SEO Audit
SEO Audit Services
An SEO audit is a structured diagnostic of why your website is not performing in search. It examines technical health, content and keyword coverage, and off-site authority, then turns the findings into a prioritised action plan. A good audit tells you what to fix first and what it is worth — not just a list of everything that could theoretically be improved.
An SEO audit is the starting point of almost every engagement in our SEO services, and it is also available entirely on its own. You do not have to become a client to get one, and you are free to take the findings elsewhere.
Most audits people have received before are disappointing for the same reason: they are exports. Somebody ran a crawler, exported ninety-four warnings, and delivered the spreadsheet. Technically accurate, practically useless — because a list of problems with no sense of which ones matter is just anxiety in a document. The value is in the judgement, not the data collection.
What a proper audit examines.
Three areas. Weakness in any one caps the other two.
Technical health
Crawlability, indexation, site speed, architecture, internal linking, canonical handling, structured data and mobile experience — whether search engines can reach and understand what you have published.
Content & keywords
What you rank for, what you should rank for, and the gap between them. Which pages target which intent, where you are cannibalising yourself, and which valuable topics you have not covered at all.
Authority & competition
Your backlink profile against the competitors actually outranking you — how large the authority gap is, where their links come from, and whether the terms you want are realistically winnable.
What you get in an SEO audit.
Get a free proposal →Full technical crawl
A complete crawl analysed against Search Console data — indexation status, errors, redirect chains, speed diagnostics and architecture problems, with the trivial warnings filtered out.
Keyword & content gap analysis
The searches your buyers use, where you currently rank, which competitors own the terms you do not, and the specific topics worth building to close the gap.
Backlink & authority review
Your link profile benchmarked against the sites beating you, including any toxic or risky patterns worth addressing, and a realistic read on how large the authority gap is.
Competitor benchmarking
Who is actually winning your terms — often not who you assume — what they are doing differently, and where they are vulnerable.
AI visibility check
How the major AI engines answer your buyers' questions today: whether you appear, who does instead, and whether what is said about you is accurate. Covered in depth by AI SEO.
Prioritised roadmap & walkthrough
Everything translated into a sequenced plan ranked by revenue impact against effort, plus a call where we walk you through it and answer questions. You keep the document regardless of what you do next.
When an audit is the right first step
An audit makes sense whenever the problem is not yet clearly diagnosed — or when you need an independent view before committing budget:
How we work
How the audit works.
Usually two to three weeks from kickoff to walkthrough, depending on site size.
Access & goals
We take read access to Search Console and analytics, and spend time understanding what the business actually needs — because an audit written without commercial context ranks problems by severity rather than by what they cost you.
Analysis
Full crawl, log review where available, rankings and content analysis, backlink profiling, competitor benchmarking, and AI visibility testing. This is the slow part and it is not automatable.
Prioritisation
Findings ranked by likely revenue impact against implementation effort. Most sites have a handful of issues doing real damage and a long tail that can safely wait — separating them is the point of the exercise.
Walkthrough & handover
We present the findings, explain the reasoning, and answer questions from you or your developers. You leave with a document your team can act on without us.
What you can do with the audit afterwards
Whatever you like. Implement it in-house, hand it to your developers, give it to your existing agency, or engage us to do the work. We write audits to be actionable by anybody competent, not as sales documents that withhold the useful parts until you sign something.
That is a deliberate commercial choice. An audit that a client takes elsewhere and succeeds with is still a good outcome for us — it is a demonstration of how we think, and a meaningful share of those clients come back for the implementation once they see the size of the job. An audit designed as a bait-and-switch tends to be obvious, and it poisons the relationship before it starts.
If you do want us to carry out the work, our technical SEO team handles the engineering side and the wider SEO programme covers content and authority. But that is a separate decision, made after you have the findings rather than before.
Included as standard
We check what AI says about you, too.
Traditional audits stop at rankings. Ours also tests how ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Gemini answer your buyers' questions — because a brand can be losing the consideration stage entirely while every ranking report still looks healthy.
Explore AI SEO →- Whether you appear in AI answers for buying questions
- Which competitors get cited when you do not
- Whether what AI says about you is factually correct
- What it would take to become the cited source
Why the prioritisation matters more than the findings
Any competent crawler can produce a list of problems. Modern tools will happily generate several hundred, colour-coded by severity, and most of them will be genuinely true. The difficulty is that severity as an automated tool defines it has almost no relationship to what a problem is costing your business. A missing alt attribute is flagged. A canonical tag quietly deindexing your highest-margin category is flagged the same way.
What an experienced auditor does is separate those. Which findings are suppressing revenue right now, which are limiting future growth, which are genuinely cosmetic, and in what order should a team with finite time address them. That judgement is the deliverable. The crawl data is just the raw material.
It is also why we insist on commercial context before starting. Two identical sites can need completely different priorities depending on whether the business needs enquiries next quarter or is building for a three-year exit. An audit that does not ask about the business is ranking problems in the abstract.
If you have had an audit before and found it overwhelming rather than clarifying, that is almost certainly why — and it is the specific thing we set out to do differently.
Related services
Questions, answered.
Still unsure? Ask us directly →
What is included in an SEO audit?
A full technical crawl and indexation analysis, keyword and content gap analysis, backlink and authority review, competitor benchmarking, an AI visibility check, and a prioritised roadmap — followed by a walkthrough call where we explain the reasoning and take questions from you or your developers.
How much does an SEO audit cost?
It scales with site size and complexity — a small brochure site is a straightforward piece of work, a large catalogue with international variants is considerably more. We quote after a short scoping conversation. See our pricing page for how we structure engagements generally.
Do you offer a free SEO audit?
We will always run a free initial review before quoting — enough to tell you whether there is a real opportunity and roughly where the problems sit. That is genuinely useful and comes with no obligation. The full paid audit goes considerably deeper: log analysis, competitor benchmarking, content gap work and a prioritised roadmap. Any agency offering a comprehensive audit entirely free is either automating it or treating it as a sales call.
How long does an SEO audit take?
Typically two to three weeks from access to walkthrough. Larger or more complex sites take longer. The analysis itself is not automatable — the crawling is fast, but interpreting what matters commercially takes time, and that is the part you are actually paying for.
Can I use the audit with a different agency?
Yes, and some clients do. The document is written to be actionable by any competent team, and you own it outright. We would rather produce something genuinely useful than a sales artefact that withholds the important parts.
What is the difference between an audit and technical SEO?
An audit is the diagnosis — a one-off assessment across technical, content and authority, ending in a plan. Technical SEO is the ongoing implementation of the engineering fixes that diagnosis identifies. If you do not know what is wrong, start with the audit. If you already have a list of problems and need them resolved, go straight to technical.
Will an audit tell me if SEO is worth investing in?
That is one of the more valuable things it does. Part of the analysis is assessing whether the terms you want are realistically winnable given the authority gap to the competitors holding them. Sometimes the honest answer is that paid search will serve you better for the next year while organic builds. We would rather tell you that than sell you a programme that cannot succeed.
How often should I audit my site?
A full audit annually is sensible for most businesses, plus a focused one before or after any major site change. Between audits, lighter ongoing monitoring catches regressions early — a full re-audit every quarter is usually overkill and the budget is better spent on implementation.
Get an audit that comes with a plan.
Tell us about your site and what you are trying to achieve. We will run a free initial review and show you whether a full audit is worth your money before you spend any.