SEO Audits

An SEO audit is worth paying for when it changes what your team does next week. Most do not: they arrive as a 90-page export of every warning a crawler can generate, ranked by severity rather than by money, and they get filed. Ours is built backwards from the fix list, every finding attached to the pages and the revenue it affects, and a sequence your developers and writers can actually work through.

What you get, and what it costs

You get a prioritised action plan: what is wrong, what it is costing you, what to do about it, and in what order. Not a warnings list. Audits are scoped to the brief, because a 300-page brochure site and a 300,000-URL catalogue are not the same job, and you get a fixed price before we start. If you want the automated first pass now and for free, run our SEO audit tool.

What the audit covers

Every manual audit works through the same ground, adjusted for what your site actually needs. Nothing here is billed separately, and this is not a warnings export. Each item is checked, explained, and tied to the action plan that follows.

Crawl and indexation

What your site publishes reconciled against what Google has actually indexed. Robots.txt and meta robots directives, noindex left on after a launch, canonical conflicts, soft 404s, orphaned pages, redirect chains and loops, XML sitemap accuracy, parameter and faceted URLs consuming crawl budget, and, where server logs are available, what Googlebot really requested.

Site architecture and internal linking

Click depth from the homepage, the shape of the category tree, breadcrumb consistency, anchor text distribution, and which commercially important pages receive no internal links at all. On established sites this is routinely the highest-return area, because the authority is already on the domain and simply isn’t reaching the right templates.

On-page and content quality

Title and meta patterns by template, heading hierarchy, keyword cannibalisation between pages competing for the same term, thin and duplicate content at scale, pages with impressions but no clicks, decaying pages that used to perform, and content gaps against what your priority terms actually require to rank.

Technical: speed, rendering, canonicals and structured data

Core Web Vitals from field data in the Chrome UX Report rather than lab scores alone, diagnosed by template so one fix repairs thousands of URLs. Render-blocking resources, image delivery, mobile parity, and raw HTML compared against the rendered DOM to find content that only exists after client-side JavaScript. Canonical tags checked for conflicts and self-reference errors, and hreflang mapped and validated across markets. On structured data: what schema types are present, whether they validate, and whether required properties are missing. We check and fix descriptive markup (Organization, Article, BreadcrumbList) but we do not add FAQPage, HowTo, Product, Offer, Review or AggregateRating schema; if a competitor is showing rich results from one of those types, we’ll explain the tradeoff rather than add markup that misrepresents the page.

Backlink profile

Referring domain quality and growth, the gap between your profile and the sites outranking you, anchor text distribution, toxic and paid-link exposure, and unlinked brand mentions worth reclaiming.

Local and Google Business Profile

For sites with a physical location or service area: Google Business Profile completeness and category accuracy, NAP consistency across the web, local pack visibility for priority terms, and review volume against the competitors occupying the map pack. Not part of the audit where the business has no local intent to serve.

AI and assistant visibility

A baseline read on whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot name you or your competitors, run using a fixed set of test prompts against your commercial terms. Alongside that: whether your pages are answer-shaped, whether your entity facts are consistent enough for a model to resolve, and whether important content survives without JavaScript. Included in the standard audit at no extra cost, not sold as an upsell.

Analytics and tracking integrity

Whether GA4 and Search Console are measuring what you think they are: goal and conversion configuration, duplicate or missing tags, cross-domain tracking on multi-subdomain setups, sampling and data-gap checks, and consent-mode impact on the numbers you’re deciding from. A finding that looks like a traffic problem is sometimes a measurement problem, and we check which before recommending a fix.

The output

Everything above feeds one prioritised action plan, ordered by likely commercial impact against implementation effort, not a list of everything that was looked at. See “What the deliverable looks like” below for what you actually receive.

The three audit levels

Free automated. Our SEO audit tool analyses a URL for Core Web Vitals, page speed, on-page elements and technical health, and returns a prioritised issue list with severity levels. No sign-up, no cost, and no sales call attached. It is genuinely useful and it has a ceiling: it tests pages, not templates, and it cannot read your logs, judge intent, or weigh a finding against the revenue behind the page.

Standard. The full manual audit for a single site and a single market, delivered as the action plan described below, with a working session to hand it over. This is the right purchase for most sites under about 10,000 URLs. Scoped to the brief, fixed price before we start.

Enterprise. Multi-market, multi-domain or very large catalogues, adding log-file analysis, template-level diagnosis across thousands of URLs, hreflang cluster validation, and a governance plan for getting fixes through a roadmap you do not control. Also scoped to the brief: site size, platform, log availability and property count set the price, not a tier name.

What the deliverable looks like

A single prioritised action plan, ordered by likely commercial impact against implementation effort, with the reasoning shown so the ordering is arguable rather than asserted. Every finding carries four things: the affected templates and a sample of URLs, the traffic or revenue currently attached to them, the specific change required, and how to verify it once shipped.

Underneath sit dev-ready tickets with acceptance criteria: not “improve site speed” but the template, the cause, the change and the target. A competitor comparison covering the sites outranking you on your priority terms. And a baseline tracking sheet captured on day one, so three months later there is a factual answer to whether the work paid for itself.

Proof

SITU LIVE is the clearest case for auditing before doing anything else. The site could not be crawled properly, so no page could rank regardless of its content. The audit found the barriers, the fixes were sequenced ahead of all other work, and the result was a 63% increase in enquiries, a 74% increase in organic traffic and an 84% increase in non-brand organic.

Venner Shipley shows the same discipline on a professional services site: on-site optimisation, structural fixes and migration oversight run as one programme, producing 48% year-on-year organic visibility growth, a 37% traffic increase and 58% growth in non-brand organic.

Amulet started with no measurable organic presence at all. Audit-led foundations delivered a 123%+ year-on-year increase in organic traffic and a 437% increase in search visibility.

Free SEO audit tool

Start here. Our website SEO audit checks any URL for Core Web Vitals, page speed, on-page elements and technical health, and returns a prioritised list of issues with severity levels. It is free, needs no sign-up, and is the same first pass we run before a manual audit. Pair it with our schema markup report to see which rich results your pages qualify for and which required properties are missing, and our GEO visibility score for a first read on how AI assistants describe your brand.

Run them first. If the output raises more questions than it answers (and on any site of real size it will, because the interesting problems are template-level) that is the point at which a manual audit earns its fee.

What happens after the audit

An audit nobody implements is a receipt, not an investment. So the handover is a working session with the people who will do the work, not an emailed PDF, and we agree what goes into the next sprint before we leave. From there you can take the plan in-house, or we implement inside a retainer from £1,250 a month ex VAT, where fixes get shipped, verified and re-measured. Tell us which you want.