SEO Audit: Find Out What Is Actually Holding the Site Back
Most SEO audits are a crawler export with a cover page. Ours ends in a ranked list of twenty to forty fixes, ordered by what each one is worth against what it costs to do, written so your developers can pick it up on Monday.
Delivered in 1 week. Yours to keep and act on, with us or without us.
THE SERVICE
What an SEO audit is
The audit finds and prioritises. The sibling services fix.
An SEO audit is a structured review of why a site is or is not performing in search, across four layers: technical health, meaning whether engines can crawl, render and index the site; on-page, meaning whether individual pages deserve to rank; content and architecture, meaning whether the right pages exist and relate to each other sensibly; and authority, meaning what other sites say about you. A useful audit ends with a prioritised list of fixes, ranked by impact against effort, rather than a health score.
Why most audits end up in a drawer
The value is in the discarding, not the finding.
Hundreds of issues, none ranked
Run a free crawler over a site and it will return several hundred issues. Missing alt text, duplicate meta descriptions, heading hierarchy warnings, a hundred and forty redirect chains. All of it technically true. Almost none of it ranked by whether fixing it would change anything.
So the document gets filed
That is the standard SEO audit deliverable, and it is why so many of them are never actioned. Nobody in a marketing team has the authority or the information to decide which of four hundred issues matters, so the document gets filed and the site stays the same.
A useful audit does the opposite
A useful audit does the opposite. It throws away most of what the crawler found, because most of it does not matter, and returns twenty to forty things ordered by what each one is worth. The value is in the discarding, not the finding.
The judgement a tool cannot make
The other half of it is the judgement a tool cannot make. Tools do not spot that two of your pages are competing for the same query. They do not tell you a page is technically perfect and answering a question nobody asks. They do not know that the fix at the top of the list needs a developer sprint while the one at number six needs an afternoon. That is what you are paying a person for.
What we look at
Technical health
Crawl and indexation across the full URL inventory, rendering, site speed and Core Web Vitals, canonicals, sitemaps, redirects and chains, and whether anything is accidentally blocked.
On-page
Titles, meta descriptions, heading structure, content depth and entity coverage, internal links and schema, on the pages where it matters commercially rather than on all of them.
Content and architecture
Which pages exist, which should not, where two pages are competing with each other, and where a subject has a gap. Cannibalisation and thin content are the two findings tools miss most reliably.
Authority
The backlink profile, the pages carrying the most link value, and whether anything is pointing at a URL that no longer exists.
Competitors
Who is beating you, on what, and whether it is because of something structural or because they have simply published more. Those need different responses.
AI visibility, briefly
Whether AI engines can read your pages and whether you are currently named in answers in your category. If that is the main thing you are worried about, the dedicated AI visibility audit goes considerably deeper and is the better purchase.
What you get
If the honest answer is that your site is in good shape, that is what the audit will say. We have delivered that result and it is a legitimate outcome: you get a documented baseline and the confidence to stop worrying about it.
THE BOUNDARY
What this is not
Not a free health score.
Those are useful as a smoke alarm and useless as a plan. If you want one, run Semrush or Ahrefs yourself, or ask us and we will point you at a free checker.
Not a sales document.
The audit is priced to stand on its own. It is not a qualification exercise dressed up as a deliverable, and it does not end in a proposal unless you ask for one.
Not a list of everything.
We deliberately discard most of what the crawler finds. Four hundred issues is not thoroughness, it is a failure to prioritise.
Not the implementation.
Fixing is a separate conversation, and you are free to have it with your own team or another agency.
OUR PROCESS
How it runs
We agree what you are actually worried about
A half-hour call first. An audit commissioned without knowing which pages make you money is a general-purpose document, and general-purpose documents are the ones that get filed.
We crawl, pull the data and read the site
Tools do the collection. A person does the reading, which is the part that takes the time and produces the findings worth paying for.
We rank the findings by what they are worth
Impact against effort, with the commercial pages weighted heavily. This is the step most audits skip.
We walk you through it
A recorded session with the person who did the work, so the reasoning is on record rather than only the conclusions. Then it is yours.
Who this is for
Traffic has dropped and nobody can say why.
The most common reason people commission one, and usually answerable within the first few days.
You are about to spend money on SEO and want to know what you are buying.
An audit first is cheaper than a year of retainer aimed at the wrong thing.
You are already paying an agency and are not sure it is working.
We will give you a straight read. Sometimes the answer is that they are doing fine and you should stop worrying.
You have inherited a site and no history.
New in the role, no documentation, nobody left who built it.
You need evidence for a budget conversation.
A ranked list with values attached is considerably more persuasive internally than an opinion.
Questions, answered straight
No fluff, as promised.
How long does it take?
A few weeks for most sites, longer for large inventories or multiple languages. Small sites are faster. We will tell you the date when we quote, and we hold to it.
Can I not just use a free tool?
Yes, and you should, as a first pass. What a free tool cannot do is tell you which of its four hundred findings matter, spot two pages competing for the same query, or notice that a technically perfect page is answering a question nobody asks. You are paying for judgement, not for the crawl.
What do we actually receive?
A ranked list of twenty to forty fixes with impact and effort against each, the three to start with, findings written for whoever has to implement them, a competitor read, a benchmark, and a recorded walkthrough. In a format you can paste into your backlog.
Will you implement the fixes?
If you want us to, yes, and it is priced separately. The audit is deliberately built to work without us, because an audit that only has value if you hire the auditor is a sales document.
We already have an agency. Will this cause a problem?
Not from our side. We report what we find plainly, and sometimes what we find is that they are doing a good job. If the goal is to check whether your money is being well spent, that is a legitimate reason to commission one and we will not turn it into a pitch.
How often should we do this?
Once a year for most sites, and after anything significant: a replatform, a redesign, a rebrand, a big content push, or an unexplained drop. Between audits, the fix list is the thing to work through rather than a reason to commission another.
Does this cover AI visibility?
At a check level: whether engines can read your pages and whether you are currently named in answers. If AI visibility is the actual concern, the dedicated AI visibility audit tests a panel of real buyer questions across four engines and goes considerably deeper. We will tell you which one you need.
What if the audit says nothing much is wrong?
Then it says that. You get a documented baseline, a competitor read and the ability to stop worrying, which for some clients is the whole value. We would rather report it than invent a problem to justify the fee.
Do you need access to our site?
Read access to Search Console and analytics makes the audit considerably better, because it is the difference between guessing what happened and seeing it. We can work without them if that is not possible, and we will tell you what we are missing as a result.
Proof from real work
All case studies
Not sure what is holding the site back?
Tell us the site and what you are worried about. You will get a delivery date before you commit to anything.