SEO Audit.
Eight Areas. Prioritised Roadmap. Senior-Led.
A standalone audit you can take to your in-house team or to another agency. Technical, on-page, content, links, AEO, analytics, competitive and strategy - all in one deliverable. 2-4 weeks. Not a checklist export.
An audit is a baseline. Eight areas, prioritised, in two to four weeks.
Technical, on-page, content, links, AEO, analytics, competitive, strategy. Each one is a real diagnostic, not a checklist export. The deliverable is yours - hand it to your in-house team or to another agency if that fits better. If you bring us in to ship the fixes, the audit fee is credited against the first three months of retainer.
The 8-area audit scope
Each area is a real diagnostic deliverable, not a single-page checklist. Scope can be focused to a single area when needed.
Technical health
Crawl audit, indexation reconciliation, Core Web Vitals field data, JS rendering inspection, schema graph validation, hreflang validation, sitemap and canonical hygiene, robots.txt review.
On-page
Title and meta-description discipline, H1 / H2 structure, internal-linking equity, image alt and srcset, schema-per-template review, content-quality benchmarks against ranking competitors.
Content & topical authority
Topic universe map, pillar / cluster gap analysis, content cannibalization audit, content-decay analysis, original-data opportunity inventory, AEO-format readiness check.
Backlinks & off-site
Backlink profile review (Ahrefs / Majestic), toxic-link identification, anchor-text distribution, brand mention monitoring, competitive-gap analysis, digital PR opportunity inventory.
AEO & AI search
AI Overview presence audit, LLM citation share-of-voice across ChatGPT / Perplexity / Gemini / Claude, AI-bot allowlisting check (GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot), llms.txt and IndexNow status, FAQPage / Article / Organization schema audit, Wikidata entity readiness.
Analytics & measurement
GSC + GA4 setup verification, conversion tracking validation, channel attribution review, custom-event coverage, branded vs unbranded segmentation, AI-source attribution where available, dashboard hygiene.
Competitive & SERP
Top-3 competitor SEO benchmark, SERP-feature share-of-voice, content-gap matrix, paid-organic overlap, branded SERP defence audit, schema-feature comparison.
Strategy & roadmap
Issues classified by impact and effort. Prioritisation matrix anchored to revenue templates. 30 / 60 / 90-day execution roadmap with named owners. Quarterly review schedule. Estimated impact ranges where defensible.
What you receive
The audit ships as a structured set of artefacts. Every line below is included.
Audit vs strategy - they are not the same thing
Most agencies blur this; we keep it clear.
An audit answers...
- · What is broken and what is leaking?
- · Which fixes have the highest ROI?
- · How do we compare to top-3 competitors?
- · What is the prioritised sequence?
A strategy answers...
- · What categories should we own and why?
- · What is the 12-month plan?
- · How do we measure success?
- · What does the team and budget look like?
Most retainers need both - eventually
- · Audit first when the site is mature and bleeding (you have to stop the leak before you grow).
- · Strategy first when the site is new or being relaunched.
- · We bundle when the situation calls for it; we keep them separate when it doesn't.
Anonymised audit outcomes
Three recent audits across our markets. Specifics anonymised.
Audit caught indexation leak silently costing 40% of organic clicks
A misconfigured canonical was attributing variant URLs to the homepage. GSC showed healthy impressions but flat clicks; the audit traced the leak in 48 hours. Fix shipped, recovery began the following week, full recovery within month two.
AI search audit revealed zero share-of-voice on category-defining LLM prompts
Strong organic rankings, healthy GSC numbers - but the brand was not cited inside ChatGPT or Perplexity for the top-20 category prompts. AI search audit revealed missing entity definition, weak Reddit footprint, no Wikidata entry. 90-day roadmap shipped; first citations within month three.
Competitive benchmark identified a single content gap that explained 60% of the lost rankings
Comparison-page architecture missing across the entire decision-stage cluster. Three-competitor benchmark made the gap visible. Pillar + 8-cluster build shipped over 12 weeks; lost rankings recovered, plus new SERP-feature wins.
Related services
Frequently asked questions
Two to four weeks for the audit and prioritised roadmap on a typical mid-market site (under 50K URLs). Enterprise sites with multi-region complexity, large URL counts or heavy JavaScript take 4-6 weeks. We deliver in two phases - the prioritised roadmap inside week 2, then the deep diagnostic by week 4 - so you can start fixing critical items without waiting for the long-tail issues.
Yes. The audit is yours. The diagnostic findings document, the prioritisation matrix, the roadmap and the schema specifications are written so any competent SEO team can execute them. We obviously prefer to ship the fixes ourselves on retainer, but the audit is a standalone product - you can hand it to your in-house team or another agency if that serves you better.
We run a free preliminary scan as part of any new-business conversation - high-leverage technical issues, GSC sanity check, AI search presence at a glance, top-3 competitive comparison. It is genuinely useful and a fair signal of how we work, but it is not a substitute for the full paid audit. The full audit is a 2-4 week senior engineering exercise; the free version is a 48-hour diagnostic conversation.
Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, Ahrefs / Majestic for backlink data, Google Search Console as authoritative source of truth, GA4, server log analysers where available, Schema.org validator, Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights for performance, AI prompt-audit tooling (custom plus Profound / Otterly / Goodie depending on scope) for AEO measurement. We do not lock to one stack - we pick what serves the audit.
Both options exist. The audit always identifies what is missing and provides specifications. For an additional fee we ship the schema as production-ready JSON-LD that drops into your Next.js or React app; for client teams that prefer to ship in-house, the specs are written tight enough to hand to a frontend engineer with no further interpretation.
Yes. Single-area audits are common - pure-technical, pure-AEO, pure-content. Each runs faster (5-10 days typically) and costs less than the full eight-area version. We recommend the full audit if you have not had one in 18 months; otherwise focused scopes are fine.
An audit is a one-shot deliverable; a retainer is an ongoing programme. Most clients audit first to baseline, then move to retainer if the scope of fixes warrants it. Some audit and stop - taking the deliverable to their in-house team. We are comfortable with both. The audit fee is credited against the first three months of retainer if you decide to engage us further.
Three layers, tracked at 30 / 60 / 90 days post-audit. (1) Issue resolution rate against the prioritised list. (2) Operational metrics - index coverage in GSC, CWV field data, AI Overview presence, citation share. (3) Outcome - organic clicks and impressions to the affected URL clusters, branded search lift, revenue contribution where attribution permits. The senior strategist who ran the audit also runs the 90-day review.
Stop guessing. Get the audit.
Two to four weeks. Eight areas covered. Senior strategist runs the work and walks you through the findings.