Audits that produce specs, not problems.
Most SEO audits hand you a 60-page PDF and a problem to solve. Ours hand you a 60-page PDF and a developer-ready specification. Same diagnosis, dramatically different next-Monday.
What we deliver
An SEO audit is only useful if it ends with someone executing the work. Most audits don't end that way — they end with a list of issues, vague priority labels, and a hope that an in-house team will figure out the rest.
Our audits are built for execution. Every issue we surface comes with a fix specification: what to change, how to change it, what success looks like, and what risks to watch for. Your developers can pick up an item from our audit and ship it without asking us follow-up questions.
The deliverables, specifically
What you get when an audit completes:
- Audit report (PDF or interactive HTML). 40+ checks across technical SEO, on-page, content quality, mobile UX, and Core Web Vitals indicators. Severity-ranked: Critical, High, Medium, Low.
- Implementation spec for every recommendation. Code snippets where applicable. Platform-specific instructions for WordPress, Shopify, headless CMS, or custom stacks. Acceptance criteria so your QA team can verify the fix shipped correctly.
- Prioritization matrix. Effort vs. impact, with quick-wins separated from project-level work so your team can sequence the fixes correctly.
- Optional competitive overlay. Top 3 competitors analyzed with positioning gaps and content opportunities surfaced.
- One-hour walkthrough call. We present findings to your team, answer questions, and align on what gets shipped first.
Who this is for
This service fits if:
- You have an internal development team or freelance developers who can implement fixes
- You suspect technical SEO debt is suppressing organic performance
- You're considering a site migration or replatform and want a clean baseline first
- You inherited a site from a previous team and need an honest assessment
- You've been told "your SEO is fine" but your traffic suggests otherwise
This service does not fit if:
- You don't have anyone to implement the fixes (we don't push code to your site)
- You're looking for someone to manage SEO end-to-end (that's fractional advisory)
- You want a 5-page report from an automated scan tool — that's a different price point at a different vendor
The process.
We learn the system.
Kickoff call. Access to GA4, Search Console, server logs, CMS. We crawl the site, pull rankings data, identify the highest-traffic and highest-revenue URLs.
We run the checks.
40+ technical, on-page, and content checks. Schema validation. Core Web Vitals analysis. Internal link analysis. Competitor analysis if scoped. Findings drafted with severity rankings.
We write the fixes.
Each finding gets a developer-ready specification. Report compiled, prioritization matrix built, walkthrough call scheduled. Your team leaves the call knowing exactly what ships first.
"An audit that doesn't end with shipped fixes is just expensive feedback. Ours end with an executable plan your team can start on within 48 hours."
What it costs.
Audit engagements start at $8,500 and scale based on site size, complexity, and whether competitive analysis is included.
- $8,500 — Standard audit. Up to 500 indexed URLs. Technical, on-page, content quality, mobile UX. Severity-ranked findings + implementation specs. 3-4 weeks.
- $12,500 — Audit + competitive analysis. Everything above, plus top 3 competitor analysis with positioning matrix and content gap report. 4-5 weeks.
- $18,500+ — Enterprise audit. 500-5,000+ URLs. Includes log file analysis, hreflang/i18n review, and migration risk assessment. 6-8 weeks.
Custom quotes for sites over 5,000 URLs, multi-region setups, or audits tied to a planned migration. Get in touch for a scoping call.
Common questions.
How long does an audit take?
Standard audits run 3-4 weeks from kickoff. Enterprise audits and audits with competitive analysis run 5-8 weeks. We've done expedited audits in 10 business days when timing demanded it, but the quality is meaningfully better with a full 3-4 weeks.
Do we need to give you access to anything?
Yes. We need read-only access to Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console at minimum. For technical audits we also need read access to your CMS or staging environment, and ideally server logs for the past 30 days. We never need write access or production deploy permissions.
Will you implement the fixes for us?
No. Palmetto is a strategy and advisory consultancy — not a development shop. Every recommendation we make includes a developer-ready spec, but your team or your dev partner ships the actual changes. This is by design: keeping implementation with your team is what makes the work sustainable after we leave.
Do you guarantee ranking improvements?
No, and we'd be skeptical of anyone who does. We guarantee the work — that the audit is comprehensive, that every recommendation has a clear spec, and that we'll re-test after fixes ship. Rankings depend on factors outside any consultant's control. What we promise is that you'll know whether your team executed the recommendations correctly.
What if we want competitive analysis but already know our competitors?
Tell us who they are during scoping and we'll analyze those specifically. If you're not sure, we'll identify the top 3 ranking competitors for your money keywords and analyze them. Either approach costs the same.
Can you audit a site before it launches?
Yes — pre-launch audits are some of our favorite work. Catching issues before launch costs a fraction of fixing them after. We work from staging environments and design files to flag issues during build rather than after release.
Ready to talk?
30-minute calls. No pitch deck. We'll either be useful or we won't, and you'll know within the first 10 minutes.
Start a conversation