Scientific SEO audits for San Diego businesses.

A Scientific SEO Audit is a measurement of where your business stands in search today (rankings, website, content and competitors), delivered with a short, ordered list of changes to test. It’s a service in its own right, and the findings are yours to use with or without me.

What makes an audit scientific

Telling you that your title tags could be improved is an opinion. Telling you that a page sits in position eight for furnace repair in Poway, that the pages above it name the service and the city in the title, and that yours doesn’t, is a finding. It comes with an obvious test: change the title and measure again in about two weeks.

Every finding in the audit is a measurement of that kind, and every recommendation is a test you can check. The method behind the audit applies the same reasoning to each problem, one step at a time.

The four parts of an audit

Which parts you need depends on where the calls are being lost.

Some companies need only one. A business that has just rebuilt its site and watched its traffic fall needs the technical part now and the others later. A business with a sound site that can’t get past fourth on the map needs the local part and the competitor part. I ask about your situation first so you aren’t paying for sections that would tell you nothing new.

How this differs from an automated report

Run any site through audit software and you get a long list of warnings: missing image descriptions, long titles, pages with low word counts. The software lists everything a crawler can detect and sorts none of it by what it costs you, and many of the warnings have little to do with whether the phone rings. The work in an audit is deciding which few findings matter for this business, against the competitors it faces in this market, and saying so plainly.

I use software to gather data. The judgment is mine, and I put my reasons in writing so you or anyone else can check them.

What you get at the end

The report is written in plain English, and I go through it with you in conversation. It opens with the baseline, meaning where you rank for each search in each part of the county. Then come the findings and the changes I’d test, in order, with the reason for each. It also says what I’d leave alone, and where a finding rests on something I couldn’t measure from outside, such as call data you haven’t shared.

An audit that recommends fixing everything hasn’t done its job. Nobody has the budget or the time for that, and changing everything at once makes it impossible to tell what worked.

What an audit can’t tell you

An audit gives a ranked set of hypotheses based on evidence. It can’t promise ranking gains, because nobody can say for certain what will happen when a change is made: Google doesn’t publish its weightings and competitors keep moving. A fix that helps a roofer in Vista may do nothing for an electrician in La Mesa, which is why I write each recommendation as a test with a measurement attached.

An audit also goes out of date. Rankings and competitors change, so the baseline is a snapshot with a date on it.

How to start

Use the SEO audit request form to tell me what you sell and where you work, and add what has been tried before. If you’d like to see what the measurement step looks like first, rank grids are the clearest example. If your question is about what AI assistants say about your company, and less about Google’s listings, the AI visibility audit is the separate check for that.