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An SEO audit should end with a to-do list, not a scorecard

Most SEO audits are a hundred pages of automated export with a logo on the front. You get a health score, a wall of red icons, and no idea what to actually do on Monday. Mine work differently. I audit your site by hand, prioritise everything by impact and effort, and hand you a plain-English roadmap your team (or I) can start shipping the same week.

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What a proper SEO audit covers

Technical

Can search engines crawl, render, and index your site without friction? I look at site architecture, internal linking, page speed and Core Web Vitals, structured data, redirects, indexation, and the crawl problems that quietly hold larger sites back. On most sites this is where the cheapest ranking gains live, because the content the fixes unblock already exists. My approach to technical SEO sits within the wider SEO service.

Content and intent

Does each important page match what people actually search for? I map your pages against real queries and their intent, find the pages competing with each other, the pages targeting nothing at all, and the gaps where demand exists but you have no answer. This is usually where audits earn their fee: not in finding broken things, but in finding misdirected effort.

Authority and competition

Where do you stand against the sites that outrank you, and why? Link profile, brand signals, and an honest read on which gaps are closeable and which aren't worth the fight. If a term is out of reach, I'll say so and point the effort somewhere it can win.

Why mine aren't a PDF full of screenshots

Every finding in my audits passes a simple test: if you fixed only this, would anything measurably improve? Findings that fail get cut. What's left is ordered by impact against effort, written in plain English, and specific enough that a developer can pick it up without a meeting. I've run this process on sites from national publishers to independent ecommerce brands, and the audit that raised SEO standards across The Telegraph's newsroom used the same bones as the one I'd run for a ten-page local business.

On the Telegraph's Money section, that same audit-led approach helped grow search traffic by 220% year on year.

A good fit if this sounds like you

  • Organic traffic has flatlined or slipped and nobody can tell you why.
  • You're planning a redesign or migration and want to know what must not break. My website builds come out of the same discipline.
  • You've had SEO work done before and want a senior second opinion on what it achieved.
  • You're a local or multi-location business and suspect the local side of search is doing less than it should.

How it runs

  1. Scope call and access. A short conversation about the business, then read-only access to Search Console and analytics. Days, not weeks.
  2. The audit itself. Manual review supported by crawling tools, not the other way round. Technical, content, intent, and competition.
  3. The roadmap. Everything found, prioritised by impact and effort, in plain English. You'll know what to do first and why.
  4. The walkthrough. A recorded walkthrough of the findings you can share internally, plus written answers to any questions after.

SEO audit FAQs

How much does an SEO audit cost?

It depends on the size and complexity of the site, and I'd rather quote honestly than publish a number that turns out wrong for your situation. Tell me about the site and I'll give you a fixed price up front.

How long does an SEO audit take?

Typically two to three weeks from access to roadmap for most sites. Larger sites with deep technical issues take longer, and I'll tell you at the scoping stage if yours will.

Do I need an audit before ongoing SEO work?

Usually, yes. Ongoing work without an audit is guessing with a retainer attached. The audit is also a fair test of whether you want to work with me longer term, with a useful deliverable either way.

What do you need from me?

Read-only access to Google Search Console and your analytics, and an hour of someone's time who knows the business. That's genuinely it.

Is this the same as a free automated audit tool?

No. Automated tools list symptoms; they can't tell you which ones matter for your business or what to do about them in what order. The value of an audit is the judgement, not the crawl.

Guides

Want to know what's actually holding your site back?

Tell me what you're working on and what you're trying to achieve, and I'll give you an honest view of whether I can help and what it would take.

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