What a Technical SEO Audit Actually Checks
How to vet a consultant before you sign Vetting is where most bad engagements could have been prevented. Before you commit budget, run the conversation like an interview and listen carefully to how the answers are framed. A trustworthy seo consultant talks in terms of probabilities and trade-offs, not guarantees.
The audit typically covers crawlability (can bots reach your pages), indexation (are the right pages actually stored by search engines), site speed and core web vitals, mobile usability, structured data, internal linking, and the presence of duplicate or thin content. None of these are exotic. They're the plumbing of your website, and when the plumbing leaks, traffic drips away silently.
Freelance vs Agency vs In-House There is no universally correct answer, only trade-offs. A skilled seo freelance practitioner gives you direct access to the person doing the thinking, usually at a lower cost and with more flexibility. The risk is capacity: one person can only diagnose and advise, not execute a large content and engineering programme alone.
Technical SEO is the foundation. It covers crawlability, site architecture, page speed, structured data, and the hundreds of small signals that determine whether a search engine can even understand your site. A seo specialist running a technical audit is looking for the friction that stops good content from being found - broken canonicals, orphaned pages, render-blocking scripts, thin internal linking.
Common models include monthly retainers, fixed project fees for audits or migrations, and advisory or hourly rates. Focus less on the model and more on whether scope and deliverables are clearly defined.
On pricing, the common models are monthly retainers, project fees for defined work like an audit, and hourly advisory.
How to vet a consultant before you sign Vetting is where most bad engagements could have been prevented. Before you commit budget, run the conversation like an interview and listen carefully to how the answers are framed. A trustworthy seo consultant talks in terms of probabilities and trade-offs, not guarantees.
The audit typically covers crawlability (can bots reach your pages), indexation (are the right pages actually stored by search engines), site speed and core web vitals, mobile usability, structured data, internal linking, and the presence of duplicate or thin content. None of these are exotic. They're the plumbing of your website, and when the plumbing leaks, traffic drips away silently.
Freelance vs Agency vs In-House There is no universally correct answer, only trade-offs. A skilled seo freelance practitioner gives you direct access to the person doing the thinking, usually at a lower cost and with more flexibility. The risk is capacity: one person can only diagnose and advise, not execute a large content and engineering programme alone.
Technical SEO is the foundation. It covers crawlability, site architecture, page speed, structured data, and the hundreds of small signals that determine whether a search engine can even understand your site. A seo specialist running a technical audit is looking for the friction that stops good content from being found - broken canonicals, orphaned pages, render-blocking scripts, thin internal linking.
Common models include monthly retainers, fixed project fees for audits or migrations, and advisory or hourly rates. Focus less on the model and more on whether scope and deliverables are clearly defined.
On pricing, the common models are monthly retainers, project fees for defined work like an audit, and hourly advisory.