Find out what is actually holding your organic growth back.
Technical SEO, content, internal linking and AI search visibility — pulled into one prioritised list, ranked by impact on traffic.
What the audit covers
How the areas are weighted comes out of the first crawl — these are the ones I go through every time.
What you actually get
Not an eighty-page PDF nobody opens — material your team can start on Monday morning.
A report that argues its case
Every recommendation says where it came from and what happens if you skip it. Without that, a list of changes is impossible to defend to the board or to engineering.
A P0–P2 backlog
Tickets in the shape you paste into Jira or Asana: description, acceptance criteria, estimated impact, priority. This is the real product of the audit — the report exists to justify it.
Quick wins to start with
A short, separate list of changes that ship in a week, with no sprint and no rebuild. These are usually what buys the time and the trust for the rest of the work.
AI search visibility
Which queries get you cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, who is being cited instead of you, and what has to change to flip that.
Structured data and CWV
Schema validation and the actual causes behind weak Core Web Vitals — separating what will move the number from what merely lights up red in Lighthouse.
A walkthrough and a re-check
A session with your team once the report lands, and one verification pass after the fixes ship. Both included. I check that the changes went in the way they were meant to.
Put your site up for audit
Twenty minutes is enough for me to tell you whether an audit is what you need and what it would cost in your case. If consulting or a handful of quick fixes would serve you better, I will say so on the call.
When an audit pays off, and when it does not
An audit only pays for itself if someone implements what comes out of it. If that is not your situation, here is what would work better.
An audit is for you if
- Organic traffic dropped and you do not know why
- Google indexes less than you publish, or indexes the wrong things
- You are planning a migration, a redesign or a change of stack
- Your store is coming apart on parameters, facets and pagination
- You have an SEO budget and need a ranked list of where to spend it
Look elsewhere if
- You have one specific question — that is SEO consulting, faster and cheaper
- The site is still in design and there is nothing to crawl
- You want someone to implement the changes — that is ongoing work
- You expect guaranteed rankings — nobody honest will give you those
The audit, step by step
Five stages, from access to verifying the fixes. All of it done by hand — you can generate the automated tool report yourself in fifteen minutes.
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01
Access and goals
A short call: what matters commercially, which pages earn, what you have already tried and how it went. I collect access to Search Console, Analytics and the CMS. Without those an audit is guesswork.
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02
Crawl and measurement
A full crawl, Search Console data, server logs where they exist, Core Web Vitals from field and lab, and a pass on AI search citations. This stage collects facts, not opinions.
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03
Analysis and priorities
Findings get ranked by impact on traffic, not by how easy they are to write up. On sites with millions of URLs nearly everything can be improved — the whole job is knowing what comes first.
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04
Report and backlog
You get the report with the reasoning, and a separate P0–P2 backlog ready to drop into your tracker. Plus a short list of quick wins for the first week.
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05
Walkthrough and re-check
A session with your team — we go through the priorities and I take engineering's questions. Once the fixes ship I come back once to verify they landed correctly.
How long an audit takes
The clock starts when I have access. The ranges are honest — on a site carrying technical debt it tends to be the upper bound rather than the lower one.
| Size of site | What it covers | Turnaround |
|---|---|---|
| Company site or SaaS, up to ~1,000 URLs | Technical, content, keywords, structured data and AI search visibility | 5–7 working days |
| Store or content site, up to ~50,000 URLs | The above plus parameters, facets, pagination, cannibalisation and competitors | 7–14 working days |
| Large site or marketplace, multilingual | The above plus crawl budget from logs, hreflang and template architecture at scale | 14–21 working days |
What I need from you
The first two are required; the rest decide how deep it is possible to go. I collect them on the intro call — nothing to prepare in advance.
- Access to Google Search Console
- Access to Google Analytics 4
- A CMS account, read-only is fine
- Server logs from the last 30 days, if you have them
- Your commercial priorities and which pages earn
- Who on your side implements the changes
What an SEO audit costs
Priced per project, after a short call and a look at the site. No package pricing — two stores of the same size can need entirely different work.
- Size of the site and how many templates there are to analyse
- Technical condition and the size of the technical debt
- Access to server logs and the history of previous SEO work
- How far the competitor and link-profile analysis goes
- Number of languages and markets
You get the quote in writing before we start and it is final — nothing gets added along the way. The walkthrough with your team and one post-implementation re-check are included.
Audit, consulting or ongoing work
Three different things, and the three most often confused with each other. Here is what actually separates them.
| Criterion | SEO audit | SEO consulting | Ongoing SEO |
|---|---|---|---|
| When to pick it | You do not know what is blocking growth and want a full read | You have a specific question or a decision to make | You want someone to run organic growth for you |
| Turnaround | 5–21 working days from getting access | A slot within 2 weeks, the session itself is an hour | Continuous, first results in 2–3 months |
| What you get | A report with the reasoning and a P0–P2 backlog | Direction and priorities, settled live | Strategy, implementation, testing and monthly reporting |
| Who implements | Your team, after the walkthrough and with a re-check | Your team (or me — implementation priced per project) | Me, alongside your team |
| Billing | Quoted per project | Hourly rate | A fixed monthly retainer |
Who runs your audit
Over 10 years in organic growth, mostly at scale: Allani, Domodi and Homebook, then Brainly — dozens of markets from the US to India — and Ceneo, the largest price comparison site in Poland. Sites with millions of URLs teach you one thing: almost everything can be improved, so the entire job is knowing what to improve first.
That is where StatTower came from, my framework for testing SEO changes at a 95% significance threshold. The same criteria rank the recommendations in an audit — priority goes to what has a measurable effect on traffic, not to whatever a tool flagged red.
Common questions about SEO audits
What exactly does the audit cover?
Indexing, rendering and crawl budget, information architecture, internal linking, content and cannibalisation, keywords and intent, structured data, Core Web Vitals, the link profile and AI search visibility. Plus competitors and gaps in topic coverage. How those areas are weighted comes out of the first crawl — if the site cannot get indexed, there is no sense in me spending half the time on meta descriptions.
How long does an audit take?
Between 5 and 21 working days, counting from the moment I have access. A company site or SaaS under a thousand URLs is usually a week, a store two to three weeks, a large multilingual site up to a month. I confirm the date in writing before we start.
What form do the findings come in?
A report with the reasoning behind every recommendation, plus a separate P0–P2 backlog: tickets with descriptions, acceptance criteria and estimated impact, ready to paste into Jira or Asana. The backlog is the real product; the report exists so you can defend it to the board. Plus a short list of quick wins for the first week.
How is an audit different from SEO consulting?
An audit answers the question you have not asked yet — what specifically is blocking growth — and ends in a ranked list of work. Consulting answers the question you already have, and ends in a direction settled live, within the hour. If you know what to ask, start with consulting. If you do not know where to start, start with the audit.
What access do I need to give you?
Google Search Console and Analytics 4 are required — without them an audit is guesswork. A CMS account helps a great deal, read-only is fine, as do server logs from the last 30 days: they are the only source of truth on how Googlebot actually moves through the site. Logs are optional, but on large sites they change the quality of the crawl budget analysis.
Do you implement the fixes?
No — the audit ends at recommendations and the backlog, and your team or your agency implements. The walkthrough with your team and one post-implementation re-check are included, so I verify the changes landed the way they were meant to. If you want someone running this for you permanently, that is ongoing work.
Do you check visibility in ChatGPT and AI Overviews?
Yes, and it is a standard part of the audit rather than an add-on. I check which queries get you cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, who is being cited instead of you, and what is missing from your content to change that. Same craft as classic SEO, different criteria.
What does an audit cost and what drives the price?
Priced per project, after a short call and a look at the site — no package pricing, because two stores of the same size can need entirely different work. Price follows the size of the site, the number of templates, technical condition, access to logs, how far the competitor analysis goes and how many markets are involved. The quote is in writing before we start, and it is final.
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