Search Engine Optimisation
SEO Audit
A diagnosis, not a sales document. Roughly a third of the audits we run conclude that the client’s main problem is not the thing they called about.
An SEO audit from The Nexclick examines technical health, content, links and competitor position, then returns a prioritised action plan rather than a list of findings. It takes two to three weeks, is delivered as a working document you keep, and is deliberately useful whether or not you continue with us.
Is this you?
What usually prompts the call
- Traffic has fallen and nobody has given you an explanation you find convincing.
- You are paying an agency monthly and cannot tell whether the work is having any effect.
- You are about to spend on SEO and want an independent view before committing.
- You are buying a business or a domain and need to know what you are inheriting.
What we do
The actual deliverables
Things that appear on an invoice, not adjectives.
- Technical health check
- Crawl, indexation, rendering, speed field data, redirects and structured data. Findings separated into what affects rankings and what only affects a tool score.
- Content and cannibalisation analysis
- Which pages target which phrases, where two of your own pages compete, and which pages are earning nothing and should be merged or removed.
- Backlink profile review
- Where authority comes from, whether anything looks manipulative enough to be a liability, and which competitor links are realistically replicable.
- Competitor gap analysis
- The phrases three named competitors rank for and you do not, with an honest note on which are winnable at your size and which are not.
- Search Console history review
- Sixteen months of impressions and position data read against your deployment history, which is usually how a traffic drop gets explained.
- The prioritised action plan
- Every finding scored on impact against effort and ordered accordingly, with the owner named. This is the deliverable; everything above is the evidence for it.
- A walkthrough call
- Ninety minutes going through it with whoever needs to understand it, including your developer. Recorded, so people who missed it can catch up.
Checklist
Judge any SEO audit against this list
Use it on ours, or on the one you have already been sent. An audit that fails more than three of these is a lead magnet with a report template, and you should not pay for it.
- 01Does it name the three findings that matter most, or does it list everything at equal weight?
- 02Is every finding scored on impact against effort, rather than on tool severity?
- 03Does it state who should do each fix — you, your developer, or the agency?
- 04Does it reference your actual Search Console data, or only third-party estimates?
- 05Does it explain your traffic history against your deployment history?
- 06Does it name real competitors and real phrases, rather than "your competitors"?
- 07Does it say anywhere that something is fine and needs no work?
- 08Is it usable by another agency, or written so that only its author can act on it?
- 09Does it distinguish "not indexed for technical reasons" from "not indexed because it is thin"?
- 10Does it tell you what NOT to bother with?
- 11Could you hand it to a developer and have them start on Monday?
- 12Does it give an honest estimate of how long results will take?
How it works
Step by step, with timeframes
Timeframes are typical rather than guaranteed, and they assume we get account access and approvals when we ask.
- 01Day 1–2
Access and scope
Search Console, analytics and CMS access, plus a conversation about what you think the problem is. That last part matters — it is often diagnostic in itself.
- 02Week 1
Data collection
Crawl, exports, log files where available, competitor data and rank history gathered before any conclusions are drawn.
- 03Week 2
Analysis
Findings correlated against each other and against your timeline. A traffic drop that coincides with a deployment is a different problem from one that coincides with a core update.
- 04Week 3
Delivery and walkthrough
The action plan, the walkthrough call, and a fortnight of follow-up questions included at no extra cost.
What you get
Reporting and ownership
- The action plan as an editable document you own, not a locked PDF or a dashboard we can switch off.
- A developer-ready specification for every technical item.
- The raw crawl and export data, so a future agency does not have to start again.
- A recorded walkthrough call plus two weeks of follow-up questions.
- An honest verdict on whether an SEO retainer is worth it for you at all.
Tools and platforms
- Screaming Frog
- Google Search Console & Analytics
- Ahrefs
- Semrush
- PageSpeed Insights & CrUX
- Server log analysis
- Looker Studio
Timeline
How long this actually takes
Two to three weeks from receiving access, depending on site size. Larger ecommerce sites take longer because the crawl alone can run for days. The audit is not the slow part — acting on it is. Expect the fix list to represent one to three months of work, and expect ranking effects to follow the usual curve: some technical items show within weeks, content and link recommendations take three to six months.
Pricing model
Fixed-price project
Fixed price against site size, agreed before we start. If you go on to a retainer within 60 days, the audit fee is credited against the first month.
Questions
SEO Audit questions
How is this different from a free audit tool?
A tool reports what it can detect. It cannot tell you that your traffic fell because a template shipped with a noindex tag in March, or that two of your pages have been competing for the same phrase since a rebrand. Those come from reading data against your history, which is the part that takes two weeks and a person.
Do we have to work with you afterwards?
No, and the audit is deliberately written so you do not have to. You get the raw data, the specifications and the plan. Plenty of clients take it to their in-house team or an existing agency, and that is a perfectly good outcome.
Will you tell us if our current agency is doing a bad job?
We will tell you what the data shows and let you draw the conclusion. Sometimes the honest finding is that the agency is doing sensible work in an unwinnable market, or that they were given a budget too small to matter. Both are more common than incompetence.
What access do you need?
Google Search Console and analytics at minimum — without those the audit is guesswork dressed up as analysis. CMS read access and server logs make it considerably better. If Search Console has never been set up, we will set it up, but there will be no historical data to read.
Can you audit a competitor instead of us?
Partially. We can analyse anything publicly visible — content, structure, links, rankings — but not their Search Console or analytics. That produces a useful competitive analysis rather than an audit, and we will call it that rather than overstating what it can show.
How big does our site need to be?
There is no minimum, but under about twenty pages the audit finds less because there is less to go wrong. Small sites usually need content and links rather than diagnosis, and we will say so on the first call rather than selling you an audit you do not need.
Last reviewed 28 July 2026.
Tell us what you are trying to fix
A 20-minute call, no pitch deck. The Nexclick will tell you what we would do, roughly what it costs, and whether we are the right people for it.