Technical SEO audit
An audit that tells you what to fix and what to leave alone.
Most technical SEO audits are a crawler export with a logo on the front. This one is a diagnosis. Every finding has evidence behind it, an order, and an honest note on whether it is worth your budget. Some of them will be marked as not worth fixing, and that is the point.
Scope
What a technical SEO audit actually looks at.
Six areas, checked against your real pages and your real Search Console data rather than a generic checklist.
Crawling and indexation
Which pages Google can reach, which it chose to keep, and why the two lists do not match. Canonicals, redirect chains, parameter handling, robots rules, sitemap accuracy, and the coverage report read properly rather than skimmed.
Architecture and internal linking
Whether your own pages are competing with each other, and whether the important ones are actually linked to. On one site a 25 link block sat on every page and helped nothing. Cutting it to 5 chosen links did more than any of them.
Structured data
The whole graph, not one page in a validator. Duplicate entities, @id references that do not resolve, markup that contradicts what is on the page, and anything that will earn you a manual action rather than a rich result.
Rendering and templates
Whether your content exists before JavaScript runs, and what each template does to pages built on it. Most technical problems on a WordPress site are template problems repeated a few thousand times.
Performance and caching
Field data first, then the cause. We once found four separate reasons behind a single cache invalidation failure, including curated pages that query content instead of being taxonomy archives, so no term based purge could ever reach them.
On-page and intent
Whether the page targets one thing or three, and whether the copy is doing any work. A DR 72 domain ranked for zero keywords on a target page while page one sat at DR 16 to 32. Authority was never the problem.
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
- A ranked findings document, worst first, with the reasoning for the order
- 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 colour coded severity score 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 of those
Order
How findings get prioritised.
Three questions per item. Anything that fails all three goes on the ignore list rather than into the plan.
What is it costing?
Traffic, revenue or eligibility. A canonical pointing at a redirect on a commercial page is not the same problem as an unminified stylesheet, even though a tool will list them side by side.
Measured, not guessedWhat does the fix cost?
Hours, and the risk of breaking something. A two hour fix worth a few thousand visits goes above a forty hour rebuild worth slightly more. Effort is part of the ranking, not a footnote.
Hours estimated per itemIs it worth doing at all?
Some findings are real and still not worth your money. Those get written down with a plain explanation of why we would leave them, so you can overrule us if you want to.
Explicitly markedThe difference
A crawler export is not an audit.
What the tool tells you
Screaming Frog will happily hand you 4,000 missing alt attributes, 60 redirect chains and 12 pages over 2MB. All of that is true. None of it explains why the category page that used to earn half your revenue stopped ranking in March.
What is missing from it
Cause. A tool sees symptoms and counts them. It cannot tell you that a caching layer never invalidates curated pages, or that two of your pages are eating each other because nobody split commercial from informational intent. That part needs a person reading the site.
Worth saying plainly
We use crawlers. They are good at finding things fast. But the export is the raw material, not the deliverable, and if someone sends you one with a cover page they have charged you for pressing a button.
Cost
What the audit costs.
Technical SEO and strategy is billed at £90 to £110 an hour. An audit is a fixed piece of that, agreed before it starts.
The audit
From £900
Roughly 8 to 12 hours depending on size and complexity. Fixed price agreed in writing once we have looked at the site, so you are never billed a surprise.
The walkthrough
Included
A call to go through the findings, in the order they are ranked, with time to disagree with us. No extra charge and no upsell attached to it.
Implementation
Optional
Quoted separately after the audit, because pricing a fix before you know the problem is guesswork. Take the document to your own developer if you prefer.
First call is free and lasts about 20 minutes. Full breakdown on the rates page.
FAQ
Questions clients actually ask
What do I actually get at the end?
A written audit with every finding explained, ranked by what it is costing you, plus the evidence behind each one. Screenshots, crawl data, Search Console exports, log samples where they matter. If a fix needs code, you get the code or the exact spec for it.
You also get a call to walk through it, because a document nobody talks through tends to sit in a folder.
How much does a technical SEO audit cost?
From £900. That is roughly 8 to 12 hours depending on how big and how messy the site is. A 200 page WordPress site with one theme is near the bottom of that. A 40,000 URL site with faceted navigation, three templates and a migration in its past is not.
We will tell you which end you are at before you commit, and if we think the audit is not the right spend for you we will say that too.
How long does it take?
Usually one to two weeks from getting access. Some of that is waiting: crawls on large sites take time, and we want a few days of fresh Search Console data rather than a single snapshot.
If you need it faster, say so up front. Sometimes we can, sometimes the data will not let us.
Do I have to hire you to implement the fixes?
No. The audit is written so any competent developer can pick it up and work from it. Plenty of clients hand it to their in-house team and never speak to us again, which is fine.
If you do want us to build it, that gets quoted separately once we both know what is involved. We will not price implementation before we know what is broken.
Why would some findings be marked as not worth fixing?
Because they are not. Plenty of things a crawler flags cost real developer hours and change nothing. Missing alt attributes on decorative images. A handful of 302s on pages nobody visits. A duplicate meta description on page 14 of a paginated archive.
If we list forty items and tell you all forty are urgent, we have made your job harder, not easier. Part of what you pay for is being told where to stop.
When should I not bother with an audit?
If your site is new and gets almost no traffic, an audit will mostly tell you that you need content and links. That is a strategy problem, not a technical one, and you would be paying us to confirm something you already suspect.
Same if you already have a recent audit sitting unimplemented. Buying a second one does not make the first one happen. Spend the money on the build instead.
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Send us the site and the symptom.
Give us the URL and what you are seeing. We will tell you whether an audit is the right spend, roughly what it would cost, and whether the answer is something you could fix yourself this afternoon.