SEO audit with clear added value.

What an SEO audit really delivers.

An SEO audit is a structured assessment of your website from a search engine optimisation perspective. Anyone wishing to familiarise themselves with the basics of search engine optimisation first will find the key terms explained there. We check how well a search engine such as Google can crawl, render and categorise your content – and identify exactly where the issues lie that are currently costing you rankings and, consequently, organic traffic. An automated quick test provides a list of red flags. Our audit also tells you, with reasons, the order in which optimisation is most worthwhile. The aim of this SEO analysis is greater visibility and better rankings in the long term – not just a one-off high tool score.

Free tools such as the Seobility SEO Check or SEOptimer give a first impression and are a good starting point if you only want a rough idea of whether your site is technically sound. We give an overview of useful tools in our comparison of the best SEO tools. However, such audits are rule-based and know nothing about your market, your competitors or your business goals. That's why we combine tool data with editorial assessment and tell you honestly which findings are relevant to your case and which you can safely ignore.

Technical issues that audits often miss

Many technical issues arise in places that remain invisible without a proper crawl. Among other things, we check the robots.txt file against the Robots Exclusion Standard, blocked resources, incorrect canonicals and indexing signals. We explore these topics in greater depth in the technical SEO section if the audit leads to a specific implementation project. A single incorrectly configured entry can remove entire sections from the index – and no amount of effort on content or backlinks can compensate for this as long as the search engine isn’t even allowed to crawl the page in the first place.

On-page, off-page and user experience: a holistic analysis

A meaningful audit clearly distinguishes between on-page SEO and off-page SEO, but assesses both in context. On-page, we check URL structure, internal linking, loading times, metadata and the keyword coverage of your most important pages, among other things - matched against keyword research and a competitor analysis of the sites currently ranking ahead of you. Off-page is about your backlink profile: which domains link to you, how natural is the anchor distribution, and where is targeted link building worthwhile? On top of that comes user experience (UX), because user signals and loading times influence how Google assesses your pages. Only when we look at all three areas together can we see which SEO measures promise the greatest impact.

Hire an SEO audit agency or do it yourself?

With enough time and tool access, an in-house SEO team can carry out many checks itself. A specialist SEO audit agency is worthwhile when the expertise to interpret the data is lacking or a neutral outside perspective is needed - we have no reason to gloss over yesterday's internal decisions. As an SEO agency based in Heidelberg, we carry out SEO audits using the same metrics and KPIs you can later measure us by: organic traffic, better rankings for relevant keywords and, ultimately, more revenue through your website. We assess every finding in terms of what it means for your target audience and your business model - whether you're a service provider or an e-commerce shop with thousands of product URLs.

Audits for classic and AI-powered search

Search has long ceased to happen only in the list of blue links. Large language models in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews cite content that is prepared in a machine-readable way. Generative Engine Optimisation, i.e. optimising for answers generated by artificial intelligence, builds on the same technical and content foundation as classic SEO. We therefore also assess whether your content is citable as a source, without trying to sell you a separate GEO suite for it.

For local businesses, we also look at local SEO visibility in the surrounding area. GeoGrid rankings show how well your listing performs depending on the searcher's location - an important addition if a large share of your customers come from the region. We show in detail how to build this regional visibility in a targeted way under local SEO. At the end, you receive prioritised feedback your team can act on straight away.

If a relaunch is planned, the SEO relaunch without loss of ranking checklist complements the audit. You can estimate for yourself in advance how much demand is achievable in your market: calculate market potential. And if you need to choose an analytics tool for the evaluation, you’ll find a comparison under Matomo or Google Analytics.