What you get

  • A full technical crawl of your site using Screaming Frog: indexing issues, site speed, structured data, all the stuff that quietly caps your rankings without you noticing
  • A content review: what's ranking, which pages are competing with each other for the same keywords, and what's not worth keeping
  • A prioritised action list, not a wall of screenshots. What to fix first, and why
  • A plain-English write-up you can hand straight to your developer or another agency

Most SEO audits are a template with your domain swapped in. Forty pages of crawler screenshots, a traffic-light colour scheme, and a summary that could apply to any site on the internet. You’ve probably had one already.

To be fair, tools like Sitebulb will crawl your site and spit out a list of recommendations, and they’re not bad if you want to give it a crack yourself. The problem is they can’t tell you which of those 200 “issues” actually matter. Half of them usually don’t.

What I actually do

I’ll crawl the site properly with Screaming Frog, but the crawl is the starting point, not the deliverable. I go through the whole site and actually read the pages. I look at what’s ranking versus what should be ranking, and dig into why there’s a gap.

That covers everything from page titles and metadata to internal linking, site structure and content. A common one I find is cannibalisation, where two or three of your pages are all chasing the same search term, so Google can’t work out which one to rank and none of them do as well as they should. It’s easy to miss and usually pretty easy to fix.

By the end you’ll know why your site isn’t ranking and what to do about it, with recommendations that will actually move the needle.

Most importantly, I’ll be honest. If there’s nothing wrong with your site, I’ll tell you. Most modern CMSs like WordPress, Shopify and Webflow are pretty SEO friendly out of the box, and a lot of the time the tech isn’t what’s holding you back. It’s more often the content, the competition, or the fact that nobody’s linking to you.

Where this is worth it

If you’re paying an agency and can’t tell what your retainer is actually buying, this is the fastest way to find out. Same if you’re about to sign with one and want a second opinion on their proposal first. Or if you’re just SEO-curious and want to know where you stand.

You’d be surprised how many clients come to us after years of doing SEO elsewhere, and the basics still haven’t been done properly.

Sometimes you just need a fresh set of eyes on it.

What you walk away with

A prioritised list, ranked by effort versus impact, not by what’s easiest to screenshot. The quick wins that make a real difference go at the top. The stuff that takes weeks of dev work for a marginal gain goes at the bottom, or gets cut entirely.

If something’s not worth fixing, I’ll tell you that too. A short list you’ll actually get through beats a long one that sits in a folder.

Depending on your CMS, I can help implement the recommendations myself, or work directly with your developer to get them done.

Questions people ask

It depends on the site. Usually anywhere from a few days to a week. A 30-page lead gen site is a very different job to an ecommerce store with hundreds of categories and thousands of products. More pages means more to crawl, more templates to check, and more ways for things to go wrong, like duplicate product pages or filters creating thousands of junk URLs. Once I've had a quick look at your site, I'll give you a proper timeline before we start.

It definitely helps, but it's not essential. I can do a solid audit from the site alone. Access just means the findings are sharper. Search Console shows me what Google actually sees: which pages are indexed, which ones it's ignoring, what you're showing up for and where clicks are dropping off. Analytics tells me which pages bring in traffic and leads, so I'm not recommending you gut a page that's quietly doing a lot of work. Read-only access is all I need.

Sometimes. If your site's on a CMS I know well, like WordPress or Shopify, and the fixes are things I can do directly, I'm happy to implement them for you. If not, the write-up is designed so you can hand it straight to your developer, your team or your existing agency. Every recommendation explains what the problem is, why it matters and what needs to change, so nobody has to guess what I meant. I'm also happy to jump on a call with whoever's doing the work to walk them through it. What I don't do is run ongoing SEO campaigns off the back of an audit. That keeps the advice honest. I've got no reason to find problems that aren't there.

No. You get the full audit and it's yours to do whatever you want with. If you need ongoing help down the track, we can have that conversation, but there's no pressure and nothing is held back to get you to sign up.

Just your website URL to start. If you can share Search Console and Analytics access, great. It also helps to know what you actually sell, who your competitors are, and what you'd like to rank for. Ten minutes on the phone usually covers it.

Not sure this is the right audit?

Tell me what's going on and I'll point you at the right one. No pitch, no lock-in.