Know what’s broken before you fix it.
An SEO audit is the diagnostic that should precede every optimisation decision. We map the technical foundation, the content estate, the link profile, and the competitive landscape — and hand back a written report that tells you what to fix first and why it matters.
Eight passes.
One written verdict.
An audit is not a tool export with a logo on the cover. We run our diagnostic across eight distinct surfaces, then sit with the data long enough to interpret it — what is symptom, what is cause, what would actually move the needle if it were fixed.
The deliverable is a written report with a prioritised recommendations list. Quick wins are flagged separately from long-horizon work, so you can act on the first within a fortnight without waiting for the rest to be planned.
Crawl audit
FoundationalA full Screaming Frog crawl of the site, configured to mirror how Googlebot would actually move through your pages. We surface broken links, redirect chains, orphaned URLs, response-code anomalies, robots and meta-robots conflicts, and any structural issue that prevents search engines from reaching the content you want indexed. Where JavaScript-rendering matters — single-page apps, headless front-ends, lazy-loaded content — we run a second rendered crawl and compare it against the static one to catch the gaps.
Indexation analysis
CoverageA reconciliation between what is in your sitemap, what Google has actually indexed, and what is in the wild on the open web. We use Search Console’s coverage report, site: queries, and log-file evidence where available to identify pages that should be indexed and are not, pages that are indexed and should not be, and the reasons behind each gap. Common findings include duplicate-content drift across canonical variants, accidentally noindexed templates, faceted-navigation crawl bloat, and stale staging URLs that have leaked into the index.
Site architecture review
StructuralAn assessment of how your site is organised — URL hierarchy, internal linking, depth from the homepage, hub-and-spoke topical clustering, and the way authority flows from the strongest pages into the weakest. We map the existing structure, identify the orphans and the dead-ends, and recommend an internal-link plan that strengthens the pages most likely to drive qualified traffic. Architecture is the unglamorous lever most teams ignore — and the one that quietly compounds over time.
Performance & Core Web Vitals
ExperienceA page-speed assessment across the templates that matter — homepage, primary service or category pages, blog posts, product or practice-area pages — using PageSpeed Insights field data, Lighthouse lab data, and Chrome User Experience Report metrics where available. We diagnose Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift on real devices, identify the heaviest assets and render-blocking resources, and translate the findings into a fix list ordered by impact rather than by tooling convenience.
Content audit
EditorialA page-by-page evaluation of the existing content estate. We score each indexable URL on intent fit, depth, freshness, internal-link support, and the position it currently holds in search results. The output is a content-decisions table — keep, improve, consolidate, or retire — that becomes the spine of any subsequent content strategy. Most sites carry years of accumulated content debt; a content audit is how you separate the pages earning their keep from the ones quietly diluting topical authority.
Backlink profile audit
AuthorityA full inventory of the inbound links pointing at your domain — quantity, quality, anchor distribution, referring-domain diversity, and any toxic patterns that warrant disavow consideration. We benchmark your profile against direct competitors using Ahrefs, identify the links you have lost over the last twelve months, and surface the broken backlinks that could be reclaimed with a few targeted reach-outs. The deliverable includes a clear read on whether your authority deficit is a real ranking ceiling — and what it would take to lift it.
Schema & structured data
Machine-readableA validation of the structured data already on your pages — Organization, LocalBusiness, Service, Product, Article, FAQ, Breadcrumb, Person — and an inventory of the schema you should be emitting and are not. We test every implementation through Google’s Rich Results tool and the Schema validator, document errors and warnings, and recommend the markup most likely to earn rich snippets, knowledge-panel signals, and AI-citation eligibility for your specific content types.
Competitor gap analysis
StrategicA comparison between your domain and three to five direct competitors across keyword overlap, content depth, link velocity, and topical coverage. The gap analysis answers a simple question: which keywords are two of your competitors ranking for, that you are not? Those are the queries with proven commercial intent, proven feasibility, and a clear authority ceiling — and they almost always represent the highest-confidence opportunities surfaced by an audit. The findings flow directly into the prioritised recommendations.
Written report with prioritised recommendations
DeliverableAll eight diagnostic passes consolidated into a single written report. Executive summary on the front page, methodology and findings in the body, a prioritised recommendations list at the back — each item scored by expected impact, implementation effort, and confidence. Quick wins are tagged for the first 30 days, structural work for the first quarter, longer-horizon investments for the year. The report is designed to be read by a non-technical stakeholder in twenty minutes, and to function as a roadmap that an in-house team or any agency could execute against.
Diagnose first.
Then prescribe.
The discipline of auditing well sits in the gap between running a tool and writing a recommendation. Anyone can export a Lighthouse score; very few will sit with that score long enough to tell you which line of it actually matters for your business.
Tools serve interpretation
We use the same industry-standard toolset every credible auditor uses — Ahrefs, Search Console, Screaming Frog, Lighthouse, GA4, Schema validators. The tools are means, not ends. The value of an audit lives in the pattern recognition that comes after the data is collected — what the numbers mean for your business, which findings are noise, which are symptoms of a deeper cause, and which deserve to land on page one of the report.
Baseline before optimisation
An audit’s most useful product is not the recommendations list — it is the baseline. We capture the state of the site at a fixed moment in time so that every subsequent change has a measurable before-and-after. Without a baseline, optimisation work is guesswork. With one, every quarterly review becomes a comparison against documented evidence rather than a hopeful narrative.
Quick wins identified separately
The recommendations list is split into two streams — quick wins and structural work. Quick wins are findings where impact is high, effort is low, and confidence is near-certain: a missing canonical, a redirect chain on a money page, a misconfigured robots directive. Tagging them separately means an in-house team can act inside the first fortnight without having to read the full report end-to-end first.
Written report, not a tool dump
The deliverable is a written document. Charts and tables where they earn their place; sentences and paragraphs everywhere else. We do not hand over a raw Screaming Frog export with a cover slide and call it an audit. Every finding is contextualised, every recommendation is justified, and the report can be read and acted on by a stakeholder who has never opened an SEO tool.
When an audit is worth
more than the work.
An audit is the right first move when you do not yet know what to fix, when something has changed and you cannot diagnose why, or when you need an independent read on work someone else has done. It is rarely the right first move when you already have a clear plan and a credible team to execute it.
Most of our audit clients fall into one of five situations — the work is the same, the framing differs.
- i Businesses considering SEO investmentOwners who suspect organic search could be a meaningful channel but want a clear-eyed read on the opportunity before signing a retainer. The audit answers two questions: is the gap closeable, and is it worth closing?
- ii Sites with declining trafficOrganic visibility has been trending down for months, and no-one inside the business can pinpoint the cause. An audit isolates the variables — algorithm shift, technical drift, content rot, link decay — and assigns each its share of the blame.
- iii Post-migration sitesYou have just moved platforms, changed domains, or restructured the architecture, and rankings are not where they should be. A migration audit identifies the redirect gaps, content losses, and indexation breaks that almost always follow a transition — and the recovery path back to baseline.
- iv Businesses inheriting a websiteNew ownership, new marketing leadership, an acquired brand. The site exists, it earns some traffic, and you need a documented read on what you have actually inherited before you commit to a roadmap.
- v Agencies seeking a second opinionAn in-house team or another agency has been doing the work, and the results have plateaued. An independent audit tells you whether the strategy is sound and the execution patient — or whether the plateau is symptomatic of something more fundamental.
Audits also work as a standalone engagement. You do not have to commit to anything beyond the report — and many of our retainer relationships started with a one-off audit that surfaced enough opportunity to justify the longer engagement.
Curious how Google sees your site?
Send us your URL. We’ll send back a Premium SEO Report, prepared by hand, within 48 hours — domain authority, keyword rankings, backlinks, competitor gap, and the quick wins worth chasing first.
No sales call required.
The discipline of fixing something well begins with the discipline of seeing it clearly. Every page we have ever helped rank started with an honest accounting of where it stood.— The Aureole Practice —
What clients ask
about audits.
If a question is missing here, the contact link at the foot of the page goes straight to the person who would answer it. No ticket queues, no funnels.
i How long does an audit take?
ii What tools do you use for the audit?
iii How is the audit different from running a free tool ourselves?
iv What does the report look like?
v Do you offer audits as a one-off, or only with ongoing engagements?
Auditing sits inside
a wider practice.
An audit is the entry point to the broader SEO practice. The recommendations almost always cascade into one or more of the sister disciplines below — strategy, technical work, on-page optimisation, content, links, migration, or local visibility.
Sister sub-disciplines
Ready for an honest
read on your site?
Start with the free SEO report, or commission a full audit. Either way, the report comes from the team that would do the optimisation work afterwards — not a sales department.