SEO Audits and Fixes

An SEO audit investigates the factors that may limit a site’s visibility: crawling and indexing, content, structure, technical health and links. It should produce a prioritised assessment with the reasoning attached, including where the evidence is uncertain.

An audit is a defined piece of analysis. Implementation and ongoing monitoring are separate decisions, based on the findings and the needs of the site.

What an audit covers

Crawling and indexing

The first question is whether search engines can reach your pages at all, and whether they have kept them. These are separate things, and people conflate them constantly.

Compare a crawl of the site with the available indexing evidence. Common findings: pages blocked in robots.txt that nobody meant to block, noindex tags left over from a staging site, canonical tags pointing at the wrong URL, parameters generating thousands of near-identical pages, a JavaScript-rendered navigation that leaves half the site unreachable, redirect chains four hops deep. Compare Search Console indexing data with the crawl, because disagreement between them can be informative.

Sometimes the answer is that Google can reach everything perfectly well and is simply not showing it. That calls for a different investigation from a technical access problem.

Site architecture

How the site is organised, how pages link to each other, and whether the structure matches what people are actually looking for. Examine click depth from the homepage, orphaned pages, internal linking patterns, whether related pages are competing with each other for the same queries, and whether your URL structure tells a coherent story.

Improving links to important pages can be a useful finding, but effort and benefit depend on the site. Explain the problem and estimate the work before assuming that a structural change is quick or will improve rankings.

What the pages say

Read the actual text, alongside any automated content reports.

Ask whether a page answers its intended audience's question and provides useful information. Review titles, descriptions, headings and overlapping pages. A short page is not automatically poor: it may answer a narrow question completely. Assess its purpose, usage and existing links before improving, combining or removing it.

Also consider whether the site is written in a way that survives being summarised. Sometimes the thing quoting your page is a language model rather than a person, which is its own discipline. The AI visibility guide covers that properly.

Technical health

Page speed and Core Web Vitals measured on real pages rather than a synthetic homepage test. Mobile rendering. HTTPS and mixed content. Structured data, where it does something. Server response codes. Server logs, where available, because the difference between what you think is being crawled and what is actually being crawled is often the answer.

A perfect score in a testing tool is not the goal by itself. A score is a proxy; investigate the underlying issue and its effect on real users.

The link profile

Who links to you, what those links say, and whether any of them are a liability. Look at the shape of the profile rather than a single number: the mix of anchor text, the range of referring domains, whether growth looks organic or looks purchased, and whether there are obvious gaps a competitor has filled.

Why link schemes carry risk

This needs saying plainly, because it is still sold.

Google's spam policies name link schemes directly: buying or selling links that pass ranking signals, excessive link exchanges, large-scale article campaigns built for anchor text, links required as part of terms of service. These are published rules, not folklore.

Link-spam policies can affect a site's search visibility; outcomes and recovery are not predictable from a backlink score. Ask a provider to explain its methods before authorising link work. We discuss the distinction in what black hat means now.

A sounder approach is to identify where a link would be useful to readers, create something worth referencing and improve the internal linking already under your control. Internal links are free, entirely within your gift, and routinely neglected.

Inherited link profiles

If you bought a domain, or revived one that had lapsed, inspect its existing link profile.

Dead and expired domains attract spam. They get scraped, they get listed in automated directories, they get used as link targets by people who did not notice the site went down. A domain that sat unregistered for a few years can accumulate a profile nobody chose. This applies to us too, which is partly why we take it seriously: this domain has its own history, set out on our about page.

Usually an inherited pile of junk links makes no practical difference. Occasionally it does, and it is worth knowing which case you are in before you spend money on anything else. It is also worth being realistic about what an old domain buys you, which is usually less than people hope. We go into that in does my domain age matter.

The fixes

A useful audit produces a prioritised list: what needs attention, what a fix would involve, its expected effect and the uncertainty around it. A technical fix does not guarantee a particular ranking.

The recommendations should be specific enough for a developer to assess and implement. Agree scope, ownership, acceptance checks and support terms with whoever carries out the work.

For implementation help or a project quotation, contact our sister agency SuffolkWeb. This page is publication guidance, not an offer of particular engagement terms.

When you do not need this

For a small local site, begin with a focused check of access, indexing, actual services, useful content and the enquiry route. If the business is eligible, review its Google Business Profile too. Low visibility alone does not establish that the content is poor or that a large audit is needed. Local SEO for Suffolk businesses explains the foundations.

A recently built site may need only a focused check rather than a large audit. Its age alone does not establish whether technical issues exist; use evidence to decide the scope.

For a project quotation, contact our sister agency SuffolkWeb. For a question or correction about this guide, contact The SEO Blog. Our editorial approach explains how the publication works.