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Diagnostic

Find out why your site is not ranking, before you pay anyone else to fix it

SEO takes time. It does not take forever. If you have paid for months and still cannot be found, the delay is not the explanation.

Quick answer

What is an SEO audit?

An SEO audit is a diagnostic pass over a website that identifies why it is not ranking: whether the right keywords are being targeted at all, whether technical problems are blocking indexing, and whether the content answers the queries it is built for. It produces a written findings document with a prioritised fix list, not a retainer proposal.

The problem

What this actually fixes

  • You have paid an agency for months and still cannot find yourself on Google.

  • Nobody has shown you what was actually done to the site, only what was invoiced.

  • Traffic exists but none of it converts, which usually means the wrong queries.

  • Pages were published and then never linked to from anywhere.

  • The site was rebuilt and rankings disappeared with no explanation.

  • You cannot tell whether the problem is the content, the technical setup, or the timeline.

Scope

What's included

Every engagement is scoped to what you actually need. This is the full deliverable list.

  1. Deliverable 01

    Indexation check

    Whether your pages are in the index at all, and which ones are excluded, deduplicated or blocked. A page Google cannot reach cannot rank, and this is the fastest thing to rule out.

  2. Deliverable 02

    Keyword targeting review

    What each page is actually built to rank for, against what it currently ranks for. The common failure is a site optimised for terms nobody searches, or for terms far above its current authority.

  3. Deliverable 03

    Technical findings

    Crawlability, redirects, canonicals, structured data and Core Web Vitals, reported as specific defects with the page they occur on rather than a score out of a hundred.

  4. Deliverable 04

    Content and intent gaps

    Queries your market is asking that the site does not answer, and pages that answer the same query twice and compete with each other.

  5. Deliverable 05

    What was previously done

    A read of the site's history where it is visible, covering what was changed, what was left half finished, and where prior spend went. This is the part most audits skip.

  6. Deliverable 06

    A prioritised fix list

    Ordered by effort against likely impact, so you can act on it yourself, hand it to your current provider, or ask us to do it. All three are fine.

How it works

From first call to running system

  1. Step

    Access and scope

    Day 1

    Read-only access to Search Console and analytics where they exist. If they do not exist, that is itself a finding and we start with what is publicly crawlable.

  2. Step

    Crawl and diagnose

    Days 2 to 4

    A full crawl, an index comparison and a manual read of the pages that matter commercially. Automated tools find defects; a human decides which ones are costing you money.

  3. Step

    Written findings

    Day 5

    A document naming each issue, the page it affects, the evidence, and what fixing it is likely to change. No score, no dashboard screenshot, no jargon left undefined.

  4. Step

    Walkthrough

    Day 5

    A call to go through it, in priority order, with honest answers about what is worth doing and what is not. You keep the document either way.

Use cases

Where this earns its keep

Before hiring anyone

An independent read on what the site needs, so you can judge a proposal instead of taking it on trust.

When an agency relationship has gone quiet

Months of invoices and no visible movement. The audit establishes what was actually delivered.

After a rebuild

A new site that lost rankings usually lost them to redirects, canonicals or removed pages, all of which are findable.

Most SEO conversations start with a proposal. This one starts with a diagnosis, because you cannot judge a proposal without one.

The three reasons a site does not rank

Almost everything reduces to one of these, and they need completely different responses.

It cannot be reached. Pages blocked, deindexed, canonicalised away, or orphaned with nothing linking to them. Nothing else matters until this is fixed, and it is usually the quickest to resolve. Google’s own documentation on crawling and indexing is the reference we work from.

It is aimed at the wrong thing. The pages exist and are indexed, but they target terms with no commercial intent, or terms the domain has no realistic chance at yet. This is the most common finding and the most expensive to have got wrong, because the content is already paid for.

It has not had time. Real, and the least satisfying. A new domain with no referring domains will not rank for competitive commercial terms in a quarter regardless of what is done to it. An audit tells you whether you are in this case or one of the other two, which is the difference between waiting productively and waiting pointlessly.

What you get

A written document. Each finding names the page, the evidence, and what fixing it is expected to change. It is ordered by effort against impact, so the first three items are usually worth more than the remaining thirty.

You keep it whether or not you work with us. An audit that only makes sense as a sales document is not a diagnosis.

What this page is not

It is not an ongoing SEO retainer, and there is no monthly package attached to it. If the audit concludes the site needs sustained content and link work over a year, it will say so, and that may well be someone else’s job.

Why SEO takes time

0:36

Read the transcript

Transcribed from the captions burned into the video. Square brackets mark a line a graphic covered on screen.

SEO takes time, true

but it doesn't take forever

[…] been paying an agency for a […]

and still can't find yourself on Google

time isn't the issue, the work is […]

because somewhere something in your website is missing

either keywords are not being targeted correctly

or a technical error is not resolved on time

your agency knows that, you don't

[…] gap for you

because we are providing free SEO website audits

for business owners like yourself

to show you exactly what has been done on your website

and where your money went

no commitment no contract, just a free audit

let's connect and we'll show you what's wrong in your website

Watch first

What is an SEO audit?

SEO takes time. It does not take forever. If you have paid for months and still cannot be found, the delay is not the explanation.

Get My Free SEO Audit

Free · 30 minutes · no obligation

Questions

SEO Audit: common questions

How long does SEO actually take?

Longer than most sales pages imply and less than forever. The honest answer depends on the domain's age, its existing authority and how competitive the terms are. What an audit can tell you quickly is whether time is the constraint at all, or whether something is broken that no amount of waiting will fix.

Do I have to buy an ongoing service afterwards?

No. The findings document is yours regardless. You can implement it yourself, hand it to your current provider, or ask us to do the work. It is written to be usable by someone other than us, which is the point of paying for a diagnosis.

Will you criticise my current agency?

We report what the site shows. Sometimes that reflects badly on previous work and sometimes it shows the work was sound and the timeline was simply oversold. Both are useful, and neither is worth dressing up.

How is this different from a free automated SEO report?

An automated report lists every defect it can detect and ranks none of them. Most of what it flags does not matter. The value here is judgement about which findings are actually costing you enquiries, which requires reading the site rather than scanning it.

Does this cover AI search as well as Google?

Yes, and increasingly it has to. Whether an answer engine can reach, parse and cite your pages is now a separate question from whether Google ranks them, and the fixes are not always the same. It is covered in the technical findings.

While there's no guarantee that any particular site will be added to Google's index, sites that follow the Search Essentials are more likely to show up in Google's search results.

Google Search Central ↗the search engine, official documentation, 2026

References

Primary sources

Vendor documentation, regulators and published research. We link the source rather than paraphrase it.

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