01 · When you need one
Four moments when an audit pays for itself.
Before a relaunch or migration
The cheapest time to find a problem is before it ships. A pre-launch audit maps old URLs to new ones, catches staging settings that would leak into production, and records a baseline so any change after launch can be measured.
After traffic drops and nobody knows why
We line the drop up against deployments, indexing changes, Core Web Vitals and search engine updates. Either there is a technical cause and we find it, or there is not, and you stop spending time looking for one.
When you inherit a site
A new owner, a new marketing lead, or a new agency taking over. Years of plugins, redirects and template changes leave a trail that nobody documented, and it is worth knowing what is there before building on it.
Before spending on content or ads
If key pages are not indexed or take several seconds to load on mobile, new content and paid traffic land on a leaking foundation. Fixing that first makes every later spend go further.
02 · What we check
Six areas, checked by hand, not just by a tool.
The tools find candidates. We confirm each one in the live page source, in Search Console and in analytics before it goes on the list. The list we work from, including redirects, the baseline and the business checks no crawler flags, is our SEO audit checklist.
Crawling
Can search engines reach it
- •robots.txt rules and what they actually block
- •XML sitemaps: coverage, freshness, errors
- •Internal links and orphan pages
- •Crawl traps: filters, parameters, infinite calendars
- •Server logs, where available
Indexing
What gets kept, and why
- •Search Console coverage, line by line
- •Canonical tags and conflicting signals
- •Stray noindex and staging leftovers
- •Duplicate and near-duplicate pages
- •Soft 404s and thin templated pages
Architecture
How the site is organized
- •URL structure and consistency
- •Click depth to commercial pages
- •Hub and category pages
- •Breadcrumbs and navigation
- •Pages competing for the same search
On-page
What each page tells search engines
- •Titles and meta descriptions: unique, keyword-first
- •Heading structure, one H1 per page
- •Image alt text and file weight
- •hreflang and language settings
- •Open Graph and social previews
What search engines understand
- •Markup type matches the page
- •Validation errors and warnings
- •Duplicate or conflicting entities
- •Self-serving review markup
- •Breadcrumb and organization data
Performance
How fast it is for real visitors
- •Core Web Vitals field data by template
- •Largest images and render-blocking files
- •Third-party scripts and tag weight
- •Caching and compression headers
- •Mobile rendering and layout shift
03 · What you get
A ranked list, not a stack of warnings.
The list
Every issue, ranked
Sorted by what it is likely to cost you and how much effort it takes to fix. Each item shows the affected URLs, the evidence, why it matters on your site specifically, and the fix.
The summary
One page for decision-makers
What is wrong, what it is costing, and what to do first, written for someone who will never open the full list.
The baseline
Numbers to measure against
Indexed pages, crawl errors, Core Web Vitals by template and organic landing page traffic, recorded on the day of the audit so the effect of every fix can be shown later.
The walkthrough
A call to go through it
We walk through the top of the list with you and your developer, answer questions, and agree what happens next, whether that is us or someone else doing the work.
04 · How it works
Five steps, most of them reading.
Access and scope
Search Console, analytics, and admin or repository access. We agree which parts of the site are in scope and whether there is a relaunch or deadline to work toward.
Crawl and data pull
A full crawl of the site, Search Console coverage and performance data, Core Web Vitals field data, and server logs where the host can provide them.
Manual review
The part that takes the time. Every flagged issue is checked by hand against the live site, false positives are removed, and the real issues are traced back to the template, plugin or configuration that causes them.
RuleIf we cannot explain why an issue matters on your site, it does not go on the list.
Report
The ranked list, the one-page summary and the baseline, delivered together.
Walkthrough and next steps
A call to go through the findings. From there you can hand the list to your own developer, or ask us to implement it.
Implementation is part of our wider technical SEO work. If the audit turns up measurement problems, such as missing conversions or broken tags, those are fixed through data tracking.
Common questions
How is this different from a free SEO audit tool?+
Tools are part of how we do it, but a tool cannot tell which of its two hundred warnings matter on your site. It does not know that a noindex is deliberate, that a redirect chain sits on your highest-converting page, or that a slow template is the one your ads land on. The audit is the judgment applied to the tool output, checked against Search Console and analytics.
Do you fix the issues too?+
If you want us to. The audit stands on its own, and every item is written so that any competent developer can act on it. Most clients ask us to implement the top of the list as part of our technical SEO work, but there is no obligation.
What access do you need?+
Search Console and analytics access at minimum. Read access to the site admin or code repository helps, and server logs make the crawling section much more accurate if your host can provide them.
Will an audit tell us why traffic dropped?+
Often, yes, if the cause is technical: a migration, an indexing change, a template that started blocking crawlers, or a performance regression. If the drop lines up with a search engine update or a competitor rather than anything on your site, we will say that plainly rather than invent a technical reason.
Do you audit content and backlinks?+
We flag content problems that are technical in nature: duplicates, thin templated pages, cannibalization between pages targeting the same search. We do not do a full content strategy or backlink audit, and we will point you to specialists if that is what the site needs.
How often should a site be audited?+
A full audit before any relaunch or migration, and after any significant traffic drop. For a stable site, a lighter review every six to twelve months is usually enough, or monthly monitoring as part of maintenance.
