An SEO audit is a full examination of your website against the things that decide whether Google can find it, understand it and choose it over a competitor’s. I carry it out myself, page by page, for UK businesses that want to know exactly what is holding their site back before they commit money to ongoing SEO. The result is a written action plan, ranked by impact, that you can hand to your developer, brief an agency with or work through with me.
What an audit fixes, and what changes for you
Most people arrive with a symptom rather than a diagnosis. Enquiries from the website have tailed off, a competitor with a weaker site keeps appearing above you, or a redesign went live and traffic never came back. The symptom rarely points to its cause: fewer enquiries can come from pages dropping out of Google, from a contact form that quietly stopped sending, or from a new rival targeting the same searches.
The audit replaces guesswork with a list of specific problems, each tied to the pages it affects and to how much it is likely to matter. The practical change is that you stop paying for work in the wrong order. New content is wasted while Google cannot reach the pages you already have, and a rebuild is wasted when three template fixes would have done the job.
Who it suits, and who it does not
It suits UK businesses whose website is meant to bring in enquiries or sales and is falling short, particularly when:
- you are deciding whether to hire SEO help and want an independent view of what actually needs doing first;
- you already pay someone for SEO and want a second opinion on whether the effort is aimed at the right problems;
- a redesign or platform move is coming and you want a record of what the current site does well before it is replaced;
- you have a developer or in-house marketer who can make changes but needs a clear, prioritised brief.
It is the wrong starting point if you only want to know whether anything is wrong at all. The free SEO audit answers that question at no cost. If you would rather investigate yourself, my SEO audit checklist walks through the same areas step by step. And if the site cannot be changed, because the platform is locked down or there is no budget for fixes, an audit can only describe the problem.
What the audit covers
I follow the order in which Google meets a site, since a fault early in that sequence makes later ones irrelevant. How deep each area goes depends on the business. An online shop with thousands of product URLs needs far more crawl analysis than a ten-page site for an accountancy practice in Islington, which needs closer attention on local search.
Crawling and indexing
Whether Google can reach every page that matters, a process called crawling, and whether it has chosen to store those pages in its index. I set a full crawl of the site against Search Console’s record of what is indexed, looking for blocked sections, stray noindex tags, redirect chains, broken links, duplicate versions of the site and pages Google has visited but declined to keep.
Site structure and internal links
How pages link to each other, how many clicks your important pages sit from the home page, and whether any have no internal links pointing to them at all. Internal links are one of the clearest signals you give Google about which pages matter most, so a key service page buried four levels deep is a common and inexpensive fix.
Keyword targeting and on-page signals
Whether each page targets one search that people genuinely make, and says so in its title tag, headings and opening copy. I look hard for keyword cannibalisation, where several pages compete for the same search and Google cannot settle on any of them. Where the targeting needs rebuilding from scratch, keyword research becomes a separate piece of work.
Content quality and gaps
Whether pages answer the question behind each search better than the pages currently ranking, whether thin or near-identical pages are weighing the site down, and which topics your buyers search for that the site never mentions. I also check the details that show who stands behind the business: a real address, named people and, for limited companies, the registered name, company number and registered office that UK companies must display on their websites.
Speed and mobile experience
How quickly the main page templates load and respond on an ordinary phone, measured against Google’s Core Web Vitals where real-user data exists. Google indexes the mobile version of a site, so I review the important pages on a phone too, including how easy it is to ring you or send an enquiry from a small screen.
Local search
For businesses serving a particular area, I review the Google Business Profile (categories, services, opening hours, reviews and the website link), check that your name, address and phone number match across the site and the main UK directories, and ask whether each location page gives its town or borough a genuine reason to exist.
Links from other sites
Who links to you, whether those links come from relevant and trustworthy sites, and whether anything in the profile looks bought or manipulative. I compare it with the sites outranking you, so you can see whether links are really the gap or a distraction from cheaper fixes.
Tracking and measurement
Whether Search Console is verified for the version of the site people actually reach, whether GA4 records enquiries and sales, and whether your cookie banner behaves as intended, neither firing analytics before consent nor accidentally switching off all measurement. If the numbers are wrong, every later SEO decision rests on bad evidence.
How I run the audit
- Scoping call. We talk through what the site is for, which pages bring in money, what has changed recently and who will make the fixes. This decides where the audit goes deepest, and it lets me quote a price before anything starts.
- Access. You add me as a user to Google Search Console and Google Analytics, plus your Google Business Profile if local search matters.
- Crawl and data. I crawl the whole site and read it alongside up to 16 months of Search Console data on indexing, queries and clicks, so each problem is judged against how your site actually performs rather than a tool’s generic score.
- Manual review. I go through every page template and your most commercially important pages by hand, on desktop and on a phone, and search the terms you need to win to see what the pages above you do differently.
- Write-up and walk-through. I write up the findings, rank them, then take you through them on a video call so you can ask questions before anyone starts work.
Problems I find most often on UK sites
- Two versions of the site live at once. The .co.uk and .com addresses, or the www and non-www versions, both load without redirecting to one, so Google sees duplicates and splits its attention between them.
- Location pages with only the town name changed. Pages for Croydon, Bromley and Sutton that share identical copy apart from the place name. Google’s spam policies treat near-identical pages built to catch each town’s searches as doorway abuse.
- Blog posts outranking the service page. An article on what a loft conversion costs in London ranks instead of the loft conversion service page, so searchers land on content with no obvious route to an enquiry.
- Development settings left on after launch. A noindex tag carried over from the build, or a staging copy of the site sitting in Google’s index next to the live one.
- Old details in directories. A previous address or phone number still listed after a move, which leaves Google unsure which details to trust for local results.
- Enquiries nobody can count. Form submissions and phone taps go unrecorded in GA4, so nobody can say which pages produce work.
What you receive
- A written report in plain English. Each issue sets out what is wrong, the evidence, why it matters to your business and how to fix it.
- A priority order based on likely impact against effort, so the first fixes are the ones most likely to affect enquiries, not merely the easiest to tick off.
- Spreadsheets listing every affected URL, ready for a developer to work through.
- A note against each fix of who should handle it: your developer, whoever writes your content, or you.
- The walk-through call, with time for your questions.
The report is yours to keep. You can give it to your own developer or agency, or ask me to carry out the work.
After the audit
The findings usually point to one or more pieces of focused work. Crawling, indexing and speed problems belong to technical SEO; pages aimed at the wrong searches belong to on-page SEO; map results and directory problems belong to local SEO. If a redesign or platform change is planned, the audit becomes the baseline for website migration SEO, so you know which pages and addresses must survive the move.
To start, send me your website address through the contact page with a line on what prompted the audit. I will reply to arrange the scoping call, then send a quote in pounds before any work begins.