Roch Sweets · E-commerce
A pick-and-mix builder for a sweet shop with 1,000 lines
0.86s
First contentful paint
Growth · Audits
SEO audits
By SimonMeasured 4 September 2026
A list of what is wrong, in the order it is worth fixing, with the reason each one matters. Not a 90-page PDF from a tool with the logo changed.
The short answer
An SEO audit is a structured review of why a website is not earning the search traffic it should — covering technical crawlability and speed, the content and how it is targeted, and the site’s authority and links. A useful one ends in a ranked list of fixes with a reason attached to each; a poor one is a tool export with a logo on it. Audits here are done inside a growth block from £250 a month rather than sold as a separate product, so the fixing starts in the same month as the finding.
Inside a growth block
from £250 /month
A block of hours spent on whatever moves the business — this, and everything else on the growth list. No percentage of your ad spend.
No minimum term. Move up, move down or stop whenever you see fit.
How the growth blocks workWhat you get
What the hours go on.
A full crawl: what Google can reach, what it cannot, and what it is wasting time on
Index coverage read from Search Console, which is the only source that knows what Google actually did
Core Web Vitals on real pages, not a lab score for the homepage
What each page is targeting versus what it actually ranks for — usually the biggest gap
Internal linking: which important pages are three clicks deep and why
A ranked list of fixes with effort against likely impact, so it can be worked through
Measured, not claimed
What it did for Roch Sweets.
A family sweet shop in Rochdale, trading since 2014, selling over a thousand lines by the kilo. We built the store around the way people actually buy sweets — build your own mix, filled to the gram, dispatched the same day.
0.86s
First contentful paint
live homepage, photography-led
Source: Browser Navigation Timing, 4 Sep 2026
What an SEO audit should actually contain
Three layers, and most audits are strong on one of them and thin on the other two.
- Technical — can Google crawl, render and index the pages, and how fast are they on a phone
- Content — what each page is targeting, whether that matches what it ranks for, and where two pages are competing with each other
- Authority — what links the site has, what its competitors have, and whether that gap is bridgeable in any reasonable timeframe
The technical layer is the one tools do well, which is why it dominates most audits: it is easy to generate 300 findings about missing alt text. The content layer needs somebody to read the pages and compare them with the live results, and the authority layer needs an honest judgement about whether you can realistically compete — which is the part nobody selling ongoing work wants to write down.
The output that matters is the ranking. Two hundred findings in a document is not an audit, it is a haystack. Ten findings ordered by impact against effort, each with a sentence explaining why it matters to this business, is something a person can act on.
What an SEO audit costs — and why ours is not sold separately
Standalone audits are a well-established product and there is nothing wrong with buying one. The structural problem is that an audit is the deliverable, so the incentive is to make the document impressive rather than to make the fixes happen — and the fixes are the only part that changes anything.
Here the audit is the first month of a growth block from £250 a month. Same work, ranked the same way, except the second half of the month is spent fixing the top of the list instead of waiting for you to forward the PDF to somebody who might.
On free SEO audits
A free audit is a sales document, and that is fine as long as everybody knows it. It is generated by a crawler, it will find between 40 and 400 issues on any site including good ones, and it is designed to produce a phone call.
The tell is whether the findings are ranked and whether anybody has looked at the site. If the top finding is “missing meta descriptions” on a site whose real problem is that four pages are competing for the same term, nobody read it. Worth knowing before you act on one.
What an audit cannot tell you
It cannot tell you how long the fixes take to show up. Technical fixes can move within weeks; content and authority work is measured in months, and anybody offering a date is guessing.
It cannot tell you the size of the prize with any precision either. Search volume estimates are estimates, and click-through rate by position varies enormously by query type — a result under an AI Overview does not behave like one at the top of a plain list.
And it cannot tell you whether the traffic will convert. That is the conversion side of the job, and an audit that promises revenue from a crawl is selling something it cannot deliver.
Locally
Working in Greater Manchester.
Most audits requested across Greater Manchester start from the same trigger: rankings that were fine eighteen months ago have drifted, and nobody can say what changed. About half the time the answer is in a redesign that happened in between, and the redirects that came with it.
The other common local finding is a Google Business Profile that is doing more work than the website — right category, wrong hours, no photographs, and reviews nobody has replied to. For a service business here that profile is often the actual front door, and it is the cheapest thing on any audit list to fix.
Neither of those needs a 90-page document to discover. They need somebody to look.
Written by Simon, who does the work.
Also inside the growth block
The rest of the growth list.
All of these sit under the growth block, where the pricing and the process are the same whichever you pick.
Technical, local and content SEO with the results measured in Search Console rather than a slide deck. Beds.ie went from 672 to 7,781 organic clicks a month in five months.
Catalogue structure, product data and shopping feeds — the three things that decide whether a large store is visible. Beds.ie went from 672 to 7,781 organic clicks a month in five months, with 94.5% of a 17,233-item feed approved.
The map pack sits above every other result on a local search, and getting into it is mostly not a website job. This is the work that decides it.
Crawlability, structure, index coverage, speed and structured data — the half of SEO that is engineering, and the half where the largest untouched gains usually are.
People increasingly ask ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity instead of scrolling results. AI optimisation is the work of making your business the answer those systems give — and of being honest about which parts of it can be measured.
Search and Shopping campaigns managed inside your growth block — not for a percentage of your spend. Agencies commonly take 10–20% of what you spend to manage it, and up to 40% on small accounts; the hours cost the same whatever your budget.
Facebook and Instagram campaigns — creative, audiences, tracking and reporting — managed inside your growth block, with artwork done in-house rather than billed separately.
Watching what people actually do on your site and removing whatever stops them getting in touch. Vehicles 2 Lease report form conversion moving from roughly 1% to roughly 4%.
Planned, designed and posted for you — as part of the growth block, so it serves the same goals as the website and the ads instead of running as a separate hobby.
GA4, Search Console, Google Ads and Meta conversions set up properly and reconciled, so every other decision is made on real numbers.
Paid search, Shopping and paid social managed inside a growth block. The fee does not move when your budget does, which is the whole point.
The only audience you actually own. Everything else is rented from a platform that can change the rules on a Tuesday.
Pages written to answer a question somebody is actually asking, in a volume the business can sustain. Not a blog nobody reads, published fortnightly forever.
A genuine performance channel for some products and an expensive way to make content for most. Which one you are depends on the product, not the budget.
The most precise B2B targeting available anywhere, at the highest cost per click of any mainstream platform. Both halves of that sentence matter.
Sources
Everything this page relies on.
Cybrial DataForSEO research, United Kingdom (location code 2826), 4 September 2026: “seo audit services” 880 searches a month at keyword difficulty 6 and £35.31 cost per click; “seo audit”, “website audit” and “technical seo audit” captured in the same pull.
Cybrial live SERP reading, 4 September 2026: an AI Overview is present on the “seo audit services” result.
Roch Sweets Google Search Console, client’s own property: impressions more than doubled within the first week of work. Read 4 September 2026.
Cybrial published pricing: growth blocks from £250 a month, no minimum term.
Straight answers
Questions people actually ask.
How much does an SEO audit cost?
Here it is the first month of a growth block, from £250, and the second half of that month is spent fixing rather than writing. Standalone audits are a normal product elsewhere; the risk with them is that the document is the deliverable and the fixes never happen.
How long does an audit take?
A few days of work for most business sites, longer for a large catalogue. The crawl is fast; reading the pages against what they actually rank for is the part that takes time, and it is the part worth paying for.
Are free SEO audits worth anything?
As a starting point, sometimes. They are sales documents generated by a crawler and will find issues on any site including good ones. Check whether the findings are ranked and whether anybody actually looked at the site.
What will an audit find on my site?
Most often: pages competing with each other for the same term, important pages buried three clicks deep, slow pages on mobile, and a mismatch between what pages are written to target and what they actually rank for.
How quickly do fixes show up in rankings?
Technical fixes can move within weeks. Content and authority work is months. Anyone giving you a date is guessing, and that is worth knowing before you buy an audit that implies one.
Tell me what growth would look like.
Send me the site and what you are trying to achieve this year. I will tell you honestly which block makes sense and what the first month would go on.