SEO Audit Services
A one-off diagnostic with a fixed scope and a real deliverable. You get the findings, the order to fix them in, and the reasoning, whether or not you ever work with us again.
Why most audits get ignored
Running a tool takes twenty minutes and produces something that looks impressively thorough. Working out which findings are actually costing you traffic is the entire job, and it's the part that usually gets skipped.
The deliverable
No portal you lose access to, no findings held back to encourage a retainer. If you take the audit and hand it to somebody else, it will work perfectly well in their hands.
Deliverable 01
What's wrong, where, and what it's costing. Written so a founder can follow the reasoning without needing an SEO to interpret it, and so a specialist doesn't feel talked down to.
Deliverable 02
Every issue ranked by impact against effort, so the sequence is obvious. This is the part most audits skip, and it's the reason most audits never get implemented.
Deliverable 03
For anything technical, the affected URLs, the expected behaviour, and how to test it. Handed over in a form that can go straight into a backlog.
Deliverable 04
We talk through the findings with you and anyone else who needs to be there. Documents get misread. Half an hour of questions prevents most of that.
What gets looked at
A store and a service business have different failure modes. The scope stays the same, the depth shifts to where the risk actually sits for you.
Crawling, indexation, rendering, redirects, canonicals, and speed. The things capable of holding back an entire site rather than one page.
What your buyers search for, and whether you have a page that deserves to rank for it. Usually where the largest gap is hiding.
Pages competing with each other for the same term, thin pages dragging on quality signals, and content that ranks but converts nothing.
Whether your most valuable pages are treated as important, or buried five clicks deep with nothing pointing at them.
What the sites currently ranking above you are doing that you aren't, limited to things you could realistically close.
Whether your analytics and Search Console are set up in a way that makes the next six months measurable. Reviewed against what we can see in your accounts.
How it runs
Timelines depend on site size, and we agree the exact dates before starting rather than after.
Stage 01
We agree what's being audited and why, then get read-only access to Search Console and analytics. Server logs if you have them. Scope is fixed in writing before any work starts, so nothing expands quietly.
Stage 02
The automated part is the beginning, not the audit. Templates get opened, rendered output gets compared against source, and search results get looked at by a person for the terms that matter to you.
Stage 03
Each finding gets sized by how many pages it touches, how much those pages could earn, and how much work the fix is. That produces the order, which is the actually useful output.
Stage 04
You get the document and the action list, then we talk it through with whoever needs to be on the call. Questions afterwards are fine and don't come with an invoice attached.
Picking the right one
Three different things get bought for three different reasons, and they're easy to confuse. Here's the honest split.
One hour
One-off project
Ongoing
Before you commit
It depends on the size of the site and how much of it is in scope. A ten page service site and a store with forty thousand URLs are not the same piece of work, and pricing either of them off a fixed number would mean one of you is being overcharged.
We scope it on a call and give you a fixed price before starting. If the site turns out to be smaller than expected, the price goes down rather than staying where it was.
No. The audit is a standalone piece of work with its own deliverable, and plenty of people take it to their in-house team or their existing agency.
That's why the specs are written for developers rather than for us. If they only made sense to the person who wrote them, you wouldn't really own the audit.
A free audit is a lead magnet. It's usually a crawl export with a template wrapped around it, and its purpose is to produce enough alarming red numbers to justify a sales call.
The work here is manual, and the output is a sequence you can act on. A tool can generate the first kind in minutes, which is roughly what it's worth.
Read-only access to Search Console and analytics, and permission to crawl the site. Server logs are useful on larger sites but not required.
We never need write access, and we don't need anything touching your hosting or codebase. An audit doesn't change anything on your site.
Only if that's what the site shows. Auditing into a predetermined conclusion is easy and we'd rather not, because it makes the whole document worthless to you.
Sometimes the finding is that the work is sound and the timeline was never realistic in the first place. That's a useful thing to learn too.
Far less often than the industry suggests. Once, properly, then again after something significant changes: a rebuild, a migration, a platform move, or a sustained drop nobody can explain.
Auditing a site every quarter when nothing has changed mostly produces the same document with different dates on it.
It's the standalone version of the diagnosis that starts every ongoing engagement. If you decide to have the work done as well, pricing for that sits on the main SEO page.
Other SEO services
Tell us about the site and we'll scope the audit, give you a fixed price, and say plainly if you don't need one.
Or email hello@culmen.digital