Our SEO audit reviews crawling, indexing, speed, content, local listings, links and AI search visibility, then ranks every issue by impact and effort. If traffic dropped, we match the timing against algorithm updates, site changes and storm-related closures to find the cause. You get a written report, a fix spreadsheet and a walkthrough call.
What a real SEO audit covers
An SEO audit should be more than an automated score. Tools are useful for finding issues, but they cannot tell you which ones matter for your business or why your leads fell in March. Ours combines tool data with a person reading your site, your listings and your Search Console history. It covers:
- Crawling and indexing: whether Google can reach and index your important pages, and whether junk pages are crowding them out.
- Technical health: speed, mobile layout, redirects, broken links, canonical tags and structured data.
- Content: thin or duplicate pages, missing services, weak titles and pages ranking just off page one.
- Local: Business Profile setup, service areas, reviews, citations and map rankings across your area.
- Authority: the links pointing to your site, including toxic patterns and lost links.
- Tracking: whether analytics, Search Console and call tracking are recording what you think they are.
- AI search: whether AI answers mention or cite your business for a set of real customer questions.
Diagnosing a traffic drop
Most audit requests start with the same sentence: our traffic fell and we do not know why. The answer is usually in the dates. We line up your traffic and lead history against three common causes.
Algorithm updates
Google describes core updates as broad changes to its search systems that happen several times a year. Its guidance is to wait at least a week after an update finishes, then compare the week after with the week before it started, and to avoid quick, superficial fixes. Google also notes recovery can take days or months, and may not show until a later update. We do that comparison properly and tell you whether a drop is update-related or something else.
Site migrations and redesigns
New websites are one of the most common causes of lost rankings. Google recommends permanent redirects from every old URL to its new match and keeping them in place for at least a year. It also notes that rankings may fluctuate for a few weeks or more during a move. When redirects are missing or point everything to the home page, the drop does not recover on its own. We compare old and new URLs to find what was lost.
Post-storm closures and changes
Southwest Florida has its own cause. After Hurricane Ian in 2022 and Helene and Milton in 2024, many businesses marked profiles temporarily closed, changed hours, moved, swapped phone numbers or rebuilt sites in a rush. Any of those, left unfinished, can quietly drag down local rankings for months. We check profile history, citations and site changes around each storm date.
Matching symptoms to likely causes
| What you notice | Where we look first |
|---|---|
| Sudden drop across the whole site on a specific date | Core update timing, site launch dates, indexing errors |
| Drop in map calls but website traffic steady | Business Profile status, hours, categories, suspensions |
| Old pages showing 404 errors in Search Console | Missing redirects after a redesign |
| Slow decline over many months | Content aging, competitors improving, lost links |
| Traffic steady but leads down | Forms, call tracking, page changes, seasonal timing |
That last row matters here. The FGCU Regional Economic Research Institute notes the region's population rises between October and April, so a summer dip can be normal. We compare year over year before calling anything a problem.
What you receive
- A written report in plain English, starting with a one-page summary of the biggest problems and what they are likely costing you.
- A fix spreadsheet listing every issue with its page, priority, estimated effort and who should handle it, whether that is you, your developer or us.
- A walkthrough call by video where we go through the findings and answer questions from you or your web team.
The fix list is written so another developer or agency can act on it. You are not locked into working with us afterward.
We keep the report focused. Instead of hundreds of minor warnings from a tool, you get the issues that are worth your time, grouped so related fixes can be done together. Low-priority items are listed at the end for whenever you have spare capacity.
When an audit makes sense
An audit is the right starting point if your traffic or leads dropped, if you are planning a redesign and want to protect existing rankings, if you are about to hire an agency and want an independent baseline, or if you have paid for SEO before and cannot tell what it did. If you are rebuilding your site, pair the audit with our web design service so redirects and content are planned before launch, not after.
It is also useful before season. If most of your revenue arrives between October and April, an audit in late spring or summer leaves time to fix problems and let Google recrawl the site before demand peaks.
How we check AI search visibility
Owners increasingly ask whether ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's AI Overviews mention their business. Google's own documentation says there are no special requirements or extra markup needed to appear in its AI features, and that traffic from them is counted in the normal Search Console performance report. So the audit treats AI visibility as an outcome of good fundamentals, not a separate trick.
We write a short list of questions your customers would realistically ask, such as who to call for a specific service in your town, and run them through the main AI tools. We record whether your business is named, whether your site is cited and which competitors appear instead. Then we connect any gaps to fixable causes in the report: missing service pages, thin location content, inconsistent listings or too few mentions on trusted regional sites.
A one-time project with a clear scope
The audit is a fixed project, not a retainer. Scope depends on the size of your site and how many locations you have, so we quote it after a quick look. Once you have the report, you can fix things in-house, hand the list to your developer, put the site on a website care plan for ongoing fixes, or move into our monthly SEO services. Send us your site for a free review and quote.