The audit
An SEO audit that tells you what is wrong, in what order to fix it, and why.
Most audits are a tool's report with a logo on it: two hundred warnings, no priorities, and nothing about your business. An audit worth paying for reads your site the way Google reads it, finds the few problems that actually hold you back, and tells you the order to fix them in.
What an audit is for
An audit answers one question: why is this site not doing better, and what would change that? It is a diagnosis, not a to-do list of everything a crawler can find. Every site has hundreds of small imperfections. Almost none of them matter. The value of an audit is in separating the three or four things that are genuinely holding the business back from the noise, and being honest about which is which.
It is also the right starting point when you are not sure what you need. Before paying anyone monthly, you should know whether your problem is structure, content, the listing, something technical, or just time. The audit tells you.
What I check
What Google has, and what it refuses
The Page indexing report reason by reason, the Manual Actions report, and a full crawl compared with what Google actually indexed. How many of your pages are in, which important ones are out, and why.
How the site is structured
Which pages exist, what search each one answers, which ones compete with each other, and whether the pages that earn money are the strongest pages on the site or buried under blog posts and archives.
What the content says
Whether each service has a page that answers what customers ask before they buy, whether the town pages are real or copies, and whether the site's claims can be backed up.
How the site is found locally
The Google listing against Google's guidelines, category and services against the website, directories against each other, and reviews against the businesses in the map for your main search.
The technical base
Redirects and broken addresses, duplicate versions of pages, canonical tags, sitemap, speed on a phone, structured data and anything else that affects whether Google can read the site cleanly.
Links
Who links to you, whether the links look natural, whether there is a pattern of spam pointed at the site, and how your link profile compares with the businesses ranking above you.
Measurement
Whether Search Console and Analytics are set up on your own accounts, and whether calls and forms are tracked. Without these, nobody can tell whether any future work paid.
What you receive
A written report, organised by cause rather than by warning. For each problem that matters: what it is, the evidence, why it matters to your business in particular, what fixing it involves, and roughly how much work that is. Then a prioritised plan, the order to fix things in and why that order, with the quick repairs first and the work that compounds after.
Then a call where I walk you through it in plain language and answer your questions. The report is yours whether or not you hire me to do the work. It is written so your own developer, another provider or you could carry it out.
What one finding looks like
Here is the shape of a single finding, so you know what you are buying. What it is: four pages compete for the search end of tenancy cleaning, the service page, two blog posts and a town page, and Google shows a blog post rather than the page with the price and booking form. The evidence: Search Console shows all four collecting impressions for that search over the last three months, and the ranking page switching between them.
Why it matters here: end of tenancy work is the business's largest line of revenue, and the page Google shows has no way to book. The fix: keep the service page as the leader, merge the stronger blog post into it and redirect, narrow the other post to the checklist question, and rewrite the town page about the town. The size: a few hours of writing and redirects, done in the first fortnight. Every finding in the report follows that shape.
How the plan is ordered
Anything stopping Google reading the site
A noindex left on, broken redirects after a move, a listing suspension. Nothing else works until these are fixed, and they are often quick.
Anything confusing Google about who you are
Pages competing for the same search, a wrong primary category, directories that disagree. Clearing confusion lets existing strength land on the right pages.
The pages that should earn
Service pages rebuilt or created to answer what customers ask, town pages for the places you really serve.
The work that compounds
Content on a cadence, reviews as a habit, links earned over time. Slower, and only worth doing once the base is sound.
Audits that changed what happened next
On a Las Vegas property brokerage's site, the audit told the 237 pages that earn business apart from tens of thousands of pages generated by its listings software. Every page got a written decision, and the vendor's part was packaged into an action sheet. Without that separation, any content added would have been one more page in a pile Google was already struggling to read. After the work, visits from Google in the 28 days to 31 August 2026 were 778, up from 497 the month it began.
For a cloud and DevOps training academy, the audit found three separate web properties on the same brand that had never been told how they related to each other, and a heading structure that competed with itself. Fixing the base came before a single word of new content. In the first seven months on the rank tracker, the tracked searches moved from an average position of 21 to 10.
What makes an audit worth trusting
Google's own advice on hiring an SEO suggests that for an audit you give read access to Search Console rather than write access, and that you check the recommendations against Google's documentation. Both are good rules. An audit should need to look, not change. And every recommendation in it should come with a reason you can check, not a score from a tool.
Be wary of audits that grade your site out of 100, list hundreds of issues at the same urgency, or recommend buying links or packages as the first step. The number of issues found is not a measure of the audit's quality. Clarity about the few that matter is.
Signs you need an audit rather than more work
You are publishing and nothing moves
Months of new pages with flat rankings usually means the problem is not the amount of content. An audit finds what is actually in the way.
You have had a drop you cannot explain
A sudden fall needs a diagnosis before a response. The wrong response to a drop is often worse than the drop.
You have had several providers
Each one added something and nobody took stock. An audit shows what the site has become and what each layer of work left behind.
You are about to spend on a redesign
Knowing what currently earns traffic and links, before anything changes, is the cheapest insurance a redesign can have.
Who it is for
Businesses that feel their site should be doing better and do not know why. Businesses about to hire an SEO provider, who want to know what they actually need before they sign. Businesses that just had a drop and need to know what it was. And businesses about to redesign, who want to know what to protect before anything changes.
Questions about an SEO audit
How long does an audit take
For a typical local business site, a couple of weeks from access to the call. Larger sites with tens of thousands of addresses take longer, mostly because of the crawl and the grouping.
What access do you need
Read access to Search Console and Analytics, and a view of your Google listing. No passwords to the website are needed for the diagnosis.
Will the audit tell me what to do myself
Yes. It is written so you, your developer or another provider could carry out the plan. Many clients do part of it themselves.
Is the audit included if I hire you monthly
An engagement starts by reading where the site stands, so the diagnosis happens either way. As a standalone piece it is written up in full for you to keep.
What if the audit says nothing is wrong
Then I will say so. Sometimes a site is sound and the honest answer is patience, or a different channel, rather than more search work.
Want to know what is holding your site back?
Send me the address. I will look before I reply, and tell you whether a full audit is worth it or whether the answer is already obvious.