What an SEO audit should actually tell you, and what to be suspicious of

We sell audits, so treat what follows accordingly. The reason we are writing it down is that a good audit and a worthless one look identical from the outside until you have read both, and most owners only ever read one.

Here is the order a useful audit works in, and why the order matters more than the length.

The first question is not where you rank. It is which of your pages exist as far as a search engine is concerned, and whether that set matches the set you meant to publish.

This gets skipped constantly, and it is where the expensive problems live. A page that is not indexed cannot rank at any position, so every hour spent on its wording is wasted until that is fixed. Pages get held out of the index for dull reasons: a stray noindex left over from the staging site, a canonical tag pointing somewhere else, a robots rule blocking a whole folder, a page reachable only from a menu that needs JavaScript to open.

The other half of the same question is the one nobody asks: how many indexed pages do you have that should not exist? Old tag archives, printer versions, filtered shop URLs with parameters on them, thin pages generated from a template. An audit that reports your sitemap has one thousand seven hundred URLs and stops there has told you nothing. An audit that tells you nine tenths of them are one template with a word swapped has told you something you can act on.

We know that specific example works, because that is what our own audit found on our own site. We are still deciding how to unwind it. It was not comfortable reading and it was the most useful thing in the report.

Crawl budget is the amount of attention a search engine is willing to spend fetching your pages. It gets talked about a great deal, usually by people selling something.

For most small business sites, with a few dozen or a few hundred pages, it is close to irrelevant. Your site gets crawled comfortably. If somebody's headline finding on a fifty page brochure site is crawl budget, they are padding.

It starts to matter when a site generates URLs faster than anyone is reading them: shops with filters and sorting that multiply into thousands of near identical addresses, calendars with an infinite run of future dates, search results pages that are themselves crawlable, or a template layer like the one described above. In those cases attention is being spent on rubbish instead of on the pages that earn money, and the fix is to stop generating the rubbish rather than to ask for more attention.

So the honest version is: it is a real thing, it applies to a minority of sites, and whether it applies to yours is a question with a checkable answer. An audit should tell you which camp you are in rather than assuming the dramatic one.

Roughly this, in roughly this order, with the findings ranked by what they cost you rather than by what the tool flagged.

None of these are proof of bad work on their own. Two or three together usually are.

It cannot tell you what you will rank for, because that depends on what everyone else does next. It cannot tell you what the traffic will be worth until you know your own conversion rate and job value, which is your data, not ours.

It also cannot fix anything. This sounds obvious and it is the most common way audits waste money. A report that is read once and filed has cost you the fee and returned nothing. Before you commission one, decide who is going to do the work afterwards, because that answer changes what the report should look like. A report for your own developer is a different document from a report for an owner who intends to do none of it personally.

Our first look is free and you get the written findings whether or not you hire us, because we would rather you had a straight answer than a sales call. A full audit with implementation planning is £750, and it is credited against any work you go ahead with.

What you will get is a list of what is actually wrong, ordered by what it appears to be costing, and a plain statement of the things we think are not worth your money. Sometimes that includes the thing you were about to pay us for. We have found genuine doorway pages on our own site by applying the same test, so we are not going to pretend the process is comfortable. It is just more useful than a four hundred line export nobody reads.