SEO Audit Services - Find Out What Is Actually Wrong

Q: What does an SEO audit cost, and how long does it take?

Around $500, and about a week. That includes a call to walk you through the findings, because the report is written in nerd speak and benefits from being explained. If you go on to hire us for ongoing work, the cost of the audit is bundled into your first month, so it is effectively free at that point.

Q: Do I have to hire you afterwards?

No. It is a one-off piece of work and you can implement it yourself, hand it to your developer, or give it to another agency entirely. We do fold the fee into your first month if you decide to work with us, but that is a discount for going ahead rather than a condition of getting the findings.

Q: How is this different from a free automated audit?

Automated tools list everything technically imperfect on a site, which runs to hundreds of items with no sense of which matter. We use those tools too. The part they cannot do is work out which findings are actually holding your site back, and which are things that were done deliberately and are fine. That judgement is what you are paying for.

Q: Can you tell me whether my current agency is doing anything?

Yes, and it is one of the more common reasons people come to us. A pattern we see repeatedly: an agency signs the client, then hands the account off to someone overseas running tactics that stopped working fifteen years ago. We have taken over accounts from other agencies and found that almost nothing had actually been done. An audit will show you what has changed on the site, what is ranking, and whether the invoices line up with the work.

Q: What if I do not have Google Search Console set up?

We set it up and wait. Search Console only reports from the point it is verified, so we let it collect for a few weeks before writing the audit. It delays things, but working without it means guessing at the half of the picture only Google can show you.

Q: Will it tell me why my rankings dropped?

Often, yes. Sudden drops usually trace to something identifiable: an algorithm update, a migration that went wrong, a technical change, or a manual action. Gradual decline is harder and sometimes the honest answer is that competitors improved and you did not.

Q: Do you audit content and links too, or only technical issues?

All three. Technical problems, content that does not match what people search for, and your link profile compared against the sites currently outranking you. A technical-only audit misses the reason most sites do not rank.

Q: What if you find nothing much is wrong?

Then we say so. It happens, usually when someone comes to us wanting a second opinion on work another agency is doing, and sometimes that work turns out to be good. Telling you your current setup is fine is a better outcome for you than inventing a problem, and we would rather be the people who did that.

What is in it

What we look at

Three areas, because a problem in any one of them will stop the other two working.

Can search engines use the site?

Crawling, indexing, redirects, canonicals, speed and rendering. Whether the pages you published are the pages Google kept, and where the gap between those two numbers comes from.

Does the content match the searches?

Thin content, or content that should exist and does not, comes up in almost every audit we run. So does something less expected: most owners genuinely do not know what they currently rank for, or what their competitors are doing. Establishing those two facts is often the most useful hour of the whole engagement.

How do you compare on authority?

Your link profile against the sites outranking you. This is where the most expensive finding usually lives: in a competitive niche, the honest answer is often that you are short of backlinks, and those are slow and costly to build. We would rather tell you that up front than sell you a year of on-page work that was never going to close the gap. It is also why we keep warning people off the cheap shortcut version.

What changed, and when

If traffic fell, we line the drop up against algorithm updates, site changes and Search Console history to find the cause rather than guess at it. Sometimes the answer is the blunt one: the site got de-indexed and nobody noticed.

Where the money actually is

Rankings that will not convert are not worth chasing. We look at which terms are attached to real commercial intent for your business, and flag effort currently going into ones that are not.

What to do first

The whole point. A prioritised list with reasoning, sorted by impact against effort, so you can act on the top five items without reading the rest.

How it goes

About a week, start to finish

No long onboarding. We need access and a conversation, then we go away and do the work.

Tell us what the business actually needsNot your keyword list. What you sell, who buys it, what a good lead is worth, and what you have already tried. An audit written without that context grades a website rather than helping a business.
Get accessSearch Console and Analytics at minimum, site admin if possible. Search Console matters most: it is the only place Google tells you directly what it did with your pages. If you do not have it, we set it up ourselves and let it gather for a few weeks before writing anything, because an audit without that data is half an audit.
Crawl and cross-referenceA full crawl, checked against what is actually indexed, what earns impressions, and what the competitors ranking above you are doing differently.
Separate the real from the noiseThe tools will report hundreds of issues. Most do not matter. This step is the work you are paying for: deciding which handful genuinely affect your rankings.
Write it so it can be acted onPlain language, specific instructions, ordered by priority. Detailed enough for a developer to implement without a follow-up call, readable enough that you can decide what is worth doing.
Walk through it togetherA call, because an audit is written in nerd speak and deserves translating. You can also just take the report if you would rather. Then it is yours, whatever you decide to do next.

Straight answer

Who this is for

An audit is a diagnostic. If you already know what is wrong, skip it and go straight to the fixing.

Worth doing if

You have paid for SEO and cannot tell whether it worked
Traffic dropped and nobody has explained why
You are about to commit budget and want to know what you are buying
You inherited a site and need to know what state it is in
You want a second opinion on what your current agency is telling you

Skip it if

The site is brand new with almost no pages and no history to analyse
You already know the problem and just need it fixed
You are about to rebuild the site anyway, so audit the new one
You want someone to do the work, in which case start with SEO
You need traffic immediately, where paid ads are the faster answer

The rest of our SEO work

An audit usually points at one of these.

SEOOngoing work, month to month, once you know what needs doing. Technical SEOWhere most audit findings end up, if the problem is structural. Local SEOMap pack rankings and Google Business Profile, for businesses serving an area. E-commerce SEOProduct and category pages, for shops where the catalogue is the site.

Questions

SEO audits, answered

What does an SEO audit cost, and how long does it take?

Do I have to hire you afterwards?

How is this different from a free automated audit?

Can you tell me whether my current agency is doing anything?

What if I do not have Google Search Console set up?

Will it tell me why my rankings dropped?

Do you audit content and links too, or only technical issues?

What if you find nothing much is wrong?

SEO Audits

Find out what is wrong before you spend more. No retainer attached.