Technical SEO audits.
Overview
Good content cannot rank if search engines cannot reach it, decide not to index it, or find five copies of it. Technical SEO is the plumbing underneath the writing: status codes, redirects, canonicals, sitemaps, structured data and speed.
It is also the part of search that is least about opinion. Either a page returns 200 or it does not. Either the canonical points somewhere sensible or it points at the home page. Most of an audit is not strategy, it is finding the seven or eight specific things that are quietly wasting the work you have already paid for.
Start with the one people can see
Before any of the plumbing, here is the part every client understands, because it is the bit they actually look at in Google. Type in either field.
Two things that surprise people. The cut happens on width, not on character count, so a title of capitals or wide letters disappears sooner than the counter in your plugin suggests. And the description is not a ranking factor at all. It is a piece of copywriting that decides whether the ranking you already have turns into a visit.
What a technical SEO audit actually checksThe four questions an audit answers
Can it be crawled, and should it be indexed?
- A full crawl, listing every error, every redirect chain and every orphaned page
- Redirect hops collapsed, because each one leaks a little and a loop leaks all of it
- Canonicals checked against reality, not against what the plugin claims
- Parameters, tags and filters that quietly generate a thousand near-identical URLs
- robots.txt and the sitemap agreeing with each other, and with the site
- Pages that are indexed but should not be, and pages that should be but are not
Is it understood, and is it fast?
- Titles and descriptions written per page rather than generated from a template
- Structured data that validates, and that describes what the page is actually about
- Internal links, so the pages that matter are not four clicks from anywhere
- Core Web Vitals measured on real visits, not just in a lab test
- Images, fonts and scripts ranked by what they cost against what they add
- Mobile rendering, since that is the version that gets indexed
How an audit runs
- 01
Crawl and collect
Hours 1–8We crawl the site the way a search engine would, then pull Search Console, analytics and, where we can get them, the raw server logs. Logs are the honest source: they show what actually visited and what got ignored, rather than what a tool estimates.
A complete picture of the site as crawled - 02
Compare and diagnose
Hours 9–16The crawl is compared with what is indexed and what is earning traffic. The interesting findings live in the gaps: pages nothing links to, pages indexed twice under different URLs, pages that rank despite the site rather than because of it.
Findings with the pages they affect - 03
Rank by impact
Hours 17–24Every finding is scored on what it would gain against what it would take. A list of two hundred issues is not a plan, it is a way of making sure nothing gets done. The point of this step is to tell you what the first five days should be.
A prioritised plan, not a list - 04
Fix, or hand over
Weeks 1–4We can make the changes or write them up for your developers, in enough detail that nobody has to guess what was meant. Anything that touches URLs goes to staging first and is checked against the redirect map before it goes live.
Changes made, or a brief they can act on - 05
Measure afterwards
Month 2+Crawl health, indexing and Core Web Vitals are measured again against the numbers we took at the start. Search moves slowly, so the honest reporting window is months rather than days, and we will say so rather than showing you a graph that means nothing yet.
A before and after you can check
The audit takes 24 hours. Fixes are scoped separately and done within four weeks.
What we will not do
There is a version of this service that sells a monthly report full of numbers nobody acts on. We would rather be useful, so a few things we do not do.
We do not promise positions. Anybody who guarantees a ranking is either describing a term nobody searches for or hoping you will not check. We do not buy links, because the risk lands on your domain rather than ours. And we do not pad an audit to make it look like value. If your site is technically fine and the problem is that the content does not answer the question, we will tell you that and it will be a short report.
What you get
- A full crawl, with every error, redirect chain and orphaned page listed against its URL
- An indexing review covering noindex tags, canonicals and duplicate URLs
- Titles, descriptions and structured data reviewed page by page, not site-wide
- Core Web Vitals diagnosed from real visitor data, with the specific fix for each
- A prioritised action plan, ordered by impact against effort
- Implementation by us, or a written brief your developers can act on
- A measured comparison afterwards, against the numbers taken on day one
Questions we get asked
How long before we see anything?
Crawling and indexing changes can show within days. Ranking movement takes weeks to months, and any agency telling you otherwise is selling something. The fastest wins are usually pages that were accidentally blocked or duplicated, because those are not competing for anything, they are simply missing.
We already have an SEO plugin. Is that not enough?
A plugin sets the fields. It does not tell you that four hundred tag archives are being indexed, that your canonical points at the home page, or that the mobile version of your template hides the content that was ranking. Those are the findings an audit exists for.
Do we need to change our content?
Often, but that is a separate job and we will keep the two clearly apart. A technical audit tells you whether the content you have can be found and understood. Whether it deserves to rank once found is a different question, and an honest answer to it is sometimes that the page needs writing rather than fixing.
Will this break the site?
Redirect and canonical changes carry real risk, which is why anything touching URLs goes to staging first and is checked against a full crawl before and after. The most common way a site loses traffic is not an attack, it is a migration where nobody wrote the redirects.
Can you work with our existing developer?
Yes, and it often works out cheaper. We write the findings up so they can be implemented by whoever knows the codebase, with the affected URLs, the reason and the specific change. We are happy to be the diagnosis rather than the treatment.
What if the audit finds very little?
Then it is a short report and a smaller invoice, and you have ruled out an expensive assumption. That happens more than you might expect on sites that were built carefully, and it is a useful thing to know before spending money on content that would have been fine all along.