SEO audit

Why a tool report is not an audit

Any crawler will hand you a list of two hundred issues within an hour. That list is not an audit, because it has no idea which issues matter for your business. It will flag every missing meta description with the same urgency whether the page is your main service page or a tag archive nobody visits.

The work of an audit is judgement: separating the findings that are costing you money from the ones that are cosmetic, tracing symptoms back to a single underlying cause, and putting them in an order that a real team with limited time can actually work through. Ten prioritised issues you will fix beat two hundred you will not.

The other thing a tool cannot do is explain why. A page that is not indexed might be blocked, might be duplicated, might be orphaned, or might simply be thin enough that Google chose not to keep it. Each of those has a different fix, and the crawl error message is identical.

What we need access to before starting

A useful audit needs data from your own site, not just what a crawler can see from outside. Search Console is the most important source, because it shows what Google actually did rather than what a third-party tool estimates. Coverage reports tell you which pages are indexed and why the rest are not. The performance report shows real queries, impressions and positions.

Analytics gives us behaviour and conversions, so we can weight findings by what a page is worth. Server logs, where they are available, show exactly how crawlers move through the site: which pages get fetched daily, which get fetched once a year, and where the crawl budget is being spent. On large sites, log analysis usually finds the biggest single issue.

• Google Search Console, ideally with sixteen months of history
• Analytics with conversion or enquiry tracking configured
• Server access logs where the hosting allows it
• A staging environment or developer contact for verifying fixes
• Any history of migrations, redesigns or manual actions

The five areas we examine

A full audit covers technical health, indexation, content, authority and competitive position. Technical health is crawling, rendering, speed, mobile and markup. Indexation is the gap between the pages you have, the pages Google knows about, and the pages Google chose to keep. That gap is usually where the largest unrealised traffic sits.

Content is assessed against intent rather than word count. We check whether each significant page matches the kind of result Google is rewarding for its target query, whether pages are competing with each other, and whether there are obvious topics your buyers search that you have never covered.

Authority covers the backlink profile, brand mentions and how you compare to the sites currently outranking you. Competitive position pulls the rest together: for each of your priority terms, what is standing between you and the top of the results, and is it a technical, content or authority problem.

• Technical: crawl, render, speed, mobile, status codes, structured data
• Indexation: coverage gaps, index bloat, orphan pages, canonical conflicts
• Content: intent match, coverage gaps, cannibalisation, outdated pages
• Authority: referring domains, anchor profile, lost links, mention footprint
• Competitive: what specifically separates you from the pages outranking you

How we prioritise the fix list

Every finding gets scored on two axes: how much it is likely to be worth, and how hard it is to do. Worth is estimated from the traffic and conversion value of the pages affected and how many pages share the issue. Effort is estimated in developer or writer time, including whether the fix is a content change, a template change or an architectural one.

That produces four groups. Quick wins are high worth and low effort, and they go first because they build momentum and pay for the rest of the work. Projects are high worth and high effort, and they get planned into your development cycle rather than attempted in a week. Fill-ins are low worth and low effort, done when there is spare capacity. Everything low worth and high effort gets explicitly listed as not worth doing, which is often the most useful part of the report.

Each item names the pages affected, the specific change required, and who needs to make it. A fix list that a developer cannot action without a follow-up meeting has failed.

Diagnosing a traffic drop

When an audit is triggered by a sudden fall in traffic, the method is different. The first question is when exactly it happened, to the day, because the shape of the drop points at the cause. A cliff edge overnight suggests a technical change, a manual action or a migration. A slide over several weeks suggests an algorithm update or a competitor gaining ground.

Then we check whether the drop is site-wide or concentrated. If a handful of pages lost everything and the rest are steady, look at those pages: a redirect, a template change, a content edit, or a competitor that published something better. If everything fell proportionally, look for a site-level cause such as a robots change, an accidental noindex, a certificate or hosting problem, or a broad quality assessment.

The most common cause we find is not an algorithm at all. It is an unrelated release that changed something quietly: a redesign that dropped internal links, a migration that broke redirects, a tag manager change that stopped tracking, or a staging noindex that shipped to production.

• Fix the exact date, then look for what changed that week
• Separate a ranking loss from a tracking loss before panicking
• Check manual actions in Search Console first, it takes one minute
• Compare impressions against clicks to see if it is visibility or click-through

What you get, and what happens next

You get a written report you can read without an SEO background, a prioritised fix list with named pages and specific actions, and a call where we walk through it and answer questions. The report is yours. If you want to hand it to an in-house team or another agency, that is a legitimate outcome and we will not make it awkward.

An audit has a shelf life. Sites change, competitors move and search engines update, so a fix list from eighteen months ago is a historical document. Most businesses find a full audit useful once a year, with lighter checks after major releases or migrations.

The measure of a good audit is not its length. It is whether, three months later, the things it said to fix are fixed and the numbers moved. We write them to be worked through, not filed.