A free audit tool tells you what is broken. It cannot tell you what matters.
Run any site through a free tool and you get a score and two hundred errors. All true, and almost none of it is why the site does not rank. The real reasons are structural, and no crawler flags them. A person who reads the site and knows what a page at your authority can win does.
- 217 errors, 64 warnings
- 41 images missing alt text
- 12 titles over 60 characters
- 1 page slower than 2.5 seconds
- Score: 68 / 100
None of these is why the site does not rank.
- 01Lead every title with what you sell, not your name
- 02One page per service, each built around one term
- 03Chase the five terms you can win, not the one you cannot
- 04Add the schema that gets you cited in AI answers
Ranked by impact. Written for your developer.
What the SEO audit includes
Six passes over the site, in this order. Each one feeds the next.
- 01
Technical SEO audit
Crawl, indexing, speed, schema. What Google reads before it reads a word of copy.
- 02
On-page & content
Titles, headings, internal links, thin pages. One job and one search term per page.
- 03
Keyword landscape
What you rank for, what competitors own, what you can win at your authority. With volume and difficulty.
- 04
AI search visibility
Whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews cite you, and what in the structure keeps you out.
- 05
Content gaps
The questions buyers search before they buy that nobody on the site answers yet.
- 06
Action plan
Ranked by impact and effort. The first two weeks, the first three months, and what to leave alone.
Six findings that come up in almost every audit
Therapy practices, Shopify stores, B2B sites, local businesses: the same six problems keep appearing. If two of these sound like your site, the audit pays for itself on the first fix.
- 01Titles
The site ranks for its own name, and nothing else.
The homepage title is the brand and a tagline. Nobody searching for what you sell knows your name yet.
The fixLead every title with what you offer and where. The name goes last. - 02Structure
Every service lives on one page.
Four services share a single URL, so none of them can rank. Google matches a search to a page, not a bullet point.
The fixOne page per service or product line, each built around a single term. - 03Keywords
The effort goes into the hardest terms.
The head term belongs to directories with ten times your authority. The terms you could own sit open at difficulty 0 to 5.
The fixThree to five winnable terms first. The head term when authority catches up. - 04Schema
No structured data, so AI answers skip you.
Not a line of JSON-LD on any page. Google and the answer engines have to guess what the business is and what it sells.
The fixOrganization, service and FAQ schema on the pages that matter. - 05Trust
The expertise is there. The signals are not.
Founders, credentials and authors live on the about page only. On topics Google holds to a higher standard, that costs rankings.
The fixAn author on every article, credentials on every service page. - 06Blog
The blog is an island.
Thoughtful posts that answer no question people search and link to no page that sells.
The fixAnchor each post to a real question and link it to the page it supports.
