SEO audit services
An audit across all three pillars, so you stop guessing which one is the problem.
Technical, content and links, assessed together and ranked against each other. Most sites are failing on one of the three and spending money on the other two. The job of this audit is to tell you which, with evidence, before you commit a budget to the wrong thing.
Choose first
Two audits. Pick the one that matches what you already know.
We sell a narrow one and a wide one. They are not the same product and buying the wrong one wastes your money, so here is the split in plain terms.
Narrow
Technical SEO audit, from £900
For when you already know the problem is technical. Crawling and indexation, canonicals and redirects, structured data, rendering, templates, caching and speed, gone through in depth. Nothing on content quality and nothing on your backlink profile.
- Pages dropped out of the index and nobody knows why
- A migration went wrong
- Schema errors or Search Console coverage issues
- A developer needs a spec they can build from
Wide
Three pillar SEO audit, from £1,500
For when you do not know where the problem is. The technical audit above is one component of this, summarised rather than exhaustive, plus content and intent, plus backlink quality, with all three ranked against each other in one list.
- Traffic is flat or falling and nothing obvious changed
- You have been told you need links and want that checked
- You are choosing where next year's budget goes
- An agency proposal arrived and you want a second opinion
This page. Keep reading.
The honest version
If you are fairly sure it is technical, buy the narrow one. It is cheaper and it goes deeper on the thing you care about. We would rather sell you the smaller audit that fits than the bigger one that does not.
Scope
What the three pillar audit looks at.
Checked against your real pages and your real Search Console data, not a generic checklist run at a domain.
Technical health
Indexation, canonicals and redirects, sitemap and robots accuracy, structured data validity, rendering, template behaviour, caching and Core Web Vitals from field data. Covered at a level that tells you whether technical is your constraint. If it is, the depth lives in the technical SEO audit.
Content and intent
Whether each page targets one thing or three, which of your pages are competing with each other, where commercial and informational intent have been mixed on the same URL, and which pages are thin, machine written or simply outranked on merit. Plus the gaps: terms your competitors cover and you do not.
Links and authority
The quality of the profile, not the count. Patterns that look bought, networks worth declining, toxic links worth disavowing, and the comparison that matters most: whether the sites beating you actually have more authority or just better pages. Often they do not. If they genuinely do, the answer is earned links rather than bought ones.
Architecture and internal links
How authority moves around your own site and whether it reaches the pages that earn money. Templated link blocks are the usual problem. On one site cutting a 25 link block to 5 chosen links did more than any of them had, and the rule that replaced it came with a live ledger so it stayed enforced.
Competitors
Not a feature list. The specific reason the pages above you are above you, page by page, on your priority terms. This is usually where the "you need more links" theory either gets confirmed or falls apart.
Where the budget should go
The output that matters. One ranked list across all three pillars, with hours estimated per item, so you can see that a two hour canonical fix outranks a six month content programme, or the other way round. Whichever the data says.
Deliverables
What lands in your inbox.
Written for a developer to act on and for a non-technical owner to understand. Both, not one or the other.
You receive
- One ranked list across technical, content and links, worst first, with the reasoning for the order
- A plain verdict on which pillar is your actual constraint
- Evidence attached to every finding, so nothing rests on our word alone
- The fix for each item, as code or as a spec precise enough to hand over
- An estimate of hours per fix, so you can decide what to buy
- A separate list of things we recommend you ignore, and why
- A call to go through all of it and argue with us if you disagree
You do not receive
- A 90 page PDF of every warning a crawler produced
- A single overall score out of 100 with no cost attached to it
- Recommendations we could have written before looking at your site
- A sales document that ends in a retainer proposal
- A traffic forecast. Nobody can honestly give you one
- A recommendation to buy links. We earn links, we never buy them
Why the width matters
The most useful finding is often what you can stop paying for.
The assumption
A DR 72 domain ranked for zero keywords on a page that mattered. Every conversation about it pointed the same way: the page needs links, so budget a campaign. That is what a links-only view of the site would have recommended.
What the data said
Page one competitors were sitting at DR 16 to 32. A weaker set of domains was beating a stronger one, which rules out authority as the constraint straight away. The real causes were a canonical pointing at a redirect, commercial and informational intent split across two competing pages, and machine spun copy that read like it.
Why this is the argument for a three pillar audit
A technical audit alone would have found the canonical. A content audit alone would have found the spun copy. A link audit alone would have recommended the campaign that was not needed. Looking at all three together is what turned a link budget into a few hours of on page work.
Order
How findings get ranked against each other.
Three questions per item, applied the same way whether the finding is a redirect chain, a thin page or a link pattern. That is what lets them sit in one list.
What is it costing?
Traffic, revenue or eligibility, measured where it can be measured. A canonical killing a commercial page is not the same problem as a thin blog post, even though a scoring tool will happily list them side by side.
Measured, not guessedWhat does the fix cost?
Hours, and the risk of breaking something. This is what makes cross pillar comparison honest. A two hour technical fix worth a few thousand visits belongs above a six month content programme worth slightly more.
Hours estimated per itemIs it worth doing at all?
Some findings are real and still not worth your money. Those go on a separate list with a plain explanation of why we would leave them, so you can overrule us if you want to.
Explicitly markedCost
What it costs.
SEO and strategy is billed at £90 to £110 an hour. An audit is a fixed piece of that, agreed in writing before it starts. Minimum engagement is 4 hours.
Three pillar audit
From £1,500
Scoped by site size and complexity. We look at the site first, then give you a fixed price, so the number does not move once work starts.
Technical audit only
From £900
The narrower, deeper option for when you already know the problem is technical. Details on the technical SEO audit page.
Implementation
Optional
Quoted separately after the audit, because pricing a fix before you know the problem is guesswork. Take the document to your own team if you prefer.
The walkthrough call is included. First call is free and lasts about 20 minutes. Full breakdown on the rates page.
FAQ
Questions clients actually ask
Should I get this or the technical SEO audit?
If you already know the problem is technical, buy the technical SEO audit. It goes deeper on crawling, indexation, rendering, schema and speed, it costs less, and you are not paying us to confirm things you already know.
Buy this one if you do not know where the problem is. It covers technical, content and links in a single pass and tells you which of the three is actually holding the site back. Most people who say "we tried SEO and it did not work" are in this second group, because the money went into one pillar while the constraint sat in another.
What does an SEO audit cost?
From £1,500, scoped by site size and complexity. A 200 page WordPress site with one template and a clean history sits near the bottom. A 40,000 URL site with faceted navigation, three templates, a migration in its past and a backlink profile nobody has looked at in five years does not.
It costs more than the technical audit because it is a wider brief covering three areas rather than one. We give you a fixed price in writing after looking at the site, so there is no surprise on the invoice. Hourly work is £90 to £110 for SEO and strategy, and the audit is a fixed piece of that.
How long does it take?
Usually two to three weeks from getting access. Some of that is waiting rather than working. Crawls on large sites take time, backlink data needs cross checking against more than one source, and we want a few days of fresh Search Console data rather than one snapshot.
If you have a board deadline, say so at the start. Sometimes we can compress it and sometimes the data will not let us.
Do I have to hire you to implement any of it?
No. The audit is written so a competent developer, a content person and a marketing manager can each pick up their part of it and work from it. Plenty of people take the document to their own team and we never hear from them again, which is fine.
If you want us to build the technical fixes, that is quoted separately once the scope is clear. We will not price implementation before we know what is broken.
Will you tell me to buy links?
No. We do not buy links, we do not use PBNs, and we will never recommend that you do. What the audit does is assess link quality, spot patterns that look bought, and make disavow calls. We have found paid link and PBN networks in profiles and told the owner to decline them.
If the audit finds that authority genuinely is the constraint, the answer is earned links through digital PR and manual outreach, and the audit will say so with the evidence behind it.
The most useful thing an audit can do on this front is prove links are not the problem. On one site a DR 72 domain ranked for nothing on its target page while page one competitors sat at DR 16 to 32. The obvious plan was a link budget. The actual causes were a canonical pointing at a redirect, two pages fighting over the same intent, and machine spun copy. That finding saved the client the entire link spend.
When is an audit the wrong thing to buy?
If the site is new and has almost no traffic, an audit will mostly tell you that you need content and links, which you probably already suspect. Spend the money on the content instead.
Same if you have a recent audit sitting unimplemented. A second document does not make the first one happen. Also worth saying: if you have a strong hunch the problem is one specific thing, buy the narrower audit for that thing. A wide brief on a narrow problem is just a more expensive answer.
Keep reading
Related services
Book me
Not sure which audit you need?
Send us the URL and what you are seeing. We will tell you whether it looks technical, whether the narrow audit would cover it, and whether an audit is the right spend at all.