A technical SEO audit:
what is actually blocking your rankings
Most SEO audits are long reports that list every theoretical issue a crawler can find, leaving a team unsure where to start. We run the audit, then sort the findings by how much organic traffic each one is actually costing. The first fix is the one that matters.
The traffic cap nobody can see on a dashboard
A site loses organic traffic in ways that rarely show up as an error message. Pages get crawled but never indexed, because of a stray noindex tag or a canonical pointing at the wrong URL. Two pages compete for the same keyword, and both rank worse than one would alone. A migration six months ago left redirect chains that waste crawl budget on pages nobody needs crawled. None of this looks urgent in a dashboard. It just sits there, quietly capping how much traffic the site can ever get, no matter how much content gets published on top of it.
A common pattern: a site redesign eighteen months ago left half the old URLs 301-redirecting to a generic category page instead of the specific equivalent. Google reads that as a soft signal that the destination is not really a match. Nobody planned this. It is what happens by default when redirects get mapped in bulk under deadline pressure, instead of page by page.
What the crawl actually checks
We crawl the site the way a search engine does, then cross-reference against Search Console and analytics. That shows the gap between what exists, what gets crawled, what gets indexed and what actually earns clicks. We check schema markup against what actually renders. We check hreflang pairs for broken reciprocal links, duplicate and thin content, redirect chains, and render-blocking resources that slow Core Web Vitals. The output is one prioritised list. Fix this first, it is costing the most traffic. Fix this, it is cheap and safe. Leave this alone, touching it costs more than it is worth.
We also check for a quieter failure mode: pages that exist, are indexed, and still underperform because internal links point to them inconsistently. Sometimes the slug has a trailing slash, sometimes not, sometimes an old URL that 301s. Cleaning this up is unglamorous, and it is routinely where a chunk of the traffic gap actually lives, more than any single dramatic error.
What we need from you
Read access to Search Console and Analytics (GA4 or equivalent), and either a sitemap or permission to crawl the live site directly. If the site went through a recent migration, replatform or redesign, tell us the date and what changed. It narrows the investigation considerably. A short call with whoever owns the CMS or codebase helps too. It tells us which fixes need a developer, and which we can hand over as a simple content edit. If you already work with an agency or developer, let them know the audit is coming, so the fix list does not read as criticism of their work. Most of what a crawl finds just accumulates naturally over years, and is nobody’s fault in particular.
How we measure
Indexed page count against total pages. Crawl stats and error rate in Search Console. Core Web Vitals pass rate. Organic sessions and rankings on the keywords tied to the pages we flagged. We report before and after on each one, not a generic health score that cannot be tied to a business outcome. We also track time-to-fix per issue once implementation starts, since a prioritised list nobody acts on for three months loses most of its value. The report carries a simple status column, so progress is visible without a separate meeting.
Price and timeline
| Option | Price | What it covers | Timeline |
|---|---|---|---|
| Launch or audit | from $600 | Full crawl, indexing and schema audit, prioritised fix list | 1 week |
| Monthly management | from $900 / month | Ongoing technical monitoring, monthly re-crawl, fixes implemented as found | monthly, no lock-in |
| Full control, handover to your team | from $1,600 | We fix everything found, document the setup and hand monitoring to your developer | 2 to 3 weeks |
Related
Pair the audit with keyword research and a content map, so the fixes and the next content sprint point at the same priorities. Add Core Web Vitals and speed when the crawl turns up a rendering problem. The full service is on the SEO and content page. For the automation that keeps a technical audit running on every deploy instead of once a year, see technical SEO checks on deploy. We ran this kind of audit as part of a 973-page SEO site build. Get in touch with your domain and we will tell you honestly what we expect to find.
FAQ
How much does a technical SEO audit cost?
From $600 for a site under roughly 5,000 indexed pages, delivered in about a week. Larger sites or multi-market setups with hreflang across many languages usually run $1,200 to $2,500.
How long until we see results from the fixes?
Indexing and crawl fixes often show movement in Search Console within 2 to 4 weeks. Ranking and traffic gains from the same fixes typically take 6 to 12 weeks to compound, since Google has to recrawl and re-evaluate the site.
What budget do we need beyond the audit?
The audit itself is fixed-price. Implementing the fixes is usually a few days of developer time if you have one, or we quote it separately once we know what the crawl found. Nothing is bundled you did not ask for.
What do you need from us to start?
Read access to Google Search Console and Analytics, and a sitemap or the site itself to crawl. Plus fifteen minutes to tell us what has changed recently, a migration, a replatform, a redesign, that might explain a drop.
How do you report progress?
A written fix list ranked by impact, plus a short call. If you keep us on for implementation or monthly management, you get a report of what moved in rankings, indexed pages and organic traffic each month.