Scored technical baseline
Every check we run, scored and dated, so you can prove movement later. This is the number you are starting from — recorded before anyone promises you a number to end at.
What a technical SEO audit actually covers
A technical audit covers four systems: crawl (can bots reach your pages), render (can they see your content), index (are the right pages stored) and serve (how fast and stable the page is). Content quality and backlinks sit outside its scope — those are separate disciplines with separate deliverables.
Most audits you have been sent are a crawler export with a logo on it. A tool flags 4,000 issues, nobody sorts them, and the document dies in a shared drive. That is not an audit — it is a data dump that transfers the hard work back to you.
The hard work is judgement. Which of those 4,000 issues touch pages that make money? Which are symptoms of one upstream cause? Which are genuinely cosmetic and can be closed as won't-fix without anyone worrying? A crawler cannot answer any of that, because it does not know what your business sells or which templates carry your pipeline.
So we crawl, yes — but the crawl is the input, not the output. The output is an ordered list of changes, each one attached to the template it affects, the pages that template generates, and the search demand sitting behind those pages. When a fix cannot be tied to a plausible commercial outcome, we say so and drop it down the list rather than padding the report with it.
What you receive
You receive four artefacts: a scored technical baseline, a prioritised fix roadmap with effort and impact per line, template-level implementation notes your developers can action without translation, and a re-crawl once fixes ship to confirm they landed. Everything is yours to keep.
Prioritised fix roadmap
Each finding sized by engineering effort and by the search demand it unlocks, then ordered. You can hand the top ten lines to a sprint planning session and they will make sense without us in the room.
Template-level implementation notes
Written for the people who will action them. Which component, which route, what the correct output looks like, and how to verify it shipped. No 'improve your site speed' filler.
Verification re-crawl
Once your team ships, we re-run the identical crawl and confirm each fix actually took effect in production — not just in the ticket.
Log-file analysis
Where server logs are available, what Googlebot and the AI crawlers genuinely fetch, how often, and where crawl budget is being wasted on pages that will never rank.
Rendering comparison
Your pages as raw HTML, as Googlebot renders them, and as a headless fetch sees them. Divergence between those three is where most JavaScript sites quietly lose their content.
How the audit runs
The audit runs over ten working days in four stages: access and discovery, automated crawling plus manual template review, log and rendering analysis, then prioritisation and handover. You spend about ninety minutes total — a kickoff call, an access handover, and a walkthrough at the end.
- 01
Access and scope
We agree which templates and subdomains are in scope, and get read access to Search Console, analytics and — where possible — server logs. Scope is written down before we start so the deliverable cannot drift.
→ Signed scope and access confirmed
- 02
Crawl and manual review
A full crawl at production scale, then manual review of every distinct template by a person. Automated tools find the pattern; a human decides whether the pattern matters on the template that carries your revenue.
→ Raw findings, deduplicated to root causes
- 03
Logs, rendering and indexation
What crawlers actually fetch versus what you published. Where rendering diverges from source. Which pages are indexed, which are excluded, and whether the exclusions are deliberate or accidental.
→ Crawl-budget and rendering findings
- 04
Prioritise and hand over
Every finding sized against the pipeline it can plausibly move, ordered, and walked through live with your team. We argue the order out with you until it is one you would defend to your CFO.
→ Roadmap, notes and a recorded walkthrough
What separates a real audit from a crawler export
The difference is prioritisation and ownership. A crawler export lists every deviation from best practice with equal weight. A real audit discards what does not matter, groups symptoms into root causes, attaches each fix to a template and an owner, and states what it expects to change.
| Crawler export | This audit | |
|---|---|---|
| Findings | Every deviation flagged, thousands of rows | Root causes only, deduplicated and ordered |
| Prioritisation | Severity label from the tool's own defaults | Effort against plausible revenue, argued with your team |
| Rendering | Raw HTML only | Raw HTML, rendered DOM and headless fetch compared |
| Crawl budget | Not covered | Log-file analysis where server logs exist |
| Implementation | Generic best-practice text | Template-level notes written for your developers |
| Verification | None — you re-run the tool yourself | We re-crawl and confirm fixes landed in production |
| Ownership | You interpret and triage it | Each line has an owner and a definition of done |
Signals you need this now
You need a technical audit when rankings fall without a content change, when new pages take weeks to index, after a replatform or migration, or when Search Console reports more excluded pages than indexed ones. Any one of those is a technical problem until proven otherwise.
- Traffic dropped and nothing about your content changed
- New pages take weeks to appear in the index, or never appear
- You replatformed, redesigned or migrated in the last six months
- Search Console shows more excluded than indexed pages
- Your site is JavaScript-rendered and nobody has verified what Googlebot sees
- You are about to invest in content and want the foundation checked first
- AI assistants cite competitors for queries you should own
What clients see afterwards
Technical fixes tend to show faster than content or authority work because you are removing a blocker rather than building an asset. Indexation improves within days of deployment. Ranking recovery typically follows over four to eight weeks, depending on how much of the problem was technical.
Where this fits
Related SEO services
Common in these sectors
The adjacent disciplines
Deciding between options
Questions about technical SEO audit
Each answer is written to stand alone in 40 to 60 words — the shape an AI Overview or Perplexity citation lifts. Ships with FAQPage schema.
How long does a technical SEO audit take?
Ten working days from access to handover for a standard site. Enterprise sites with multiple subdomains, several rendering strategies or heavy internationalisation run to fifteen. We agree the timeline in writing during scoping, before any work starts.
What access do you need?
Read access to Google Search Console and your analytics, plus a way to crawl the site at production scale. Server log files are valuable but optional — where they exist we add crawl-budget analysis, and where they do not we say so rather than guessing.
Do you fix the issues or just report them?
The audit is a fixed-scope diagnostic and ends with the roadmap. Implementation is a separate engagement, and roughly half our clients action the roadmap with their own developers using our notes. We are happy either way and do not gate the notes behind an implementation contract.
Will an audit help with AI Overviews and ChatGPT citations?
Partly. Generative engines retrieve from the live web, so a page that cannot be crawled or rendered cannot be cited. Technical work removes that blocker. Being chosen once you are retrievable is a separate discipline covered by our AEO and GEO services.
How is this different from a free automated audit?
A free audit runs a crawler and formats the output. This engagement adds manual template review, rendering comparison across three engines, log-file analysis, prioritisation against your commercial reality, and a verification re-crawl after your team ships.
What if the audit finds nothing significant?
That is a valid and useful result, and it happens. You get the scored baseline, a written all-clear on the technical layer, and a straight recommendation about where your constraint actually sits — usually content depth or earned authority rather than infrastructure.
Find out whether this is your constraint.
Thirty minutes with a senior strategist. We pull your live visibility while we talk and tell you plainly whether a technical SEO audit is what you need — or whether your problem sits somewhere else.