SEO Audit Services

What an audit is for

An audit answers one question: of everything that could be improved, what would move the needle first? Almost every site has hundreds of possible improvements. Perhaps six of them matter this quarter. The value is in the ordering, not the list.

That is why we will not send you a 200-page automated export. Tools produce those in minutes and they are close to useless — every issue flagged red, nothing prioritised, and no distinction between a genuine problem and a warning that applies to every site on the internet.

What we actually check

Crawl and indexation

We crawl the site as a search engine would, then compare that against what is actually indexed. The gap is where problems hide: pages you care about that Google has never stored, and pages you forgot about consuming crawl budget. Where server logs are available we use them, because they show what crawlers did rather than what they could have done.

Content and intent

For each commercial page: does it match what someone searching that term wants? Pages fail on intent more often than on any technical measure. A page built to sell when the searcher wanted to learn will not rank however clean the markup is.

We also check for cannibalisation — several of your pages competing for one query, which usually means none of them wins.

Competitors

Not a vanity comparison. Specifically: for the queries that matter to your revenue, what do the ranking pages have that yours does not? Sometimes that is links, often it is depth, and occasionally it is that the query has been taken over by a format you are not producing.

Authority and links

Where your links come from, whether any of them are a liability, and what the gap is against sites currently outranking you. If a previous agency bought links, this is where it surfaces.

Speed and stability

Core Web Vitals measured against field data — what your actual visitors experience — rather than a lab score generated on a fast connection in a data centre. Lab scores are useful for debugging and misleading as a target.

What you receive

• A prioritised fix list, each item scored by expected impact against effort
• The reasoning behind each finding, not just the finding
• Specific instructions a developer can act on without interpreting
• A competitor gap analysis for your commercial queries
• A walkthrough call, recorded, so your team can revisit it

It is written to be handed to somebody else. If you take it to an in-house developer or another agency, it will work exactly as well. We would rather earn the follow-on work than lock you into it.

What it costs and how long it takes

Fixed scope, fixed price, quoted after a short call about your site's size and what you are trying to fix. Two to three weeks for a standard site; longer for large catalogues, because crawling a few hundred thousand URLs takes as long as it takes.

We will also tell you when an audit is not what you need. If your site has forty pages and no links, the answer is not a technical audit — it is content and authority, and we will say so on the call rather than sell you a document.

What an audit will not tell you

Worth being clear about the limits, because audits get oversold.

It will not tell you exactly how much traffic a fix is worth. Anyone producing a precise forecast is extrapolating from assumptions you cannot see; we will give you a direction and a confidence level instead.

It will not find a single cause for a traffic drop with certainty. Search results change for many reasons at once, some of them entirely outside your site. What an audit does is eliminate the explanations that are testable, which usually narrows it considerably.

And it will not substitute for authority. If competitors outrank you because they have spent a decade earning links, no technical document changes that. It will say so.

Recovering from a traffic drop

The most common reason people request an audit. The first job is separating the three possibilities, because they need completely different responses.

Something broke. A migration lost redirects, a robots rule went live, a template changed and removed internal links. These are the good outcome: identifiable and fixable, with recovery usually following.

Google changed its assessment. A core update reassessed your content against competitors. There is no switch to flip; the response is improving what the update rewarded, which takes months.

Nothing changed on your side. A competitor improved, or the result page itself changed shape and pushed organic listings down. Sometimes the honest answer is that the query is worth less than it was.

Distinguishing these takes date-aligned analysis against known update timelines and your own deployment history. It is worth having the deployment dates to hand.

After the audit

Three things usually happen. Some clients implement it themselves and come back later. Some hand us the top items as a defined sprint. Some read it, decide SEO is not their best investment this year, and do something else — which is a legitimate outcome and one the audit is designed to make possible.

What does not happen is an automatic retainer. If ongoing work makes sense after the audit, it will be obvious from the findings.