An SEO Audit for UK Businesses That Actually Tells You What to Fix First

An SEO audit is a structured review of a website across three areas: technical health, on-page content, and backlink authority. It explains why a site is not ranking, or ranking below its potential, and lists what to fix first. In 2026 a proper audit adds AI visibility: whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews mention the business at all.

A full audit covers technical health such as crawling, indexing, speed, and Core Web Vitals, on-page and content quality, your backlink and authority profile, schema and structured data, local and map-pack presence if relevant, and now AI visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. It ends with a short list ranked by what will move the needle first.

Yes. The free audit covers technical health, on-page content, backlinks, and AI visibility, reviewed by a senior person rather than generated entirely by a tool. It is a genuine, useful look at your site, not a teaser version designed to push you into a contract. What you do with the findings afterward, including nothing, is entirely up to you.

Most audits take between one and two weeks from the call to the findings being ready, depending on the size of the site and how much history there is to review. A small brochure site moves faster than a large ecommerce store with years of content and a complicated backlink profile. We confirm the expected timeline on the first call.

Once a year is a reasonable baseline for most businesses, and sooner if something changed: a site redesign, a drop in traffic, a new agency taking over, or a shift toward AI search that nobody has checked yet. Businesses in fast-moving categories, or ones that rely heavily on organic traffic, often benefit from a lighter check every six months instead.

No, and we would rather say that plainly than promise a scary report to justify the audit. Some sites are in genuinely good shape, and we say so. Most sites we look at do have real, fixable issues though, often ones a previous automated scan flagged incorrectly or missed completely because it could not read the page the way a person can.

It is genuinely thorough. We built the free audit to be useful on its own, whether or not you ever work with us, because a rushed or padded version would not tell you anything true. The only difference between the free audit and a deeper, ongoing engagement is scope, not honesty.

Small businesses often benefit more, not less. A large site can absorb some waste and still rank on size and history alone. A small business usually cannot, so a handful of fixable issues, a missing schema tag, a slow page, a thin service page, can matter far more to a five-page site than to a five-thousand-page one.

A technical SEO audit checks whether search engines, and now AI crawlers, can actually reach, load, and understand your pages: crawlability, indexing, site speed, Core Web Vitals, broken links, and structured data. It is the plumbing behind a site. Strong content on a technically broken site rarely ranks well, because the engine never gets a clean read of it.

Technical health first: crawling, indexing, speed, and Core Web Vitals. Then on-page and content quality, your backlink and authority profile, schema and structured data, local and map-pack presence where relevant, and AI visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Everything gets written up in one prioritised list, not several separate reports to piece together yourself.

A technical audit looks at whether engines can crawl, load, and index your site properly: speed, structure, broken links, redirects. A content audit looks at what is actually on the page: whether it answers a real question, says something specific, and is organised in a way a reader or an AI engine can follow. A full audit covers both, because one without the other misses half the problem.

A backlink audit reviews the other websites linking to yours: which ones are helping your authority, which look risky or spammy, and how your overall link profile compares with competitors who currently outrank you. Search engines still treat credible links as a trust signal, so a backlink audit often explains a ranking gap that on-page fixes alone cannot close.

Yes. Ecommerce platforms have their own quirks: duplicate collection pages, thin product descriptions, app bloat slowing down load times, and templated content that reads identically across hundreds of stores. We audit Shopify and WooCommerce sites with those platform-specific issues in mind, alongside the same technical, content, and backlink checks any audit covers.

Yes, for any business with a physical location or a defined service area. That means checking your Google Business Profile, the consistency of your name, address, and phone details across the web, local reviews, and whether your site has genuine, useful pages for each area you serve rather than one generic page trying to cover them all.

Core Web Vitals measure how a page actually feels to use: how fast it loads, how quickly it becomes interactive, and whether content jumps around while loading. Google uses these as a ranking signal, and a slow or jumpy page loses visitors before they ever read your content. We check and explain each score in plain terms, not just a raw number.

Yes, briefly. We look at who is currently outranking you for the terms that matter and note what they are doing that you are not, whether that is content depth, backlink strength, technical speed, or AI visibility. It is not a full competitor teardown, but it gives useful context for why a competitor sits above you today.

Yes, that is now a core part of the audit rather than an afterthought. We run the questions your buyers would realistically ask across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, note whether you get named, a competitor gets named instead, or nobody gets named at all, and explain what is likely blocking you: missing schema, thin content, or simply no credible mentions elsewhere.

AI visibility is whether a business gets named when someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or Google for a recommendation, rather than only ranking in a list of links. Around 30 percent of UK searches already show an AI Overview instead of plain results, so an audit that only checks Google rankings is now checking less than it used to.

We check ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, because those four currently cover the large majority of AI-driven search and research behaviour among UK buyers. If your customers lean heavily on a different tool, we adjust the check accordingly, but these four are the standard baseline for every audit we run.

Not automatically, though it helps. AI engines draw on the same open web that ranks in Google, so strong rankings are useful raw material. But being named in an answer also depends on schema, how clearly your content states the answer, and whether other credible sites mention you. A site can rank well and still be invisible inside an AI summary.

The audit itself only reports what we find, so you know exactly where you stand before spending anything further. If you want us to fix what the audit uncovers, that becomes a separate, scoped piece of work: entity and schema fixes, content restructuring, and building the credible mentions that get a business named in an AI answer.

Both. You get a written, prioritised list of findings you can keep, forward to a colleague, or hand to another agency, plus a call where we walk through it in plain English and answer questions live. Some people want to read first and talk second, others want the opposite. We support either order.

No. The audit stands on its own. Some businesses take the list and fix things internally, some bring it to a different agency, and some ask us to help with the work. All three are common outcomes, and we would rather you make that call once you have seen exactly what needs doing than agree to anything before that.

Yes, plainly, and just as plainly if they did good work. We have seen audits used as a scare tactic against a perfectly competent previous agency, and that is not honest. If something was missed, mishandled, or left half-finished, we say so and explain why. If the foundations are solid, we tell you that too and build from there.

Yes. We work with businesses across London, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, and the rest of the UK, with audits and calls run remotely so a company anywhere in the country gets the same senior person and the same standard of review, not a junior team handling the work while someone more experienced signs it off.

A person, every time. Automated tools do the initial scanning because they are fast at surfacing raw data, but a senior member of the team reads the output, checks it against the actual site, removes false alarms, and ranks what is left by real impact before anything reaches you. The founder reviews the findings before they go out.

We can, if it makes sense for what the audit found. Some businesses only need the fixes done once and are set for a year. Others have gaps that take sustained content and authority work to close properly. We scope that separately and only after you have seen the findings, never as a condition of getting the audit itself.

Send your name and work email through the form on this page. The founder replies within 24 hours to book the audit call, where we agree what to look at and, for most sites, run the technical, content, backlink, and AI-visibility checks straight away. You get the findings and a plain walkthrough call after that, with no obligation attached.