SEO audit
You have paid for SEO before and cannot tell what it bought you.
The usual experience is a monthly retainer, a dashboard nobody reads, and no way to connect any of it to work coming in. An audit is the opposite of that: one diagnosis, in writing, that you own whether or not you hire me again.
From $2,500 · or $1,200–2,500/mo ongoing
The problem
Why an audit rather than a retainer
Most sites do not have an SEO problem that more monthly activity would fix. They have three or four structural problems — a site organised around the org chart instead of what people search for, pages competing with each other, a platform that renders nothing until JavaScript runs, thin pages built for keywords nobody types.
None of that is solved by publishing more. It is solved by finding it, fixing it once, and then deciding whether ongoing work is worth it. Which is the honest order.
Method
From $2,500
What the audit covers
- Demand, before the site. What your buyers actually type — which is regularly not what you call your own services. This is the part most audits skip and it changes the rest.
- Technical. Crawling, indexing, rendering, speed, structured data. The mechanical failures that cap everything else.
- Architecture. How the site is organised against how the demand is shaped, and which of your pages are competing with each other.
- Content. What earns traffic, what earns nothing, what should be merged or retired. Usually the most uncomfortable section.
- The competitive picture. Who occupies the results you want and whether those positions are realistically reachable — because some are not, and knowing that saves you a year.
- A prioritised plan. Ranked by expected impact against effort, so your developer can start on Monday.
From $2,500 · or $1,200–2,500/mo ongoing. The audit stands alone. If ongoing work makes sense afterwards I will say so, and if it does not, I will say that instead.
Opinion
You cannot just buy the ready-to-buy leads
Everyone chases the same bottom-of-funnel terms — the ones where somebody is already holding a credit card. Which means you compete with everyone, on price, against whoever can afford to bid most.
The work that compounds is catching people earlier, when they are still working out whether they have a problem. That audience is larger, far cheaper to reach, and by the time they are ready they already know who you are. It is slower, and it is the only version that keeps paying after you stop spending.
This is also why I will sometimes tell you the answer is not SEO at all — it is that the thing you sell is described in words nobody searches for.
Limits
Who should not book this
- Anyone wanting guaranteed rankings. Nobody can guarantee those, and the people who do are selling something else.
- Anyone wanting links bought in bulk. I do not do it, and it is a liability on a domain you intend to keep.
- Anyone needing results this quarter. If the deadline is that hard, paid search is the honest tool.
- Sites with no content and no plans for any. There is nothing to rank. Fix that first.
Reporting
What you receive, and what happens to it
Half the value of an audit is destroyed by how it is delivered. A 90-page PDF nobody opens is a common outcome, and an expensive one.
- A written report you own — findings, evidence, and the fix for each. Yours to hand to any developer, including one who is not me.
- A prioritised action list, ordered by expected impact against effort. Usually a handful of items carry most of the gain; those are named as such rather than buried in a list of 200.
- A walkthrough call where I show you the findings on your own site. This is the part that changes what your team does next month.
- A baseline — where you stand today on the terms that matter, so improvement is measurable rather than asserted.
If you take ongoing work afterwards, reporting is monthly, in plain language, against the baseline. If a number goes the wrong way it appears in the report — the point of measuring is to find that out.
Evidence
Search work, live
Structure and content, not bought links. Open them and look at how each is organised — that is where search results actually come from.
Distance and continuing education
distance.confederationcollege.ca (opens in a new window)
Public college, Thunder Bay
The department now has pages of its own worth promoting — mobile-friendly, searchable, discoverable — and can put up a landing page to market an upcoming course.
A site built many years ago, before the department worked the way it does now — not responsive, not accessible, and fed by hand.
More leads than they could process — the owner asked to switch ads off for some services while the team caught up. And the site's simple structure has since become the standard competitors copy.
Licensing services are bought through a Google search, and every competitor bids on the same clicks. Whether the ad spend comes back as leads is decided by the page the click lands on.
People who would have picked up the phone started making contact through the site instead — and the build has since moved off a dying stack without losing any of that.
An established provider whose site was not being found by the people already searching for what they sold.
Top positions on competitive terms, with no link building and no ongoing search spend.
The information existed but was scattered across dozens of places, so nobody could compare anything.
Broken links get caught by a scan instead of by a visitor.
Broken links accumulate silently on any large site, and checking them by hand is the kind of job that never gets done.
Questions
What people ask first
How long until we see something?
Technical fixes can move within weeks. Structural and content work usually takes three to six months to show clearly. Anyone promising faster is either lucky or describing paid ads.
We were told we need 20 blog posts a month.
By someone who sells blog posts, most likely. Volume without structure produces pages that compete with each other. I would rather find the five pages that should exist and make those genuinely good.
Do you need access to our analytics?
It makes the audit substantially better — Search Console especially, since it is the only first-party view of what people actually searched before they arrived. If you do not have it set up, that is finding number one, and it is free to fix.
Can you just do it monthly instead?
Yes, once we know what "it" is. Retainers before diagnosis are how people end up paying for activity rather than progress.
How is this different from the free audit tools?
The free scanners are genuinely useful and I use them too — they find the mechanical failures fast. What they cannot do is tell you whether the thing you sell is described in words anyone searches for, whether two of your pages are competing for the same query, or whether the positions you want are realistically reachable. Those are judgement calls on your specific market, and they are what you are paying for.
What do we actually get at the end?
A written report you own, findings ranked by expected impact against effort, and a walkthrough call. Everything is specific enough for a developer to act on without translating it first.
Start with the diagnosis
Send me your URL and what you have tried already. I will tell you what I would look at first and whether an audit is worth your money right now.
Start with your URL
Send the address and what you have already tried. You will get back what I would look at first and whether an audit is worth your money right now.
Goes straight to me. No list, no automated sequence — see the privacy policy.