SEO Audits
Not a 200-point checklist. A diagnosis of what's actually costing you revenue - with a clear plan to fix it.
Most SEO audits are long. Mine are prioritised. The output isn't a document that tells you everything that could theoretically be better - it's a severity-ordered backlog a developer can pick up and start working through the same week: fix domain canonicalisation, immediate. Log file analysis, urgent. Redirect rules, urgent. Then sitemap, internal links, canonicals, in the order they'll actually move the needle.
I've delivered audits for brands from global banks to adventure tourism operators, in formats from one-day ticket spreadsheets to eight-month discovery programmes. For a global appliance brand, that meant stakeholder interviews, pain-point analysis and a full prioritised recommendations workbook. The format changes. The principle doesn't: find what's actually costing revenue, and tell you what to do about it in an order you can follow.
A backlog, not a report
An SEO audit that sits in a shared drive as a 40-page PDF doesn't fix anything. I write findings as tickets - severity-ordered, specific enough that a developer can act without asking me what I meant. Immediate issues first, then urgent, then next. That structure isn't decorative. It reflects the actual order things need doing in: canonicalisation problems undermine everything built on top of them, so they go first, whatever else looks more urgent on the surface. Log file analysis and redirect rules follow close behind, because they're usually where the next-biggest leaks are. It's built to be worked through, not admired.
The audit can be the whole engagement
Not every business wants a retained relationship. I offer a lower-cost audit tier, around £1,000, for businesses that want the diagnosis and will do the work themselves. I tell you what I'd do. You decide who does it - your own team, a developer you already use, or nobody, if the priority list tells you it's not worth it yet. That separation matters to me. The diagnosis and the delivery don't have to come from the same person, and a lot of businesses just need someone honest to tell them what's actually wrong before they commit budget to fixing it.
Quarterly, for retained clients
For clients I work with on an ongoing basis, audits run on a quarterly always-on cadence rather than a one-off. Sites drift - a plugin update breaks something, a new section ships without the redirects it needed, a developer changes a template and nobody checks what it did to the canonicals. None of that shows up in a single annual audit until it's already cost months of rankings. Catching that quarterly is cheaper than catching it a year later, and it means the backlog stays small and manageable instead of building into another big remediation project.
Getting from zero to four is not the hard part
The way I frame it with clients: getting you from zero to four is not that hard or expensive. Getting to eight is twice as expensive and twice as complicated. Most audits find the zero-to-four issues, because most sites haven't done the basics yet - broken canonicals, thin indexation, missing internal links, the fundamentals rather than anything exotic. Knowing which stage you're actually at matters more than chasing the full checklist regardless of where you are. A business at zero doesn't need an eight-out-of-ten strategy. It needs the basics fixed, in order, before anything more advanced is worth the spend.
Scale doesn't change the method
I've audited sites from a single-site adventure tourism operator to a global bank, and run an eight-month discovery programme for a global appliance brand with stakeholder interviews across the business. Different scale, same job: work out what's actually costing revenue, then order the fixes so the highest-impact ones happen first.
An audit is only useful if someone can act on it. So every finding I write down gets a severity and a next step, not just a description of the problem. If you've had an audit before and nothing on the site changed afterwards, that's not a technical failure, it's a format failure. Fix the format and the fixes actually happen.