what exactly is an SEO audit?
what exactly is an SEO audit?
Blog Article
Think of it as an MOT for your website. We hook your site up to a battery of scanners, poke around the engine bay, and run a few laps round the block. The difference is that instead of oil leaks and worn tyres we’re sniffing out broken links, dodgy redirects, flaky backlinks and copy-and-paste content. The goal? Spot everything that could keep you off page one before you blow the marketing budget on shiny new backlinks or blog posts that won’t rank.
“Free” audits versus the real deal
I know, I know—your inbox is already heaving with agencies offering “free” thirty-second audits. Truth bomb: those reports are basically the equivalent of a doctor diagnosing you via Google. Yes, the raw data from Ahrefs, Moz or Majestic is useful, but without a seasoned pair of eyes to interpret it you’ll end up chasing ghosts. A proper audit marries the numbers from those tools with hands-on detective work in Google Analytics and Search Console, plus a big dollop of common sense.
The big-ticket items we poke at
Here’s the quick-and-dirty checklist I run through when I’m auditing a site:
Can Google actually crawl the thing? One stray noindex tag or an over-zealous robots.txt file can slam the door in the crawler’s face.
404 graveyards and redirect rabbit holes. Nothing says “unloved” like a trail of dead pages or a redirect chain six links deep.
Site architecture. Are your money pages buried three clicks down a twisty menu system? Do orphan posts float in limbo with no internal links pointing their way?
Content quality. Google’s Helpful Content update and E-E-A-T guidelines are allergic to thin, plagiarised or keyword-stuffed copy. If it reads like it was written by a toaster, you’re toast.
Backlink profile. Glorious, relevant links from trusted sites = rocket fuel. Spammy links from a casino site in Outer Nowhere = handbrake.
Local signals. Got a bricks-and-mortar biz? Then your Google Business Profile and those NAP citations had better be singing from the same hymn sheet.
Core Web Vitals. Slow pages are party poopers. Nobody wants to wait for your hero image to load on a 4G signal.
Penalty check. We look for any manual or algorithmic slaps lurking in Search Console.
An architectural blueprint, not a one-pager
By the end you won’t just get a colourful pie chart. You’ll get an action plan ranked by urgency:
Critical fixes: stuff that’s actively sinking your rankings, like a rogue disallow rule or a swarm of toxic links.
Quick wins: tweaks you can knock out this week—maybe reclaiming broken internal links, rewriting duplicate product descriptions or sprucing up titles on your top five pages.
Medium-term projects: new content calendars, outreach campaigns, schema markup—the works.
Long-range strategy: how many blog posts a month, which pages to add next, and the cadence for earning fresh backlinks so you stay ahead of the pack.
Most of my audits cost somewhere between £250 and £750, reflecting a day or—if it’s a sprawling e-commerce beast—a full week at the whiteboard.
The great backlink reality check
Let’s talk links. Whenever someone asks why their rival sits smugly at the top of Google, nine times out of ten the answer is backlinks. Not quantity—quality. Fancy a horror story? I once inherited a site with 12,000 spam links from a Chinese wallpaper forum. After disavowing the lot, traffic doubled in three months without adding a single new page. Moral: good links lift you; bad links bury you.
Duplicate content: the silent killer
Another fave. A client duplicated 300 product descriptions straight from the manufacturer’s PDF. Google yawned and shoved them onto page five. We rewrote the copy, added original images and an FAQ section, and voilà—page one for three key terms. If you copy, you’ll flop.
Against 200-plus ranking factors, strategy matters
Google’s algorithm juggles more than 200 ranking signals, so you need a plan of attack. That’s why the audit isn’t the end—it’s step one. From there we map out a marketing strategy: which gaps to fill, which strengths to double-down on, and how to budget your time between on-page tweaks and off-page outreach. It’s a marathon, but a smarter one.
Mind the competition
Peek over the fence. What are the top three rivals doing better? Longer how-to guides? Snazzier videos? A hundred juicy do-follow links from big UK brands? Use their strengths as a shopping list—but promise me you’ll never copy them word-for-word. Google’s plagiarism detectors have fangs.
SEO: hard graft, big rewards
White-hat SEO isn’t easy, and results aren’t instant. But when your site finally breaks onto page one, you can literally watch sales climb in Google Analytics. I’ve seen businesses go from tumbleweed to hiring new staff within a quarter.
Ready to pop the hood?
If your analytics are flatlining or you just have a hunch something’s “off,” an audit is the first move. It’s meticulous work, so I don’t give it away for free—but the starting price of £250 is peanuts next to the cost of flying blind.
Drop me a message, tell me what keeps you up at night, and let’s turn that quiet website into your best salesperson.