Pre-SEO, and why an audit tool cannot find a missing page

The thing every audit tool has in common

Crawler-based audits, rank trackers, keyword tools, on-page scorers: they measure different things and they are all measuring instruments, pointed at the pages you already have. That is not a criticism. It is what they are for, and they do it well.

So a site can pass an audit comfortably and still fail to answer the three questions every buyer asks before they choose. The score is real; it is a score of the pages that happen to be there.

Where the work actually forks

Nobody sets out to buy a report about their own pages. The sequence goes like this, and the fourth step is the one that has no product attached to it.

1. 01

   You want to be found

   Somebody searches for the thing you do, and it is not your name that comes back.

2. 02

   You read that the answer is SEO

   Keywords, search volumes, rankings, backlinks. An afternoon in, and none of it has been about your business yet.

3. 03

   You are handed the tools

   Audits, scores, rank trackers, a subscription each. Every one of them is a measuring instrument, pointed at the pages you already have.

4. 04

   But the pages your buyers need are not written yet

   So there is nothing for any of it to measure. This is the step nobody sells you, and it is the one that has to come first.

5. 05

   You write the pages, or we do

   Off the briefs, in the order the report puts them in. This is the part that takes real time. Do it yourself, or have us do it for you at €50 an hour.

6. 06

   Now SEO is worth paying for

   The pages exist, so there is something to optimise, measure and rank. Every one of those tools starts earning its subscription.

What we do instead

We read the site the way a crawler does, in a real browser, hold it against what you tell us the business actually does, and produce the list of pages that should exist. All of them, not a shortlist, each with an address, the questions it has to answer, who reads it, and the order to write them in.

• What is measured is your site against itself and against your own answers, never against a scoreboard of other people
• What comes out is a list of pages to write, with a brief for each, not a list of faults to correct
• The technical checks are in there too, last, because they are the least of it

What is in the report is the section-by-section account, and the sample is a complete one about a real business.

Where an agency fits, and where a tool does

After. That is the whole answer, and it is worth being specific about why: an agency on a retainer and a subscription to a rank tracker are both bought to move pages up a list, and both do better work when the pages carrying what you sell are on the site. Handing an agency the list of pages your business needs is a better first meeting than asking them to find it.

If you are already paying for either, this is not a reason to stop. It is a reason to spend the next month writing rather than tuning.

The promise we refuse to make

Quoted from the terms, because it is the thing this product is defined against:

The report is our reasoned opinion, formed from what your site said on the day we read it. Acting on it is your decision.