SEO Audits That End With a Plan, Not a PDF
An SEO audit is a structured review of everything limiting a site's organic performance: technical health, content quality, backlink profile, competitors and keyword gaps. Our SEO audits end with a prioritised action plan rather than a report, so you know what to fix first, what it is worth, and who has to do it.
What Does a Full SEO Audit Include?
Retainers that begin without an audit spend their first three months guessing. Six checks tell us where your traffic is actually being lost, and they are worth running whether or not you ever work with us.
Technical Audit
Crawl, indexation, rendering, redirects, canonicals, speed and structured data, cross-referenced against log files and Search Console. The output is what Google genuinely reaches and indexes, compared with what you assume it does. The gap is usually where the missing revenue sits.
Content Audit
Every indexable page classified as performing, decaying, thin, duplicated or competing with one of your own pages. Most sites gain more from fixing and consolidating what already exists than from publishing anything new, and this is where that becomes obvious.
Backlink Audit
Profile quality rather than raw count: where the links come from, how the anchor text is distributed, whether growth looks natural, which lost links are worth reclaiming, and whether anything is toxic enough to justify a disavow. Most profiles do not need one, and we will say so.
Competitor Analysis
Who actually holds the positions you want, what is keeping them there, and where they are weakest. Ranking is relative, so knowing the gap in pages, links and topical coverage matters more than any absolute score a tool prints.
Keyword Gap Analysis
The terms your competitors rank for and you do not, filtered down to the ones with genuine commercial intent and a realistic path from where you are today. Volume alone is a poor guide, and chasing it is how content budgets disappear.
Analytics & Tracking Review
An audit is only as reliable as the data beneath it. We check that conversions fire, that channels are attributed correctly, and that Search Console and GA4 broadly agree. Broken measurement makes every other finding on this list a guess.
What Do You Receive From an SEO Audit?
The audit is not the deliverable. The plan that comes out of it is, and it is written so three different people can each pick up their part without a meeting.
- A prioritised findings document, scored by revenue impact and effort
- Developer-ready tickets with acceptance criteria for every technical item
- A page-by-page content action list: keep, update, merge or retire
- Keyword gap and competitor summary with the terms worth targeting
- A ninety-day roadmap sequenced by dependency, not by wishlist
- A recorded walkthrough, so the findings survive a change of staff
Every finding lands somewhere on this chart before it reaches you. Nothing arrives unranked.
How the Audit Actually Runs
Four stages, two to three weeks, and a named person on our side throughout. You will know what we are doing at every point and what we need from you next.
Access & Objectives
A short call to establish what the site is meant to achieve commercially, followed by read access to Search Console, analytics and, where possible, server logs. We also ask what has already been tried, so we do not hand you back advice you rejected two years ago.
Crawl & Data Collection
A full crawl of the site alongside rendered-page testing, log file sampling, backlink data, competitor sets and keyword exports. This stage is deliberately broad. Narrowing too early is how audits miss the single issue that mattered.
Analysis & Prioritisation
Findings are scored against two axes only: likely revenue impact and effort to implement. Anything that fails both is cut rather than padded into the document. What survives is sequenced so dependencies come first.
Walkthrough & Handover
A recorded session with your marketing and development teams together, working through the findings in order and agreeing who owns what. The document is yours to keep and use, whether or not the engagement continues.
How Does an SEO Audit Work in Practice?
An audit is the cheapest way to find out whether an agency is worth working with. These are fair questions to ask first.
How much does an SEO audit cost?
The initial review is free and comes back within two business days. A full audit is quoted as a fixed-price project, scaled to catalogue size and the number of markets involved. We quote after looking at the site rather than from a rate card, because the same document takes very different effort on different builds.
What happens after the audit?
The document is yours either way, with no obligation attached to it. Where clients do continue, the findings usually route into technical SEO, on-page SEO or content marketing, in whatever order the priority list dictates rather than whichever service we would prefer to sell.
Do you audit sites you did not build?
Almost always. The majority of audits we run are on sites built and managed by someone else, and we do not need the previous agency to cooperate for it to work. We also do not use the audit as a case against them, which is a habit worth avoiding on both sides.
SEO Audit Questions
No, and we would rather be clear about it. The free version is a focused review of your domain covering the largest and most obvious problems, delivered within two business days. The full audit is the six-part analysis described above and takes two to three weeks. The free one is genuinely useful on its own, and there is no obligation attached to it.
Two to three weeks for most sites. Very large catalogues or complex international setups can take four. The timeline is driven mostly by how quickly we get access to Search Console, analytics and any log files, so sites that grant access on day one finish soonest.
Read access to Google Search Console and your analytics, ideally server log files, and thirty minutes with whoever knows the site history. Everything else we gather ourselves. If access is difficult we can work without some of it, and we will tell you which conclusions become less certain as a result.
It can give you a defensible estimate rather than a precise figure. We size the gap using terms your competitors rank for and you do not, current click-through rates at your positions, and pages that are indexed but earning nothing. Anyone presenting that number to two decimal places is selling you something.
Where the Findings Usually Lead
Start With the Audit. Decide About the Rest Afterwards.
Send us your domain and we will come back within two business days with the biggest problems we can see from the outside, ranked by what they are costing you. No contract, no pitch deck.
Response within two business days. No contracts, no obligation.