An outside read of your search presence
A Full, Independent SEO Audit
Maybe the rankings have been sliding for a year and nobody can tell you why. Maybe the bill goes out every month and the report that comes back doesn't tell you whether that money earned its keep. This is a fixed-scope look at what's actually happening in your search presence, done by someone with nothing riding on the answer.
The situation
SEO is the hardest thing you buy to check on
You can look at a new website. You can read an ad. With search, the work happens somewhere you can't see, in a system you don't control, and the only proof you're offered is a monthly report. Those reports tend to come in two flavors. One is a wall of charts and acronyms that technically answers everything and tells you nothing. The other is a cheerful paragraph about how things are trending.
And search doesn't fall off a cliff. It drifts. A page slips from third to seventh, a competitor publishes something better, a plugin update quietly tells Google to skip half the site, and none of it shows up on a day you'd notice. By the time the phone rings less, the cause is a year back and nobody in the building owns it.
The audit
What the audit covers
Six things, in the order they usually matter.
- Whether Google can actually find, read, and index your site. This is the layer nobody sees, because a site can look perfect in your browser and still be shut out of half the search results. Broken indexing is more common than most owners would believe.
- What the search data says about where you really stand. Which terms you rank for, which pages earn the clicks, and which rankings are sitting just off the bottom of page one, where a small amount of work moves them onto it.
- Which of your content is working and which is decaying. This is also where we find your own pages competing against each other for the same search, splitting the traffic you already earned.
- Whether AI systems like ChatGPT and Perplexity cite you when someone asks them a question in your category. Some sites are quoted regularly. Some can't be read by those systems at all, and don't know it.
- Who's beating you on the searches that matter, and what they have that you don't. Not "they're bigger." The specific pages, the specific coverage, the specific reasons Google prefers them right now.
- A roadmap of what to fix first, ordered by what each fix is likely to return against what it costs to do. It's written so any competent web person can pick it up and execute it without calling us to explain it.
How we keep it honest
Every finding has to survive being questioned
Nothing in the report is asserted. Each finding arrives with the evidence that produced it, so you can see the data and disagree if you want to. Before anything reaches you, it gets argued with by someone whose job is to break it, and the findings that don't hold up don't make the report.
You'll get fewer conclusions that way. You'll also get conclusions you can act on without checking them first.
After the report
It doesn't matter who does the fixing
If you already have an agency, this is an outside check on work you're paying for, and sometimes the honest verdict is that they're doing well. If SEO lives with someone in-house, it's a prioritized to-do list they didn't have to build themselves. And if you've never done any of this deliberately, it's a starting line with the first few moves already chosen. The roadmap is yours. Hand it to your team, hand it to another agency, or bring it back to us.
Questions we get
What do you need from us?
Read access to your Google Search Console account, which takes a few minutes to grant and doesn't let us change anything. Everything else we need is out in the open where we can observe it ourselves. There's no project to staff on your end.
Will our SEO agency be offended?
Good work survives an outside look, and the agencies doing good work usually want it seen. We're not in the business of manufacturing problems to win an account, and more than once the finding has been that the current team is on the right track and should keep going.
Is this the same as the free automated audits online?
No. Those are a tool printing a list of everything it noticed, with no sense of which items matter to your business. This is a person reading your actual search data, deciding what's worth your attention, and defending every conclusion before it reaches you.
Do we have to hire you for the fixes?
No, and plenty of firms don't. You're buying the read, not a relationship. If you want us to do the work afterward, that's a separate conversation you're free to skip.
Find out where you actually stand
You'll end up with a plain account of what's working, what's broken, and what to do about it in what order. Whether that turns into work we do together is a question for later. We reply within one business day.
Part of Cascade's Website Design & SEO practice.