SEO Audit & Strategy

The technical audit confirms that search engines can reach, understand and quickly serve your pages. A full crawl with Screaming Frog or Sitebulb covers status codes, redirect chains, robots directives, XML sitemap accuracy, canonical consistency and duplicate content clusters. Search Console's page indexing report shows which URLs are excluded and why; joined to the crawl, it reveals whether the cause is a directive, thin content or conflicting signals.

On larger sites we add server log analysis. Seeing which URLs Googlebot actually requests, and how often, is the only reliable way to understand crawl budget: how much goes to parameter pages, faceted navigation or duplicates. Hreflang clusters and country targeting are validated in the same pass.

Performance is assessed through Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP and CLS) with lab and field data; Google Search Central documents that page experience is evaluated on real-user field data, so a lab score alone is not enough. JavaScript rendering, structured data validity and mobile usability complete the section.

The content audit asks what every indexable page is for. Search Console and GA4 data are joined to the crawl so that each URL carries its impressions, clicks, target query, conversion contribution and internal link count in one table. The output is one of four decisions per page: keep, update, merge or remove. Cannibalisation clusters become visible here.

Keyword opportunity analysis starts with data you already own. Queries earning impressions between positions five and twenty in Search Console without clicks are usually the fastest wins at the lowest effort. Ahrefs or Semrush then size demand, classify intent and record SERP features (featured snippets, AI Overviews, video, local packs), and every query cluster is mapped to an existing page or to one that should exist.

That map is the backbone of the strategy and is delivered as a page-to-intent map rather than a volume list, because a list of keywords tells nobody what to build or fix first.

Competitor analysis looks at the sites that appear alongside you for your target queries, which are not always your commercial rivals. For three to five organic competitors we compare topic coverage, the page types they rank with (comparisons, guides, tools, category pages), their presence in SERP features and their referring-domain profiles. The result is a list of content gaps: topics with proven demand that your site does not cover.

Information architecture decides where those gaps will live. We review the depth of category and hub pages, URL hierarchy, navigation and breadcrumbs, and how many clicks important pages sit from the homepage. The internal-linking audit shows how authority flows: orphan pages, over-linked utility pages, meaningless anchor text and topic clusters that never link to each other.

Recommendations are concrete: which hub links to which spokes, which anchor rules apply, which pages merge. This section often has the highest impact-to-effort ratio, because internal-linking changes rarely need developer time.

After the handover the plan proceeds along one of three routes. Your own team implements it: tickets and briefs are ready, so items go straight into your sprints, and we re-crawl every four weeks and report progress. Your existing agency implements it, using the audit as a neutral roadmap. Or implementation moves to our SEO programme, where the audit becomes the first quarter's plan.

Measurement is the same on every route: the baseline, a monthly comparison and a review at the end of the 90 days, where the plan is updated as implementation surfaces new findings and competitors and Google's AI features move the results page. A full audit once a year, or before a migration, redesign or platform switch, is a sensible rhythm.

We judge an audit by whether it gets implemented, not by its page count. Every finding is scored on an impact × effort matrix: impact from the number of affected URLs, their share of traffic and conversions, and whether the issue blocks indexing or ranking; effort from the role required (developer, editor, marketing), the working days and the dependencies. The matrix moves the conversation from "what matters" to "what can be done this quarter".

Every fix has an owner. A finding without an owner will not happen, so technical items are delivered as developer tickets with acceptance criteria and content items as editor briefs. hreflang and market-level targeting are a standard section because we run our own site in four languages; crawler access and content citability for AI-assisted search are checked the same way.

We also write down what we do not promise. The audit does not commit to a ranking, a traffic figure or a revenue number; it commits to what will be done, who will do it and how it will be measured. Outcomes depend on implementation speed, the site's authority and the competition, and the report's first page says so.