What should a comprehensive pre-contract SEO audit checklist include?

Short answer: A pre-contract audit must be deep enough to prove whether the proposed work is actually needed: indexability, technical health, content inventory, authority profile, measurement infrastructure and competitive position belong in one report, together with a measurable baseline.

Core blocks of the checklist

• Indexability: robots.txt, XML sitemaps, canonical consistency, exclusion reasons in the Search Console coverage report.
• Technical health: Core Web Vitals, rendering behaviour, mobile fit, redirect chains.
• Content inventory: winning pages, pages losing traffic, cannibalization and gap analysis.
• Authority: backlink profile, risky link patterns, visibility on non-brand queries.
• Measurement: access to analytics and Search Console, conversion tracking accuracy, baseline values.
• History: past penalties, drops coinciding with algorithm updates, previous agency work.

The contract side

The audit should also clarify account ownership, deliverable definitions and exit terms. TYS Digital Performance uses no guarantee language before a contract; it reports the current state and measurable opportunities, and any gain is measured against the baseline.