Website Audits / SEO Reviews

Ideally, we’d like access to your Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts if you have them. These platforms give us a lot of useful data about the health of your site and the behaviour of visitors. 

We also use other, independent tools to analyse your website, such as SEMRush and Screaming Frog. 
 

We look for dozens of potential problems, checking various elements of your site. Here are some of the most common issues we find:

• Indexation errors
• Robots.txt errors
• XML Sitemap issues
• Broken links, pages or images
• Missing or poorly optimised meta information
• Content quality issues
• Problems with Canonical or Hreflang tags
• Site speed and performance
• Image file sizes too large
• Images lacking alt text
• Mixed content issues (your site contains both https and http content)
• Internal linking strategy
• External link profile
• Mobile-friendliness
• Usability issues

It depends how many and how complicated the issues are that we find, and how much time your budget allows for us to work on your site. 

Some problems may need your developer’s input if they are intrinsically related to the way the website is built. We can liaise with them to find out what work they will need to carry out, and any cost attached and then – if you are agreeable – ask them to schedule the work.

For issues that we can work on ourselves, we’ll estimate roughly how long it might take to do that work and offer a quote.

If you agree to an ongoing SEO project with us, working on those audit issues can be our primary focus in the first few months. 

Getting an ailing site onto more solid foundations is the initial goal, but really that’s just the first step (although if you only want our SEO team to help you get to that point, we can).

When you carry on with SEO, it builds on that healthy platform to improve your rankings, drive targeted traffic and win conversions over the longer term.

Think of SEO like gardening. Fixing the problems identified in the website audit is like preparing the soil, planting seeds and doing the hard landscaping in your garden. It's an essential first step to ensure everything can grow well, in the right place for visitors to see and enjoy it. However, a garden needs ongoing care to flourish and produce beautiful flowers or delicious vegetables: watering, weeding, and fertilising for example. In SEO terms, this means continuously optimising your site over the long term. 

Absolutely, yes! Whatever platform your website is built on, we’ll be happy to audit it for you.

We charge a nominal fee (approximately £75, depending on the size of your website), which includes our initial chat with you to find out more about your business and your goals, the SEO site audit, and a follow-up meeting to discuss our findings.

If you'd like us to work on any issues found in the audit, or you'd like to talk about an ongoing SEO project with us, we can arrange a quote. 

In rare cases, a website’s problems run so deep that the time and expense needed to fix them would be unworkable and not cost-effective for you.

If we recognise this scenario, we will be completely up-front with you: starting SEO in these circumstances would be a waste of your money. To borrow an old saying, you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig! Likewise, we would never make superficial enhancements to a badly built website; it's unethical and it's pointless, as Google would never overlook its fundamental flaws.

In this situation we will give you our best advice, which may be to rebuild your site on more solid foundations, using an experienced developer with whom you can have an ongoing relationship. After this, if you’d like to pick up our conversation about SEO, we’ll be more than happy to help.

This honest and ethical approach is the reason our customers keep working with us, year after year.

If you or we are working on your website frequently or publishing new content, it’s useful to do an audit from time to time, to ensure that no new issues have cropped up. And if you notice that you’ve lost traffic or keyword rankings, an audit can often provide clues as to why. It’s also just good practice to keep abreast of your site’s technical health.

For ongoing SEO clients, this is an integral part of the work we do.