SEO Audit

Every other SEO service, whether it is content, links, or technical work, depends on knowing where you actually stand. Building content on top of a site with indexation problems, or earning backlinks to a site with broken redirects, wastes effort on a foundation that cannot support it.

An audit is also the fastest way to catch problems that are actively costing you money. A site that lost half its indexed pages after a migration, a robots.txt file accidentally blocking Google, or a Core Web Vitals score in the red are the kinds of issues that quietly suppress rankings for months before anyone traces the cause back to a technical mistake.

We start with crawl and indexation: can search engines actually find, render, and index your pages the way you intend, or is something blocking, duplicating, or hiding content from them. This includes checking your sitemap, robots.txt, canonical tags, and how your site handles redirects.

From there we review technical health more broadly, including page speed and Core Web Vitals, mobile usability, and structured data, and we rank every issue we find by how much it is likely costing you, not just by how many issues exist. A site can have fifty minor issues and one major one; the report should make that one obvious, not bury it.

We also review your content and backlink profile against the competitors you are actually trying to outrank in search results, not a generic industry benchmark. This tells us where your pages are thinner or less relevant than what is currently ranking above you, and where your backlink profile has real gaps.

The same handful of problems show up again and again on small business websites. Slow load times from unoptimized images or bloated page builders. Missing or duplicate title tags and meta descriptions across dozens of pages. Thin or duplicate content, often from templated location or category pages that all say almost the same thing. Missing schema markup, meaning Google has no structured way to understand what your page is actually about. And for local businesses specifically, a Google Business Profile that has never been fully filled out or maintained.

Platform migrations are another common source of damage. Moving from one website platform to another, or even a routine redesign, can silently break internal links, drop pages from the index, or introduce duplicate URLs, and most business owners do not find out until organic traffic has already dropped.

The deliverable is a prioritized action plan, not a raw list of findings. Every issue is ranked by estimated impact and effort, so you know what to fix first even if you only have time or budget for a handful of items this quarter.

This is written to be usable by you directly, by an in-house team member, or by us if you decide to move forward with implementation. It is not designed to be unreadable on purpose so that you feel like you need to hire an agency to interpret it.

An audit is a snapshot, and the value fades as your site and your competitors change. Most businesses get real value from a full audit at the start of an engagement, and a lighter check-in periodically after that, especially after a redesign, a platform migration, or a noticeable drop in traffic.

Some businesses use the audit as a one-time deliverable and implement the fixes with an internal team or a developer. Others use it as the starting roadmap for ongoing technical SEO, content, and link-building work. Either way, you own the findings and the plan.

Beyond the high-level categories, the actual work involves going through your site at a granular level: validating your XML sitemap matches what is actually on the site, checking for orphan pages that exist but have no internal links pointing to them, and looking for duplicate content, which often shows up as near-identical category pages, printer-friendly versions, or URL parameters creating multiple addresses for the same page.

We also check how your site handles pagination, whether your URL structure is clean and descriptive or full of unreadable parameters, and whether your hreflang setup, if you serve more than one country or language, is configured correctly. On larger sites, we look at crawl patterns from server logs when available, which shows exactly how search engines are spending their time on your site rather than relying only on simulated crawls.

An e-commerce site's audit leans heavily on faceted navigation and filter URLs, which can generate thousands of near-duplicate pages if left unmanaged, along with product page templates, out-of-stock handling, and category structure. A service business's audit focuses more on service and location page structure, lead-generation elements, and whether the site clearly targets the specific services and areas it wants to rank for.

A local, brick-and-mortar business gets closer attention to Google Business Profile signals and NAP consistency alongside the on-site audit, since local ranking factors sit partly outside the website itself. We tailor the checklist to your business model rather than running the same generic scan regardless of what you actually do.

Every finding gets scored on two things: how much it is likely suppressing your visibility, and how much effort it takes to fix. A robots.txt file accidentally blocking your entire site is both high-impact and low-effort, so it goes to the very top. A full content rebuild of twenty underperforming pages is high-impact but high-effort, so it gets scheduled rather than tackled all at once.

This scoring is what turns a long list of findings into something you can actually act on with limited time or budget, starting with the handful of fixes that move the needle the most.

Once the initial priority fixes are implemented, a follow-up review confirms they actually took effect rather than assuming they did. Robots.txt and noindex changes get re-crawled to confirm search engines can now access what was previously blocked. Redirect fixes get checked to confirm they resolve in a single hop instead of a chain. Content updates get checked against Search Console to see whether impressions or position for the target terms are actually shifting.

This step catches the fairly common situation where a fix was implemented correctly in one place but a caching layer, a CDN, or a staging-to-production sync issue meant the live site never actually reflected the change. It also surfaces new issues that only become visible once the original blockers are cleared, since a badly indexed site can mask problems that only show up once crawling improves.

For most small businesses, this follow-up happens somewhere between four and twelve weeks after implementation, giving search engines enough time to recrawl and re-evaluate the affected pages, though sites with more frequent content changes benefit from checking in sooner.

A site that has had prior SEO work, whether from an agency, a freelancer, or an in-house attempt, needs a slightly different approach than a site starting from zero. Part of the audit becomes understanding what was already tried: which pages were previously optimized, what link-building or content work already happened, and whether any past tactics were the risky, shortcut kind that might be actively holding the site back rather than helping it.

This matters because the fix for a site with a history of low-quality, purchased links looks very different from the fix for a site that simply has never had any SEO attention at all. In the first case, part of the plan may involve disavowing or cleaning up harmful links before new work can be effective. In the second, the priority is usually building a foundation that has never existed.

We also check Google Search Console's history, when available, for any past manual actions or algorithmic penalties, since these leave a record that explains gaps in performance that would otherwise look mysterious from the outside.