SEO Audit Services
SEO Audit Services That Tell You Exactly What To Fix
Featured in Digital Reference's Best UK Digital Marketing Agencies 2026 - a UK SEO audit agency that puts a fixed price, a deadline and a named senior specialist on every audit.
Our SEO audit services combine a full technical crawl, indexation and Core Web Vitals analysis, on-page and content review, backlink profile assessment and an AI visibility check into one prioritised fix list your developers can action. Priced £1,500 to £5,000 by site size, 30 to 80 senior hours of work, delivered in two to three weeks with a video walkthrough and a debrief call.
Companies we've worked with
durhamlane: Catching the Catastrophic SEO Issue Other Experts Missed
Before founding Visionary, Chris was the sole Digital Marketing Specialist at durhamlane - a UK B2B sales acceleration business. The headline moment: catching a pre-launch technical SEO issue that would have cost the business hundreds of thousands of pounds, after every previously-engaged consultant had signed off.
Page-view growth
Revenue, no SEO budget
Saved (catastrophic catch)
In-house tenure
Overview
What is an SEO audit service?
An SEO audit service is a paid, senior-led review of everything that affects how your website performs in organic search, delivered as a prioritised list of fixes with the evidence behind each one. It is diagnosis, not treatment: the audit tells you what is broken, what it is costing you, and in what order to repair it.
A proper audit works from data, not opinion. We crawl the site with Screaming Frog, pull twelve months of Google Search Console and GA4 data, benchmark the backlink profile in Ahrefs, and test templates against PageSpeed Insights and real Chrome user experience data. Every finding in the report links to the evidence that produced it, so nothing rests on "best practice says".
The difference between an audit service and an audit tool is judgement. Tools flag everything; a senior specialist tells you which twelve of the four hundred flagged issues actually move rankings and revenue, and which three hundred and eighty-eight you can safely ignore. That prioritisation is what you are paying for, and it is why our audits are scoped in senior hours rather than by page count alone.
What does an audit actually diagnose? In practice, the same families of problems recur across almost every site we review: pages Google cannot reach or chooses not to index, templates that load too slowly on real devices, content that competes with itself for the same query, internal linking that buries the pages that earn money, backlink profiles thinner than the competitors', and tracking that misreports all of it. None of these show up in a rankings dashboard. All of them show up in a crawl, a log of what Google indexed, and twelve months of query data read by someone who has seen the patterns hundreds of times before.
Audits are one of the two ways we start working with clients. Some commission a standalone audit and implement with their own team. Others use it as the first month of a retainer with our wider SEO agency service, where we implement the findings ourselves. Both are fine. The audit is priced and delivered the same either way, and it never locks you into anything.
An SEO audit is one of the few SEO projects with an honest, checkable market price. We publish ours: £1,500 to £5,000 depending on site size, covering 30 to 80 senior hours. If a quote you have received sits far outside that range, ask what the hours are buying.
See our full SEO pricing breakdown →Visionary Marketing delivers SEO for UK and international brands, with senior specialists on every account. We combine deep technical expertise with commercial strategy to deliver measurable organic growth.
Audit scope
What a full SEO audit covers: nine components
Every audit covers the same nine components; the depth of each flexes with your site. An ecommerce store gets more crawl and faceted navigation work, a services site gets more content and E-E-A-T work, an international site gets more hreflang and market-targeting work. Nothing on this list is optional and nothing is an upsell: if a component genuinely does not apply to your site, the hours move to the components that do. The technical half runs on the same standards as our technical SEO agency engagements, so an audit client and a retainer client get the same depth of inspection.
Technical crawl
A full Screaming Frog crawl of every URL the site exposes: status codes, redirect chains, canonical tags, robots.txt directives, hreflang, pagination and duplicate URL variants. This is where most of the silent ranking losses live, and where we find the issues no dashboard surfaces.
Indexation and crawl budget
Google Search Console coverage reports against the crawl: what Google has indexed that it should not, what it has ignored that matters, orphan pages, index bloat and XML sitemap accuracy. On large sites, wasted crawl budget is often the single biggest fix.
Core Web Vitals and speed
Template-level testing against PageSpeed Insights and Chrome user experience data: Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift, with the specific scripts, images and render-blocking resources causing each failure named.
On-page and structured data
Title tags, headings, internal linking architecture and schema markup across your key templates. We map which pages hoard internal link equity and which money pages are starved of it, then specify the redistribution.
Content quality and E-E-A-T
Thin, duplicate and cannibalising content identified page by page, with a keep, improve, merge or remove decision for each. Authorship, expertise signals and trust architecture reviewed against what actually ranks in your sector.
Keyword and intent mapping
An Ahrefs and Search Console gap analysis: the queries you rank for, the queries competitors rank for that you do not, and which existing pages should own which terms. Every content recommendation in the report traces back to this map.
Backlink profile
Referring domains, anchor text distribution, lost links worth reclaiming and genuinely harmful links worth disavowing, benchmarked against the sites that outrank you. We tell you the honest link gap, not a scare number.
Competitor benchmark
The top three sites ranking for your money terms, torn down: their content depth, technical setup, link profile and template patterns. The report shows precisely what they do that you do not, so recommendations come with a reason.
Analytics and tracking
GA4 and Search Console configuration, conversion tracking accuracy and attribution sanity checks. An audit that recommends changes without first verifying you can measure their effect is guesswork; we verify first.
Report format
Inside a real audit: a sample finding
Every finding in our reports follows the same structure: what is wrong, the evidence, the priority, the effort to fix, and the exact fix specified precisely enough for a developer to ship without translation. No screenshots of tool dashboards padded to eighty pages. If a finding does not change what you do next, it does not go in the report.
Priorities run one to three. Priority one findings suppress indexation or rankings directly and get fixed first regardless of effort. Priority two findings cost visibility at the margin and are sequenced by effort. Priority three findings are worth fixing when a developer is already in the relevant template. That sequencing is the difference between an audit that gets implemented and one that gets admired.
The excerpt opposite shows the format. It is illustrative, with client data redacted, but it is structurally identical to what you receive. Ask on the scoping call and we will walk you through a full redacted report.
Illustrative excerpt. Structure identical to a live audit; client data redacted.
Deliverables
What you receive: SEO audit deliverables
You receive five things: a written report, a prioritised fix list, a video walkthrough, a debrief call, and thirty days of follow-up support. Everything arrives within two to three weeks of kick-off, depending on site size.
The written report is authored by the senior specialist who did the work, not exported from a tool. Every finding carries its evidence, priority and specified fix. The prioritised fix list is a separate working document, sequenced by impact against effort, that your developers can pick up as a ticket queue on day one.
The video walkthrough is the specialist recording a screen-share through the report, so the reasoning survives beyond the document. The debrief call is where your team asks anything: an hour with the auditor, not an account manager. For thirty days afterwards, follow-up questions from your developers get answered as they implement.
A note on length, because audit reports are routinely judged by weight. Ours are as long as the findings justify and no longer. A ninety-page document where sixty pages are tool screenshots is not thoroughness, it is padding that hides the six findings that matter. We would rather hand you thirty pages your team actually reads and a fix list that gets shipped than a doorstop that gets skimmed once and archived.
If you would rather we implement the findings, the audit rolls into a monthly retainer and the audit fee is money well spent either way; our SEO packages page sets out what ongoing work includes. There is no obligation and we do not discount the audit to sell the retainer.
Five deliverables, every audit
- 01Written audit report, evidence-linked, authored by the auditor
- 02Prioritised fix list, sequenced by impact against effort
- 03Video walkthrough recorded by the specialist
- 04One-hour debrief call with the auditor
- 05Thirty days of implementation follow-up support
Pricing
SEO audit pricing: £1,500 to £5,000 by site size
An SEO audit costs £1,500 to £5,000 with us, priced by site size and complexity, which sets how many senior hours the work honestly takes. The full engagement runs 30 to 80 senior hours.
Small sites
£1,500 - £2,500
- Typical scale
- Up to roughly 500 indexed URLs
- Senior hours
- 30 - 45
- Turnaround
- ~2 weeks
Mid-size sites
£2,500 - £3,500
- Typical scale
- Roughly 500 to 5,000 indexed URLs
- Senior hours
- 45 - 60
- Turnaround
- 2 - 3 weeks
Large and ecommerce sites
£3,500 - £5,000
- Typical scale
- 5,000+ indexed URLs, faceted navigation, international
- Senior hours
- 60 - 80
- Turnaround
- 3 weeks
Where you sit within a band depends on complexity, not revenue. The things that genuinely add hours: international targeting and hreflang, JavaScript rendering that forces us to compare raw and rendered crawls, faceted navigation that multiplies the URL space, a history of migrations or rebrands that left redirect debt behind, and multi-domain or subdomain setups. The scoping call establishes which of these apply, and the price we quote is the price you pay. What never moves the price is how much money your company makes. You will not pay more because you can.
Why publish the range at all, when most agencies quote after a discovery call? Because the market for audits is opaque and that opacity is mostly used against buyers. The same site gets wildly different quotes: a reseller running an automated scan at one end, an agency pricing your logo rather than the work at the other. Publishing our range and our hours lets you check any quote, including ours, against what the work actually involves.
Implementation is separate and optional. Your own developers can work straight from the fix list, or we implement through a monthly retainer from £1,300 per month, capped at £2,500 per month. The cap applies to every client, including the largest sites we audit.
Scoping takes one short call. We look at the site together, confirm the band, name the specialist who will do the work and fix the delivery date before anything is signed. If the call convinces us an audit is not what you need, we say so on the call rather than three weeks and several thousand pounds later.
Triggers
When you need an SEO audit
Most audits are commissioned at one of six moments. If you recognise yours below, an audit is usually the right first step; if none apply, a retainer conversation may serve you better than a diagnostic. We will tell you which on the scoping call, including when the honest answer is that you do not need an audit yet.
Traffic drop
Organic traffic has fallen and nobody can say why. The audit separates algorithm updates, technical regressions, tracking changes and genuine competitive losses, because each demands a different response and guessing wrong wastes months. Date-matching your drop against confirmed updates and deploy history is usually the first hour of the work.
Pre-migration
You are replatforming, redesigning or changing domains. Auditing before the move establishes the baseline and catches the issues that migrations amplify. It pairs with our SEO migration services, where the pre-migration audit is the first stage of the playbook.
Second opinion
An agency has run your SEO for a year and you cannot tell what you have paid for. An independent audit gives you an evidence-based read on the work done, the work skipped, and whether the strategy holds up.
Pre-investment
You are buying, selling or raising against a business where organic traffic carries the valuation. The audit tests how durable that traffic is: what it depends on, what could break it, and what a new owner must maintain.
Penalty or update
Rankings fell around a confirmed Google update, or a manual action has landed in Search Console. The audit identifies what the update targeted on your site specifically and sequences the recovery work.
Growth plateau
Nothing is broken, but organic has flatlined for a year. The audit finds the ceiling: crawl waste, content cannibalisation, internal linking, link gap, and names the constraint actually holding growth back.
Free vs paid
Free SEO audits vs a paid audit: what the difference buys
A free SEO audit is a sales document; a paid audit is a working document. Free audits, including ours, are a tool-generated scan plus a short human read: useful for spotting headline problems, structurally incapable of telling you what to fix in what order. The distinction matters because the two get sold under the same name, and plenty of businesses have "had an audit" that never touched their Search Console data or crawled more than the homepage.
| Free audit or tool scan | Paid senior audit | |
|---|---|---|
| Produced by | Automated crawler plus a brief human review | 30 - 80 hours of senior specialist work |
| Data sources | Public crawl only | Full crawl plus your Search Console, GA4 and Ahrefs data |
| Output | Issue count and generic warnings | Evidence-linked findings with specified fixes |
| Prioritisation | None; every issue weighted equally | Sequenced by impact against effort |
| Accountability | None | Named auditor, debrief call, 30 days of follow-up |
| Cost | Free | £1,500 - £5,000 |
There is a version of the free audit trap worth naming. A scan reports four hundred issues, the business panics, and budget goes to fixing the hundred easiest ones, which are almost never the ones suppressing rankings. Meta description warnings get cleared while a canonical error keeps half the catalogue out of the index. Issue counts are not priorities, and a scan cannot tell the difference.
If budget rules out a paid audit, do it yourself properly rather than trusting a scan. Our ecommerce SEO audit template walks through the process step by step with the checks in order, and it is genuinely the same sequence we follow.
We also offer a free 30-minute audit call, and we are upfront about what it is: a senior specialist looking at your site live and telling you the two or three most obvious problems. It is a useful conversation and an honest sample of how we think. It is not the audit.
AI and audits
Can ChatGPT do an SEO audit?
An LLM cannot crawl your site, read your Search Console or measure your Core Web Vitals
No. ChatGPT can explain SEO concepts well and critique a page you paste into it, but it cannot audit a website. It cannot crawl your site at scale, it cannot see your Search Console or GA4 data, it cannot execute JavaScript to check what Google actually renders, and it cannot measure your Core Web Vitals in the field. An audit without those inputs is an essay, not a diagnosis.
There is a second problem: confidence without evidence. Language models produce plausible recommendations whether or not they apply to your site, and the failure mode is expensive. We have scoped audits for companies that spent months implementing generic advice from a chatbot while the actual constraint, a crawl trap generated by their filtering system, went unfound because no one crawled the site.
We do use AI tooling where it genuinely helps: clustering keyword data, classifying content at scale, summarising crawl exports. The judgement layer, deciding what matters on your site, stays senior and human. That split is deliberate and we are happy to explain it on the call.
The more useful question is the reverse: what do AI systems see when they look at your site? Every audit now includes an AI visibility component as standard. We check whether ChatGPT, AI Overviews and Perplexity cite you for the questions your buyers ask, whether your robots directives block or admit AI crawlers in line with your intent, and whether your key pages give direct, liftable answers that assistants can attribute to you. The findings land in the same report with the same priority and fix format as everything else: which pages need restructured answers, which entity signals are inconsistent, and which competitor is currently taking the citations you should own.
Organic search increasingly includes answer engines, and an audit that ignores them is auditing a shrinking share of your visibility. Equally, an agency that sells you a separate "AI audit" at a separate price is charging twice for one discipline. It is the same site, the same crawl and the same content quality questions, which is why it belongs inside the audit rather than beside it.
Oh My Cream: +65% Profit - While Already With a Big Agency
Premium UK beauty brand Oh My Cream (formerly Naturisimo) had hit a growth plateau their full-service agency couldn't unblock. Chris was layered in as strategy lead - not as a replacement - to find an under-exploited segmentation axis the embedded agency couldn't see from inside day-to-day delivery.
Profit lift
Unlocked
Layer
Engagement
"Chris is a real master of SEO and PPC. I'll never forget the time he discovered what could have been a catastrophic SEO issue, prior to a new big website launch that would have cost the business £100,000s (that every other so-called SEO expert we'd engaged had missed)."
What's Included
What Our Expert SEO Services Include
Technical SEO audit
Full crawl, indexation, Core Web Vitals and structured data review with developer-ready fixes.
Learn moreContent and E-E-A-T audit
Page-by-page keep, improve, merge or remove decisions backed by keyword and intent mapping.
Learn moreBacklink profile audit
Link gap, anchor distribution and disavow recommendations benchmarked against the sites outranking you.
Learn moreAI visibility audit
Citation checks across ChatGPT, AI Overviews and Perplexity, plus AI crawler access review.
Learn moreMigration and recovery audits
Pre-migration baselines, post-update diagnosis and penalty recovery sequencing.
Learn moreAnalytics and tracking review
GA4, Search Console and conversion tracking verified before any recommendation is made.
Learn moreOur Process
How our SEO audit process works
- 01
Scope and data collection
A short call fixes the price band and timeline. We then connect Search Console and GA4, run the full Screaming Frog crawl and pull backlink data, so analysis starts from complete evidence.
- 02
Analysis and prioritisation
A senior specialist works through all nine components, testing findings against your data rather than against checklists. Each confirmed issue gets a priority, an effort rating and a specified fix.
- 03
Report and fix list
You receive the written report and the sequenced fix list, built to be picked up as a developer ticket queue. Nothing padded, nothing exported from a dashboard.
- 04
Walkthrough and debrief
The auditor records a video walkthrough, then holds a debrief call with your team. Follow-up questions are covered for thirty days while implementation runs.
Why Us
Why Work With Visionary?
Senior-only delivery
The person who scopes your audit does your audit. No juniors, no offshore production line, no account-manager relay.
Priced by the work, not your revenue
£1,500 to £5,000 by site size, published on the page. The quote never changes because your company looks well funded.
Written for developers
Every fix is specified precisely enough to ship without translation, and we answer implementation questions for thirty days.
AI visibility as standard
Citation and answer-engine checks are a component of every audit, not a bolt-on with its own invoice.
Our People
Meet Our Specialists
Chris Coussons
Founder & Senior SEO Specialist
Google Ads & SEO Specialist
15+ years in SEO and paid search. Every audit is scoped, run and debriefed by Chris personally.
FAQ
SEO audit services FAQs
Start Here
Your Revenue. Our Obsession.
Tell us about your business and we'll show you exactly where the opportunities are - no obligation, no sales pitch.
■ Senior specialists only
■ No long-term contracts
■ Free audit included