SEO Review

Understanding where you stand before anything else

Good SEO starts with an honest picture of where your website is right now. Not where you’d like it to be, and not a best guess based on how it looks, but a clear, evidence-based view of how search engines are seeing it, how it’s performing, and what’s really driving — or limiting — its visibility.

The SEO Review is the starting point for most client engagements. It can sometimes work as a standalone audit for clients who just want to know where they stand. But usually this is the first step in the ongoing work we do together.

What the review looks at

The aim isn’t to generate a long list of things that are wrong. It’s to identify the factors that are most likely to be shaping your current visibility, either positively or negatively, and to give you a clear sense of where to focus.

The review covers:

• Technical foundations — checking that Google can find, read, and index your website correctly. Issues here are often invisible to the naked eye, but they can have a significant impact on how well your site performs in search.
• Search visibility — looking at which pages are appearing in search results, which aren’t, and what those patterns suggest about how your website is being understood by search engines.
• Content performance — reviewing how your existing content is performing in terms of search visibility, engagement, and alignment with what your audience is actually searching for.
• Competitive context — getting an early sense of the landscape you’re operating in, and what it would realistically take to compete for the searches that matter to your business.
• Authority signals — a high-level look at the external signals pointing to your website, which play an important role in how search engines assess your credibility.

What you get at the end

The review concludes with a written situation report and a dedicated call to walk through the findings together.

The report sets out clearly:

• how your website is currently being seen and indexed by Google
• a summary of your site’s technical health from an SEO perspective
• how your pages are appearing and performing in search results
• an assessment of content performance and engagement
• an overview of your site’s current authority
• a set of clear, prioritised recommendations for what to focus on next

The emphasis is on clarity and practical direction, not an overwhelming list of data points.

Why start here?

Without this foundation, any SEO work is essentially guesswork. You might invest in content that targets the wrong searches, optimise pages that aren’t the real bottleneck, or build a strategy based on assumptions that the data would quickly contradict.

The SEO Review removes that uncertainty. It ensures that whatever we work on together is grounded in what’s actually happening and focused on what’s most likely to make a difference.

For most clients, the review also marks the beginning of an ongoing engagement. The findings typically inform the direction of the first few months of retainer activity, from content priorities to technical fixes to authority building.

Frequently asked questions

How much data do you need?

Ideally around 6–12 months of Google Analytics and Google Search Console data. If your site is newer than that, the review can still be carried out, we just factor in the limitations and, where relevant, build in a checkpoint a few months later to sense-check the initial recommendations.

Do I need to give you access to my accounts?

Read-only access to Google Analytics and Google Search Console makes the analysis significantly more accurate. No changes are ever made to your setup. If you’d prefer not to grant direct access, we can work from data exports instead. We’ll discuss the practicalities before we start.

Will you identify technical issues?

Yes, where they appear to be affecting performance. This isn’t a line-by-line technical audit, but if something significant is holding your site back, it will be flagged clearly along with a recommendation on how to address it.

What happens after the review?

After the review call, you decide what happens next. Some clients take the findings and act on them internally. Most choose to continue into an ongoing retainer engagement, using the review as the roadmap for the first phase of work — whether that’s keyword research, content strategy, authority building, or SEO reporting. Either way, nothing is assumed and there’s no obligation to commit to anything further.