to you, they’re what our paid engagements are for. The free audit is meant to be genuinely useful even if you never work with us — and to answer the question “is my site currently costing me money?” with real data instead of a sales guess.
How this compares to the paid audits
Most paid Edmonton audits ($49–$199) deliver a subset of what we ship free:
| What’s included | Free BrightLocal-style ($49) | Paid GHL Local ($99) | Our free audit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google PageSpeed score | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ (instant) |
| On-page SEO checks | Partial | ✅ | ✅ (instant) |
| Map-pack rank grid | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ (in follow-up) |
| 50+ directory listings | Partial | ✅ | ✅ (in follow-up) |
| Review score aggregation | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ (in follow-up) |
| Competitor comparison | ❌ | Partial | ✅ (in follow-up) |
| Deep technical SEO | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ (in follow-up) |
| Turnaround time | 3–7 days | 24–48 hrs | Instant + 24 hrs |
| Price | Free | $99 one-off | Free |
The catch — we’re an Edmonton marketing agency. If you like what you see and want us to fix the problems, our monthly local SEO plan is $300/month, and we throw in a free website rebuild (normally $499) when you start with us. If you don’t want to work with us, keep the report, use it as a shopping list, hire someone else. Genuinely no obligation.
Who this is for
The free SEO audit is a good fit for:
- Established Edmonton businesses with 3+ years of trading history whose Google presence has plateaued
- New businesses opening in Edmonton, Sherwood Park, St. Albert, Spruce Grove, Leduc, or Fort Saskatchewan that need a baseline
- Businesses whose current SEO agency isn’t reporting on anything meaningful — take our report, compare it against the last update from your current agency
- Any Canadian business — even outside Alberta, the on-page + PageSpeed checks work anywhere. The follow-up Local Marketing Audit is strongest for Alberta and BC where we have the most citation-data coverage.
It’s not for:
- Enterprise businesses with a dedicated in-house SEO team — you already have this data
- E-commerce sites over $1M/year — you need audits from Ahrefs / SEMrush level tools, not a Local Marketing Audit
How to get yours
Go to onepointsolution.ca/free-seo-audit, fill in the form, and hit run. The instant report loads in about 15–30 seconds while Google’s PageSpeed engine scores your site. The full follow-up report arrives from a member of our team within 24 hours.
One thing that matters — the business name, address, and phone you enter has to match your Google Business Profile character-for-character. One missing suite number, extra space, or wrong phone digit and the local audit results will be for the wrong business. The form warns you about this. Copy-paste from Google Maps if you’re not sure.
Questions? Call (780) 229-8464 or email info@onepointsolutionsca.com. We’ll answer.