The SEO audit that is just a PDF

A client forwarded me an audit he had been sold for nine hundred dollars. Two hundred and forty pages. Beautiful cover. Charts.

I read it in about twenty minutes, which was nineteen minutes longer than it took to produce.

It was a tool export. You put a domain into any of half a dozen well known platforms, hit go, and it emits this. Every issue it flagged was flagged by severity, which sounds useful until you notice the severities are the tool's defaults and have no relationship to the business.

The top critical issue was missing alt text on decorative images. Genuine accessibility work, worth doing, zero revenue impact for this business.

Page forty had, in a section titled Minor, the fact that his service pages were not linked from anywhere except the footer.

That was the whole problem. That was why he was invisible. It was on page forty, labeled minor, because a tool cannot tell that a footer link on a plumbing site is different from a footer link on a news site.

An audit is not a document. An audit is a person looking at your business, then looking at your site, and telling you which three things to fix first and what they are worth. That is a couple of hours of expensive attention and it produces maybe four pages.

If what you receive is longer than your website, you were sold a printout.

Ask before you buy: how many hours of human attention is in this, and will you tell me the three things that matter most? If the answer involves the word comprehensive, keep your money.