Technical SEO audit Four gates decide whether content counts.
Content and links are wasted spend if a crawler cannot reach the page, the index will not keep it, the renderer never sees the words, or it is too slow to serve. Crawl, index, render, speed — in that order.
250+ live client engagements · Melbourne-based, working across Australia, the UK, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and New Zealand · First call inside one business day
Seven ways a live
page stops counting.
None of these are exotic, and not one of them looks like a problem in a browser.
Pages nothing links to, and pages six clicks deep
No internal link points at it. Its cousin sits six clicks from the homepage — technically live, practically invisible.
A robots.txt rule nobody remembers writing
One line left over from a redesign, or a block added to stop a crawler hammering search. Everything under it stops being read.
Filters multiplying into thousands of near-identical addresses
Colour, size, sort order, page number, plus redirect chains three hops long. The crawl gets spent on machinery.
The internal links are buttons
A link built as a click handler gives a crawler nothing to follow. Only a browser will ever perform it.
A noindex tag that came across from staging
The most expensive line a deploy can carry. Alongside it, canonicals aimed at the wrong host, or at themselves.
The HTML response is almost empty
The application paints the content afterwards. Words that are not in the response are words not counted.
The slowest thing on the site is your own marketing tags
Third-party scripts outweigh everything the business wrote, and images without dimensions move the layout under a reaching thumb.
Reached, kept, read, served.
Technical work is not a health score out of a hundred. It is a short list of binary questions, and most sites fail one without ever seeing a symptom.
4
gates before content counts
Crawl, index, render, speed. Failing the first makes the other three irrelevant, so the audit runs in order.
3
Core Web Vitals metrics
Google publishes three: when the largest thing appears, how fast the first tap is answered, how far the layout moves.
200
the status code that proves nothing
A page can answer 200, look correct in your browser, and still be excluded from the index.
1
canonical per page
One signal about which address is the real one. Two of them hands the decision back to the search engine.
2
renderings of every page
The HTML response and the painted page. A crawler is given the first; your business has only seen the second.
0
broken URLs a sitemap should list
A sitemap lists addresses you want indexed. Entries that redirect, 404 or carry noindex are the ones we count.
Everything else you buy is downstream of these four.
A page a crawler cannot follow a link to, that the index has quietly dropped, or that serves an empty document is not competing badly. It is not competing.
Which is also why this work has a ceiling. Removing obstacles gets the content a fair hearing; it does not make the content more persuasive.
Australia · UK · KSA · UAE · NZ
250+
Active client engagements
Search, paid media, web and tracking under one roof
Google reviews
5.0
Rating across every review
We run our own review system on ourselves first
The SoudCoh Standard v1.0
41
Clauses published in full
The operating rules, where you can read them first
Firm-level figures from the SoudCoh record, not audit forecasts. No crawl, index or speed figure is claimed here — your own site on day one is the baseline.
Ten things happen in a technical SEO audit. Here they are, in order.
This is the part most agency pages keep vague, and the only part that decides whether the money works.
Crawl the site the way a search engine would
Every reachable URL with its response code, redirect path, canonical, depth and inbound links. Not a sample.
Compare the crawl against what is actually indexed
The pages you have and the pages a search engine kept are rarely the same set. The gap is the finding.
Read the server logs
The only record of what a crawler genuinely requested — usually parameters, old redirects and pagination.
Check what is in the response, not what is on the screen
Raw HTML against the painted page. Anything appearing only after JavaScript, a tab or a scroll is listed as at risk.
Find the duplication and the bloat
Near-identical pages competing, parameter URLs nobody meant to publish, thin pages dropped, exclusions nobody has read.
Fix the canonicals and the sitemap
One canonical per page, pointing where you intend. A sitemap of live indexable URLs, generated rather than hand-kept.
Rebuild the internal linking
Orphans given inbound links, depth pulled in, and navigation built as anchors a crawler can actually follow.
Measure speed and layout stability on a real device
Field data where it exists, plus a mid-range phone on a mobile connection. Every result gets a named cause.
Validate the structured data
Checked for validity and, more often the real problem, for whether it is in the response at all.
Hand over a prioritised fix list, and say who ships it
Ordered by what each defect costs, not by a severity colour. An audit nobody implements is worth nothing.
Crawl first. Opinions later.
- Week 0
The brief and the access
A short call on which pages actually earn, then read-only access to Search Console, analytics and the logs.
- Week 1
The crawl and the render check
The crawl runs, the index comparison is built, and every template is read raw against painted.
- Weeks 2–3
The audit lands
A prioritised fix list written for a developer: what to change, where, and what it should unblock.
- Weeks 3–6
The first wave of fixes
Blocking defects first — anything stopping a page being reached, kept or rendered. Usually small changes.
- Weeks 6–12
Re-crawl and verify
We crawl again and confirm each fix landed in production rather than in a ticket marked done.
- From there
Rhythm
A crawl on a fixed cadence, because sites regress on every deploy. Reporting names what regressed.
You keep the audit whether or not you hire us to implement it, and we ask for read-only access wherever it will do.
Technical work lives in two of the six stages.
Compound is how our team works on any account — six stages every change passes through.
Sweep
Waste is found daily, named, and priced.
Here that is the crawl and the logs: broken redirects, parameter URLs, orphan pages, stale noindex tags, regressed templates.
Statement
A fixed rhythm, good news or bad.
A before and after against your own baseline: crawlable pages, indexed pages, content in the response, speed and stability.
What we publish.
These are lead-generation accounts and every tile says so. No technical case study here is dressed up as yours — this work is reported against your own baseline, measured on day one.
- Lead generation · Roofing68quote requests in 35 daysReady before the storm · insurance-literateCornerstone Roofing
- Lead generation · Security · Sydney39qualified leads in 15 daysCommercial and residential split · same-day lead alertsNexData
- Organic + paid · Commercial cleaning · Sydney80%boost in organic traffic65% more qualified leads · twice the quote-form submissions off the same service areaOperaShine
- Site rebuild · Cleaning48%more warm, ready-to-convert enquiriesConversion rate up 60% · average site speed improved 42% after the rebuildMade2Clean
The usual questions
Twelve answers before the first call.
Technical SEO, answered.
Scope, timing, who implements the fixes, JavaScript, Core Web Vitals, access and cost.
The first call is free and there is no deck.
Book a free strategy callTechnical work sits underneath everything else.
Which is why it rarely arrives on its own. SEO services compares the options side by side.
- Replatforming or moving domainA rebuild, domain change or platform move is a different job with different risks.
- Website designSome findings cannot be patched. When the template is the defect, rebuild it.
- Counting what the fixes producedA better-indexed site is worth what it converts. Nothing here counts until enquiries do.
- E-commerce SEOFilters, variants, out-of-stock products and pagination make every problem here larger.
- Local SEOMap results run on different signals; the profile and the reviews do most of that work.
- When an assistant is doing the readingContent that is not in the response is not in the answer either.
- Custom web app developmentWhen the site is really an application, rendering and routing are architecture, not settings.
Four arguments here have a briefing of their own: how long the work takes once the obstacles are gone, whether to keep buying traffic to a site that is not ready, the tag that slows the page and corrupts the numbers, and why markup that helps a screen reader helps a crawler.
Get the audit
We crawl the site, read the response your pages actually serve, and hand you the list of what is stopping them counting. Yours to action either way.
No pitch deck. No upsell. A written list of what is broken.