The 10-page SEO audit we actually run on day one.

Every client engagement starts the same way: we spend two weeks reading your site, your accounts and your competitors before we touch anything. This is the structure of that audit — the ten parts, in the order we work through them, and what we're looking for in each.

Free to steal. Run it on your own site, run it on a competitor, use it as a hiring question. The order matters more than the tools.

01 · Crawl & index state

The first thing we check is what's actually indexed and what isn't. Nothing else matters if Google can't find or render your pages.

We pull a full site crawl and compare against Search Console's Indexing report. Pages that are crawled-not-indexed are where the money is hiding — usually thin content, duplication, or bad canonicals. Pages that are indexed-not-canonical are usually the opposite problem: too many slight variations of the same thing.

Rule of thumb: if your site: count is more than 2× your sitemap count, you have an indexing problem before you have a ranking problem.

02 · Core Web Vitals & rendering

Next, we look at field CWV (real-user data) — not the lab report. Lab numbers are where optimism lives; field numbers are where reality is. If LCP is over 2.5s for mobile users on low-end Android, we know priority one is weight, not keywords.

Alongside CWV, we run a render comparison — what does the page look like to Googlebot vs. what does it look like to a user? Sites that lean heavily on client-side JavaScript (old React stacks, broken hydration) often ship empty shells to crawlers. That's invisible to Analytics and fatal to SEO.

03 · Information architecture

Only now do we look at the sitemap structurally. A good IA maps to how buyers actually search — not how the business is organised internally. If your nav has "Platform / Solutions / Resources" but your customers search for specific use cases, your IA is doing you a favour no one asked for.

We draw a "user intent tree" — the top 50 queries with real buyer intent, and where each lands. Queries that have no landing page are gaps. Queries that all land on the homepage are consolidation problems.

04 · On-page intent match

For the top 50 ranking pages, we check whether the content on each page actually matches the intent of the queries it ranks for. Google is brutally good at intent matching now; a page that ranks on page two is usually there because it almost-answers but not-quite.

We look at H1 vs. ranking query, the first 200 words vs. the query, the presence of the entities Google expects, and the user-journey exit (do they bounce back to SERP after 8 seconds? that's a signal). Fix intent mismatches before you write new content.

05 · Internal linking

The single most under-used lever in SEO. We pull every internal link on the site, score every page by inbound internal links, and compare that to the commercial value of the page.

Three times out of ten, the page getting the most internal links is something like /about — and the high-value comparison pages are getting three links each. Rebalancing that is often the fastest-moving fix on the list.

06 · Content quality & depth

We grade the site's content on a four-point scale: does it have a unique point of view, is it complete, is it actually written by someone with the experience it claims, and does it have any original data or perspective. Most pages fail at least one.

AI-generated generic content now fails all four for Google's helpful-content systems. The era of "just publish something" is over; the opportunity for brands willing to publish with a voice is enormous.

07 · Off-page & authority

We pull the backlink profile, focus only on referring domains (not total links), and mark which ones are editorial vs. directory vs. scheme. Then we compare that to top competitors.

If you're five referring domains behind the competitor at #1 for your top query, you're not getting there with content alone — we need a digital PR plan. If you're 200 ahead and still losing, the problem is on-page.

08 · Local / brand / E-E-A-T signals

For most B2B and all local businesses, brand and author signals matter as much as technical SEO now. We check:

• Organisation and Person schema presence.
• Named-author bylines on content (vs. "Admin" or no byline).
• Knowledge Panel presence and accuracy.
• Brand search volume trend (proxy for brand strength).
• G2, Clutch, Trustpilot, or category-specific review presence.

09 · Competitive gap

We line up the top three competitors for your most valuable queries and map the deltas: what do they rank for that you don't, what formats do they use (videos, comparison tables, calculators), what do their site structures do that yours doesn't.

The output is a shortlist of 15–25 queries where the gap is narrowest — where winning in 90 days is realistic. Not the hardest queries. The closest ones.

10 · Measurement & reporting

Last, we audit how SEO is measured. Is Search Console properly connected? Is ranking tracked alongside commercial metrics, or in a vacuum? Is there a single dashboard the exec team can look at, or is it scattered across five tools?

Unmeasured SEO is untended SEO. The last page of the audit is always a measurement plan — so that by the end of week four, we're watching the same numbers the CFO is watching.

What this looks like when you ship it

A complete audit is usually 40–80 pages. We summarise the top findings and actions into a two-page exec brief at the front. The 80 pages are the detail — the two are what gets read in the Monday morning meeting.

Then the roadmap is a single sheet: 10 actions, ranked by impact-vs-effort, with the first three already started. Week one of the engagement, in other words, is doing not talking.

Want the exact audit template? Request a free audit and we'll send you a redacted version of our working doc.