SEO AUDIT SERVICES
SEO Audit Services That Tell You What to Fix First, and Why
My SEO audit services find what is actually holding your organic growth back and put it in the order that matters for your business. I'm Ajay Padhy, a former Head of SEO with 14+ years in search. The person you speak to on the first call is the person who audits your site, and you get a prioritised plan your team can act on, not a tool export with a logo on it.
At a glance
- For: businesses whose organic traffic or leads have stalled or dropped, teams about to migrate or relaunch, and owners who want an independent view of what their SEO provider is doing.
- Four audit types: full SEO audit, traffic-drop (forensic) audit, pre- or post-migration audit, and an independent review of your current agency or freelancer, covering SEO and, where you run it, paid media.
- Covers: technical SEO, site architecture, content and keyword ownership, Core Web Vitals, structured data, backlinks, analytics and tracking, and AI search readiness.
- Depth set to your goal: a short action plan if you only want what to do next, or a detailed diagnostic down to page and data level if you need it. Scope and fee follow the depth.
- After the audit, your choice: a walkthrough for your team, developer-ready tickets with support hours, or implementation by specialists from my team. No retainer required.
OUTCOMES
What this engagement is measured on
Every client's goals are different, and most are a mix. In the first weeks we agree which of these matter to you, record a baseline, and report against it every month. Targets are set after the audit, never promised up front.
Traffic and engagement
A prioritised fix list aimed at the issues holding traffic back.
- What we measure
- Non-branded organic clicks, organic sessions and users, engaged sessions and click-through rate.
- What usually moves first
- Impressions, rankings and click-through rate on pages that are fixed or rewritten.
- What follows
- Sustained growth in organic clicks and engaged sessions.
Visibility, AI search and brand reach
Fewer indexing and crawl problems, so more of your pages can rank.
- What we measure
- Keywords in the top positions, presence in Google AI Overviews, how often AI assistants mention and cite you, and branded search demand.
- What usually moves first
- Answer-ready pages appearing in AI Overviews and AI citations; more keywords entering the top 10.
- What follows
- More branded searches and more recommendations by AI assistants.
Authority: backlinks and topic authority
A clear view of your link profile and topic gaps against competitors.
- What we measure
- Relevant referring domains, link quality, Domain Authority/Rating trend and how much of each topic your site covers and ranks for.
- What usually moves first
- New links from relevant sites and more of your topic pages indexed and ranking.
- What follows
- Rankings on the competitive head terms that need authority to move.
CLIENT RESULTS
Results from similar engagements
Anonymised client work I led, delivered with my team at the time. Client names are withheld; the numbers are real.
80%
Of monthly organic traffic retained in the first month after the domain change.
Keeping 80% of Traffic Through a Rebrand and Domain Change
93%
Of organic traffic recovered within two weeks of the migration.
Core Web Vitals score
Recovering 93% of Traffic Two Weeks After a Redesign
68 → 112K
Google clicks to job pages, quarter vs the same quarter a year earlier (~1,600X).
Job-apply events
Job-Page Clicks From 68 to 112K With Google for Jobs Schema
Penalty lifted
Reconsideration approved and the Google penalty resolved.
Lifting a Google Penalty for a Lifestyle Publisher
19 → 5
Ranking for 'glass candles'.
Ranking position for 'glass candles'
Taking Unranked Category Keywords to Page One for a D2C Brand
+43%
Click-through rate on the optimised pages (Google Search Console).
Lifting CTR 43% With Emojis in Meta Titles and Descriptions
Who this is for
Most businesses that ask for an SEO audit already have one. It's usually a long PDF from a crawler or a free tool, with hundreds of "issues" ranked by colour rather than by what they cost the business. The problem isn't finding issues. Any crawler does that in minutes. The problem is knowing which five of them are holding back traffic, leads and revenue, and which hundred can wait.
That judgement is what a technical SEO audit from a senior consultant is for, whether you call it a website SEO audit, a site audit or a health check. I start from what you need search to do (enquiries, sales, sign-ups), look at where demand and your pages meet, and work back to the technical, content and authority problems in the way. Every finding comes with the evidence, the pages affected, the likely business impact, the fix and who should own it.
If you want to see how I think about an audit before talking to me, my SEO audit checklist lays out the areas I check and the order I check them in. It's free and detailed enough to run yourself. What the paid audit adds is the judgement on your specific site and the accountability for getting the priorities right.
- Founders and marketing heads whose organic traffic or leads have flattened or fallen and who need a clear reason, not guesses
- Teams planning a redesign, replatform or domain change who want a baseline and a risk check before launch
- Businesses paying an SEO agency or freelancer who want an independent view of whether the work is the right work
- In-house teams with developers and writers who need priorities and specifications, not more reports
- Ecommerce, B2B, SaaS, BFSI and multi-market sites where a few templates or page types drive most of the revenue
DIAGNOSIS
Problems I solve
Common constraints teams face before we begin working together.
"We have a 200-row audit and still don't know what to fix"
"Traffic and leads dropped, and nobody can say why"
"We pay an agency and can't tell if it's working"
"We're about to relaunch and can't afford to lose rankings"
What my SEO audit covers
The areas are the same ones any good audit checks. The difference is how deep each goes on your site and how the findings are connected to what the business needs.
| Area | What I check | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Crawling and indexing | robots.txt, XML sitemaps, canonicals, noindex, status codes, redirect chains, crawl waste from filters and parameters | If search engines can't reach or choose the right pages, nothing else counts |
| Rendering | Whether key content, links and metadata exist in the HTML or only after JavaScript runs | Common on React, Next.js and headless builds; content that isn't rendered isn't ranked |
| Site architecture and internal links | Depth of important pages, orphan pages, how authority flows to money pages, navigation | Decides which pages search engines treat as important |
| Content and keyword ownership | Search intent match, thin or duplicate pages, pages competing for the same terms (cannibalisation), content gaps against competitors | Most ranking ceilings are content and intent problems, not technical ones |
| On-page | Titles, meta descriptions, headings, images and alt text, structured content | Affects both ranking and click-through from results |
| Core Web Vitals and mobile | LCP, INP and CLS from real-user data where available, mobile layout and usability | A ranking signal and a conversion problem when pages are slow |
| Structured data | Organisation, Service, Product, Article, FAQ and other schema, validated and matched to visible content | Eligibility for rich results and clearer signals for AI systems |
| Backlinks and authority | Referring domains, links to key pages, lost links, gap against the pages that outrank you, any manual actions in Search Console, and spam patterns that need a closer look (not a mass removal exercise) | Shows how much authority work a page needs to compete, and whether past link building is a real risk |
| Competitors in your results | The sites that actually rank for your important queries, which may not be the competitors you track, and what their pages, content and authority have that yours don't | Tells you what it takes to compete for each query, not just what is wrong on your own site |
| Local and international | Google Business Profile and location pages; hreflang, country targeting and market duplication where relevant | Wrong-country or wrong-city pages ranking is a common, fixable leak |
| Analytics and tracking | GA4 and Search Console setup, conversion events, attribution of organic leads | Without it you can't tell what SEO is worth |
| AI search readiness | AI crawler access in robots.txt and at the CDN, whether your pages are cited in AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity answers, llms.txt | AI answers now sit above many results; being cited is a new kind of visibility |
For AI visibility on its own, measured across platforms, see my AI visibility audit.
Four types of SEO audit
Start from the problem you have. Each type answers a different question, and the scope follows from it.
| Audit type | The question it answers | When to choose it |
|---|---|---|
| Full SEO audit | What is holding organic growth back across technical, content, authority and measurement, and in what order should we fix it? | No single crisis, but growth has stalled, or you're planning the next year of SEO |
| Traffic-drop (forensic) audit | What exactly caused the drop: an algorithm update, a release, a migration, AI Overviews, tracking, or competitors? | Traffic, rankings or leads fell and you need the cause before deciding the fix |
| Pre- or post-migration audit | Before launch: what must survive the move and is the new site ready? After launch: what broke? | A redesign, replatform, domain change or merger is coming, or has just gone wrong |
| Agency or vendor review | Is the current strategy and work the right work, and is it being done well? Covers SEO and, where you run them, Google Ads and Meta ad accounts | You pay an agency or freelancer for SEO or paid media and can't connect their reports to business results |
The forensic approach is explained in how to tell why website traffic dropped. For migrations, the audit is usually the first stage of my SEO migration services.
For marketing leads who inherited an agency
You've joined a business, or taken over a budget, and the SEO or ads provider came with it. You need to know whether to keep, change or reshape the arrangement, and you need evidence rather than opinion.
An agency or vendor review looks at two things: the accounts and the work.
- The accounts: Search Console, GA4 and, where you run paid media, the Google Ads and Meta ad accounts. Who owns them, who has access, how tracking is set up and whether conversions are measured in a way you can trust.
- The work: what the scope promised, what was actually delivered, whether it was the right work for your goals, and whether it's moving enquiries and sales rather than impressions and activity.
Every finding is backed by evidence from your own data, not by my opinion of how the provider should work. Where something is a genuine problem, the review says so plainly. Where it's a reasonable difference in approach, it says that too, so you're not pushed into changing something that works.
You get the detailed review for whoever manages the provider day to day. If you also need to brief leadership, a short summary for them is available on request.
How I prioritise what to fix first
A long list with no order isn't an audit; it's a crawl. Every finding I report is scored on three things:
- Impact: how much traffic, how many conversions or which revenue pages are affected, using your Search Console and analytics data rather than a tool's severity colour.
- Effort: what it takes to fix and who has to do it: a content edit, a template change, or a development sprint.
- Confidence: how sure we are that fixing it will change results, based on the evidence.
High-impact, low-effort fixes go first. High-impact, high-effort fixes get a plan and an owner. Low-impact items are listed but parked, so your team doesn't spend a sprint on warnings that don't matter.
Audit depth: action plan or full diagnostic
Not every business needs the same amount of detail. If you want to know what to do next, you get a focused action plan: the priorities, the fixes and the owners. If you need the full picture, with the analytics behind each finding and recommendations down to page and template level, you get a detailed diagnostic. We agree the depth on the intro call, and the scope and fee follow from it.
After the audit: three ways to get the fixes done
An audit only pays off when the fixes go live. You choose how that happens:
| Option | What you get | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Report and walkthrough | The audit, a live session with your team, and answers to follow-up questions | Teams with capable developers and writers who need priorities, not hands |
| Tickets and developer support | Fixes written as developer-ready tickets, plus a block of support hours to guide your developers through them | In-house or agency developers who build well but don't specialise in SEO |
| Implementation by my team | Specialists from my team carry out the fixes, with me leading priorities and sign-off | Businesses without the in-house capacity to implement |
There's no retainer attached to an audit. If you later want ongoing help, my SEO consulting service picks up from the audit rather than starting again.
Free SEO audit or a paid one?
Free audits have their place. A free tool will show broken links, missing titles and slow pages in seconds, and you should use one. What a free tool can't do is understand your business: which pages earn revenue, why a drop happened, which of 300 warnings matter, or how to sequence fixes with the developers you have.
Many "free SEO audits" from agencies are a short automated scan used to open a sales conversation. That's fine as long as you know it's a pitch, not a diagnosis.
A paid audit isn't always the right buy, either. If your site is small, if search isn't how your customers find you, or if nobody will have time to act on the findings in the next few months, start with my free SEO audit checklist instead. Pay for an audit when fixing the wrong things would cost you more than the fee.
How to judge an SEO audit provider
- Who does the audit? Ask for the name and experience of the person doing the analysis, not the person selling it.
- How do they prioritise? Ask how a finding gets ranked. If the answer is "by severity in the tool", expect a long list with no order.
- Is it about your business? A good audit refers to your pages, your conversions and your competitors, not generic best practice.
- What happens after? Check whether you'll get help implementing, or just a PDF.
- Do they promise rankings? Nobody controls Google's results. Treat guaranteed rankings as a red flag.
More questions are in what to ask an SEO consultant before hiring.
SEO audit consultant or SEO audit agency?
Both can do good work. The difference is mostly who does the thinking and what happens after the report.
| Dimension | Consultant with a team (how I work) | Typical SEO audit company or agency |
|---|---|---|
| Who analyses your site | The senior person you speak to on the first call | Often a junior analyst or a tool, reviewed by a strategist |
| What the audit is for | A diagnosis and plan you can use with any team | Often the first step towards a monthly retainer |
| How findings are ranked | By impact on your traffic, leads and revenue, using your own data | Often by the severity score of the crawler |
| After the report | Your choice: walkthrough, developer tickets with support, or implementation by my team | Usually implementation through the agency's own retainer |
| Best for | Businesses that want senior judgement and a plan they own | Businesses that want one provider to run SEO end to end |
If you're comparing providers, ask each one the questions in the section above, and judge them on how specific their answers are to your site.
Ecommerce, enterprise and local SEO audits
Ecommerce SEO audit
Online stores lose most of their search potential in templates rather than individual pages: faceted filters creating thousands of crawlable URLs, out-of-stock and discontinued products, thin category pages, duplicate product descriptions and missing Product schema. An ecommerce SEO audit works through category, product and filter templates first, then the pages that drive revenue.
Enterprise SEO audit
On large sites and multi-market setups, the audit focuses on crawl budget, rendering at scale, internal linking across sections, international targeting and hreflang, and how SEO requirements reach the teams that ship code. The output is written for several owners, not one, so each team knows its part. More on this in international and enterprise SEO.
Local SEO audit
For businesses that serve a city or region, a local SEO audit adds Google Business Profile, location pages, consistency of name, address and phone details across listings, reviews, and how you show in the local map results for the searches that bring customers.
How SEO audit pricing works
Every audit is priced as a fixed scope after the intro call, so you know the fee before work starts. What drives it:
- Audit type: a full audit, a forensic traffic-drop audit, a migration audit or an agency review.
- Depth: a focused action plan or a full diagnostic with data at page and template level.
- Site size and complexity: number of URLs and templates, JavaScript rendering, ecommerce filters, markets and languages.
- Implementation option: report only, tickets with developer support hours, or implementation by my team.
For ecommerce, enterprise and multi-market sites, the audit works through templates and page types first, then samples individual pages, so the scope stays proportionate to the size of the site. For the wider context on what SEO costs, see SEO pricing in India.
To scope yours, book an intro call and tell me what has changed recently and what you need search to do.
DELIVERABLES
What you get
Tangible assets, strategic roadmaps and documentation provided during the engagement.
Prioritised findings
Business summary
Developer-ready fix list
Keyword and page ownership map
Measurement check
Walkthrough session
WORKFLOW
How an engagement works
A clear, four-phase delivery model ensuring accountability from kickoff to ongoing impact.
- 01Phase 1
Goal and scope
An intro call to understand what search needs to do for the business, what has changed recently and how much detail you need. You get a written scope and fee before anything starts. - 02Phase 2
Access and data
Search Console, GA4, CMS or staging access, and any previous audits or reports. I crawl the site, render key templates and pull performance, backlink and competitor data. - 03Phase 3
Diagnose and prioritise
Connect what the data shows to the business goal, separate root causes from symptoms, and rank every finding by impact, effort and confidence. - 04Phase 4
Walkthrough and handover
Present the findings, agree owners, and hand over in the format your team works in. Then move to the implementation option you've chosen.
Ways to work together
Every engagement is led by me personally. For execution, I work with a small team of specialists — technical SEO, content, development and automation — so you get senior thinking without agency layers, account managers or hand-offs.
Audit & roadmap
A fixed-scope diagnosis with a prioritised roadmap your team can act on. Typically 2–4 weeks.
Advisory retainer
Ongoing senior guidance: monthly strategy, reviews of your team's work, and a direct line to me when decisions come up.
Strategy + execution
I own the strategy and stay your single point of contact; my specialist team handles implementation — technical fixes, content, builds and reporting.
Proof from past work
~70% → 98%
Quality improvement
Built quality frameworks and delivery processes that improved execution across international campaigns.
International operations
~60% → 90%
Client retention
Restructured team operations, accountability and delivery processes to significantly improve client retention.
Operations leadership role
~70% → 98%
Execution quality across international campaigns.
Scaling SEO Operations Across International Markets
~60% → 90%
Client retention after restructuring operations, accountability and delivery.
Transforming a Growing SEO Organisation
TOOLING
Tools I use
Industry-standard platforms and custom automation stacks used to audit, track, and execute.
FAQ
SEO audit services: questions clients ask
Straight answers to what people usually want to know before a first call.
SEO audit services are a structured review of a website to find what is stopping it from ranking and converting from search. A good audit covers technical SEO, site architecture, content and keyword targeting, page speed, structured data, backlinks, analytics and now AI search readiness, and ends with a prioritised plan of what to fix first.
Crawling and indexing, JavaScript rendering, site architecture and internal links, content and keyword ownership, on-page elements, Core Web Vitals, structured data, backlinks, local or international setup where relevant, analytics and conversion tracking, and AI search readiness. Every finding comes with evidence, affected pages, likely impact, the fix and an owner.
I run four: a full SEO audit, a traffic-drop (forensic) audit, a pre- or post-migration audit, and an independent review of your current agency or freelancer. Technical, content, local and AI search checks are parts of these rather than separate products, and the audit type is chosen from the problem you have.
It depends on the audit type, the depth you need, the size and complexity of the site and whether you want help implementing. I quote every audit as a fixed scope after an intro call, so you know the fee before anything starts. There's no retainer attached.
It depends on the site's size, the audit type and the depth you choose, so the timeline is agreed in the written scope. If I find something urgent while auditing, such as pages blocked from indexing or broken tracking, I flag it straight away rather than waiting for the final report.
I do the analysis and prioritisation myself and present the findings. Specialists from my team help with data collection and crawling at volume on large sites, and with implementation if you choose that option.
Both, for different jobs. Crawlers and Search Console collect the data quickly and completely. Deciding what matters, why traffic moved and what to fix first is done by hand, on your data. A report that stops at the tool output is a scan, not an audit.
Your choice. You can take the report and walkthrough to your own team, get developer-ready tickets plus a block of support hours to guide your developers, or have specialists from my team implement the fixes with me leading priorities and sign-off.
Google Search Console and GA4 at minimum, plus CMS or staging access if the audit involves templates or a migration, and any previous audits, reports or backlink data you have. For a traffic-drop audit, release notes or a list of recent site changes help a lot.
Yes. An agency or vendor review looks at the strategy, the work delivered, how it's reported and whether it's moving business results, and gives you a clear, fair view you can share with the provider. It can cover paid media as well as SEO, including Google Ads and Meta ad accounts. Often the outcome is a change of priorities rather than a change of agency.
No. The review is a paid, standalone piece of work, and the findings don't depend on whether you hire my team. I'll only discuss ongoing work if you ask, and only after the report has been delivered.
I recommend it, but it's your choice. I work with read-only access, so nothing in your accounts changes during the review. The findings are written so your provider can respond to each point, and the review separates real problems from differences in approach.
A free tool is a good first check for broken links, missing tags and slow pages. It can't tell you which issues affect revenue, why traffic dropped, or how to sequence fixes with your developers. If the problem is small and obvious, a free tool may be enough; if it isn't, you need a person to diagnose it.
Yes, at readiness level: whether AI crawlers can reach your site, whether key pages are cited in AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity answers for your important queries, and what is stopping them being cited. For a deeper, platform-by-platform measurement, there's a separate AI visibility audit.
A full audit once a year suits most sites, with lighter checks every quarter. Audit straight away before and after a migration or redesign, after a significant traffic drop, or when changing SEO provider.
Guides worth reading first
Free tools to check your site
Have a growth problem worth solving?
Tell me where you're stuck. On a 30-minute intro call I'll tell you where I think the constraint is and what I'd look at first — whether or not we end up working together.