Audit
SEO audit services
Sixteen areas, read by a person, with the findings ranked rather than dumped.
An SEO audit is a full read of a site against the things that decide whether it can be found and whether it deserves to be: whether search engines can crawl and index it, whether the architecture concentrates authority or scatters it, whether the content answers the queries the business actually needs, and whether the measurement behind all of it is trustworthy. Ours covers sixteen areas and is written by hand, which matters more here than in any other discipline because the tool-generated SEO report is the most familiar document in this market and the least useful.
Coverage
What does an SEO audit cover?
Sixteen named areas, from crawlability and indexation through site architecture, content coverage and cannibalisation, down to the analytics configuration underneath it all.
The audit covers sixteen areas of the site. The list is complete rather than a summary, because a page that says it is thorough proves nothing and a list you can count does.
Crawlability and indexation
What search engines can reach, what they have actually indexed, and the gap between the two. Nothing else on this list matters on a page that cannot be crawled or has been quietly excluded.
Site architecture and internal linking
Whether the structure concentrates authority on the pages that need it or spreads it evenly across pages that do not. Internal linking is the lever most sites own outright and least often use.
Technical health
Status codes, redirects and redirect chains, canonicals and pagination. These are the faults that silently subtract from a site rather than announcing themselves in a report.
Core Web Vitals and page experience
Measured on real pages rather than a template sample, and separated into what genuinely affects rankings and what only affects the score in a testing tool.
Mobile parity
Whether the mobile version carries the same content, links and structured data as the desktop one. Indexing is mobile-first, so anything missing on mobile is effectively missing.
On-page elements and metadata
Titles, descriptions, heading structure and the alignment between what a page is optimised for and what it actually says.
Structured data coverage and validity
Which types are present, whether they validate, and whether they describe content that is genuinely on the page. Markup that describes something the reader cannot see is a manual action waiting to happen.
Content coverage against the queries the business needs
Not word counts. Whether a page exists for each thing the business needs to be found for, and whether that page is the one search engines would reasonably pick.
Keyword mapping and cannibalisation
Which page owns which intent, and where two or more pages are competing for the same one and splitting the authority of both. Cannibalisation is common, invisible from inside, and cheap to fix once named.
Duplicate and thin content
Pages that repeat each other, pages generated by a filter or a parameter, and pages that exist without saying anything. All three dilute a site's claim to the topics it cares about.
Backlink profile
Authority, relevance and toxicity, read together rather than as a single score. A profile that looks strong on volume and weak on relevance behaves like a weak profile.
Competitor gap analysis
What competing sites are found for that you are not, and which of those gaps are worth closing given what the business actually sells.
Local search signals
Where local intent is part of the business: profile completeness, consistency of the details across the places that carry them, and whether local pages exist and differ.
International setup
Where more than one country or language is in play: hreflang correctness, whether the alternates return the pages they claim, and whether the country versions differ enough to deserve to exist.
Crawl budget
On larger sites, where crawling is being spent and whether it is reaching the pages that matter. On a small site this is a non-issue and we say so rather than padding the report with it.
Search Console and analytics configuration
The measurement behind SEO reporting: property coverage, filters, and whether organic performance is being attributed correctly. A site optimised against a mismeasured baseline optimises toward the wrong thing.
Method
How does a manual SEO audit differ from a scan?
A crawler reports every rule it can check. A person decides which of those findings change anything for your business, and says so plainly.
This is the same audit we run on an account before we agree to take it on. We use it to decide whether we can help, which is a stronger reason to make it accurate than any promise about it would be.
Read-only access, agreed first
You grant read-only access to Search Console and to the analytics property. We make no changes to any account or to the site during an audit, and access can be revoked as soon as the walkthrough is done.
Crawl, then read
We crawl the site to gather data, which is what crawlers are genuinely good at. Then a person reads it. The crawl is the input to the audit, never the audit itself.
The judgement pass
Most free and cheap audits in this market are tool-generated scans: a crawler or a script runs a fixed rule set and formats the output. Ours is run by hand by the senior specialist who would do the work, which is why it reads like a person wrote it and why it can tell you which three findings matter out of forty.
Findings ranked by impact and effort
The usual SEO deliverable is several hundred issues sorted by severity as defined by a tool. Ours is ranked by what would change traffic for your business against what it costs to do, which is a different order and a much shorter list at the top.
The walkthrough
We take you and, if it helps, your developers through the findings on a call. Technical findings are written so an engineer can act on them without a translation layer.
Deliverables
What do you receive at the end?
A written document ranked by impact and effort, the evidence behind each finding, an implementation order, and a call to walk through it.
- A written findings document covering all sixteen areas, ranked by impact and effort
- The evidence behind each finding, including the URLs it applies to
- Technical findings written so a developer can implement them directly
- A keyword-to-page map showing which page owns which intent, and where two are competing
- An implementation order, including what to leave alone and why
- A call to walk through it, and the document afterwards whatever you decide
Where this leads
- SEO services
What the ongoing work covers, if the audit concludes it is worth doing.
- SEO services cost
Third-party market data, named and dated, with what each figure does not tell you.
- How pricing works
Why an audit is quoted against scope rather than listed, and what drives the figure for a given account.
The do-it-yourself version
The method is published rather than held back. If you would rather run it yourself, these are written so you can.
Fit
Who is an SEO audit for?
Sites that have stopped growing, sites about to be rebuilt or migrated, and anyone holding a scanner report they cannot act on.
- Sites where organic traffic has flattened or fallen and nobody can say why
- Anyone planning a redesign or a migration, where the audit is cheapest before the build rather than after it
- Businesses holding a scanner report full of issues they cannot prioritise
- Sites that have grown by accumulation and now have several pages competing for the same query
- Teams who need an outside read to settle an internal argument about where to spend effort
When it is not the right thing to buy
If the site is a handful of pages and a few months old, an SEO audit will mostly tell you to publish more, which you already know. If the business has no organic demand to capture, because nobody searches for what you sell, an audit will not create demand and we would rather say that early than take the fee. In both cases paid search or a positioning conversation is the better first spend.
If that is where you are, the free audit is the better place to start. It costs nothing and it will tell you whether there is enough here to be worth a paid one.
Questions
What do buyers ask about SEO audits?
Whether a free tool would do, what access is needed, how a migration changes the scope, whether we implement, and who keeps the document.
Would a free SEO tool tell me the same thing?
It would tell you some of it, and it is worth running one before you pay anybody. What a scanner cannot do is decide which of its findings matter for your business, notice that two pages are competing for the same query, or tell you that the technical work is fine and the actual problem is that no page exists for the thing you sell. That judgement is the part you are buying.
What access do you need?
Read-only access to Search Console and to the analytics property. Search Console is the one that matters most, because it carries the data on what the site is actually found for and how much of it is indexed, and neither of those can be reconstructed from outside.
Do you audit before or after a redesign?
Before, wherever there is a choice. An audit before a rebuild shapes the new architecture and the redirect map, which is the cheapest moment to fix anything structural. After a migration the same audit becomes damage assessment, which costs the same and buys less.
Do you implement the findings?
Only if you want us to, and it is quoted separately. Technical findings are written for a developer to act on directly, so your own team can implement them without us in the loop.
Does the audit include content writing?
No. It tells you which pages are missing, which are thin, and which are competing with each other, and it puts those in priority order. Writing the pages is separate work and we scope it from the audit rather than guessing at it beforehand.
How does this compare to the free audit?
The free audit is a review that surfaces the biggest issues we can see and tells you which are worth fixing first, delivered on a call. This is the sixteen-area read, written up with the evidence and the affected URLs attached, and delivered as a document your developers can work from. On a site with an obvious single fault, the free one may be all you need.
The other audits
Google Ads audit
Eighteen areas of the account, read by hand by the person who would run it.
Conversion rate optimization audit
Thirteen areas of the conversion path, ending in a test backlog you can actually run.
Conversion tracking audit
Fourteen areas across GA4, Google Ads, the tag manager and the CRM, verified rather than assumed.
All four, and how they fit together, are on the audit services page.
Request the SEO audit
Tell us what you are running and we will scope it, then quote against that scope in writing before anything starts. You keep the findings whatever you decide afterwards.