What an SEO audit actually is
An SEO audit is diagnosis. It answers one question — why isn’t this site bringing in customers? — and turns the answer into a list of changes worth making, ordered by how much each one matters. It is not a redesign, a content plan, or a monthly retainer. It is the step that stops you from spending money fixing the wrong thing.
The expensive way to skip it
Most businesses skip it, which is understandable. It feels like paying for a conversation when you’d rather pay for work. But the failure mode is expensive and common: a business spends five figures rebuilding a website that was never the problem, when a single noindex tag, a canonical pointing at a competitor’s page, or a robots.txt line left in from a staging server was quietly keeping it out of Google entirely. That happens more often than anyone admits, and no amount of new design fixes it.
The other reason it matters now is that “being found” means something different than it did three years ago. A growing share of questions get answered directly inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews, without anyone clicking a blue link. A site can be perfectly healthy by 2019 standards and still be invisible in the place its customers are now asking. An audit that only checks title tags will not tell you that.
What changes once you know
The document is not really the point. The point is that a month from now your money is going into the thing that was actually holding the site back, and you can say out loud which thing that is and why it came first. That is a considerably better place to be than the one most businesses are in, which is spending confidently on a guess. It also makes every quote you receive after this readable — you will know whether the person quoting you has found the real problem or is selling you their usual package.
What’s in Meridian’s audit
Seven areas. This list is the same one written into the agreement you’d sign — not a marketing summary of it, and deliberately so.
1. Indexability — is Google even allowed to list you?
robots.txt rules, robots meta tags, the X-Robots-Tag response header, canonical tags pointing away from the page, and whether an XML sitemap exists and actually contains the page. This is first because when it’s wrong, nothing else matters.
2. On-page
Title tag presence, length and keyword use; meta description presence and length; H1 presence and uniqueness; H2 section structure; and image alternative text.
3. Technical
HTTPS, mobile viewport, declared page language, Open Graph tags, and structured data (JSON-LD).
4. Content and keyword density
Content depth, whether the primary keyword appears in the opening text, and keyword density measured against a natural range — so both thin content and keyword stuffing get identified. Stuffing is the more common own-goal.
5. Local and AI answer readiness
A visible phone number, a Google Business Profile or map link, LocalBusiness schema, and FAQPage schema — the last of which is what lets a page be quoted by AI answer engines. Where more than one page is reviewed, we also flag titles and meta descriptions duplicated across pages.
6. Citations and directories
Name, Address and Phone consistency across the major citation sources, reported character-for-character, because inconsistent NAP is among the most common causes of weak local visibility. Plus the directories that actually matter for your type of business, each reported as listed, listed inconsistently, or missing — with the submission route for the ones worth pursuing.
7. AI answer-engine visibility (AIO / GEO)
We query ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google Gemini and Google AI Overviews using search phrases relevant to your business, and report for each whether you are cited with a link, mentioned without one, or absent — and where a competitor is cited instead, which one it was.
Three competitors, benchmarked
You nominate up to three competitors. We report what they publish that you don’t: the topics their pages cover, the structured-data types they use, the FAQ content they carry, and the AI answer-engine queries where they get cited and you don’t. Findings you can act on, not a leaderboard.
The roadmap
Every finding is graded by severity and paired with a specific recommended fix. The report closes with a prioritized roadmap — the changes we’d make, in the order we’d make them, each one stating what it addresses and why it sits where it does, so you can follow it without needing us to explain it. If you never speak to us again, the document still works.
Start with the free one
Paste your web address and get an instant scorecard in about a minute. No signup, no card. It’s the honest way to see whether the paid audit is worth it to you.
Run the free audit →How much does an SEO audit cost?
Meridian’s is $2,000, one-time, and it is credited in full against the $15,000 Done-For-You build if you go on to hire us — so for anyone who proceeds, the audit doesn’t add to the total. It sequences the payment; it isn’t an extra charge.
For context, the market splits roughly into four bands. An automated tool report costs under $100 and is worth about that: it’s a crawler’s opinion with no judgement attached. A freelancer typically charges $500 to $800. An agency-delivered audit for a small site usually runs $2,000 to $3,500, with turnaround of one to three weeks. Enterprise audits run well past $10,000.
We priced at the entry of the agency band rather than below it, because the work is agency work — a person reads the site, queries five AI engines by hand, checks the citation sources, and writes the roadmap. There is no version of that which costs $99.
We do sell a $99 version, and the honest difference is not “fewer checks”. Our automated deep audit runs the same kind of checks this page describes and delivers them in minutes with a prioritised plan. What it cannot do is judge. It will not notice that two of your service pages are competing for one phrase and the fix is to merge them, or that your best-ranking competitor wins on reviews rather than on anything technical, or that a finding is true and irrelevant for your business. A person does that, and a person is what costs $2,000.
If $2,000 feels like a lot to commit to
It is a real amount of money, and nothing on this page asks you to decide today. The free scorecard is instant, takes no card, and you can leave with it. The paid audit starts with a call where we look at your site together and agree the scope before any money moves — and if that call makes it clear you don’t need the audit, that is a normal outcome and we will tell you so rather than take the fee. Nothing is charged until you have signed an agreement that states exactly what you are getting and by when. Take as long as you want in between.
How long does it take?
Within three weeks of payment. That’s a good-faith commitment written into the agreement rather than a guaranteed date, and we say so in the contract itself: if we’re late, your remedy is to cancel any undelivered portion. We’d rather write it that way than promise a date and quietly hope. You’ll hear from us during, not just at the end.
What you receive, and what you don’t
You receive a written report and a prioritized action list. That is the whole deliverable, stated plainly, because “prioritized action list” can read like a promise to action it — and it isn’t one.
Implementation is not included. You can carry the changes out yourself, hand the document to whoever maintains your site, or engage us separately under Meridian One or Done-For-You. All three are fine. The report is written so that the first option is genuinely viable, which is the test of whether it was worth $2,000.
Who this is for, and who it isn’t
It’s for a business with an existing website that isn’t producing enquiries, where nobody can say precisely why. It’s for anyone about to commission a rebuild who’d like to know what was actually wrong first. And it’s a prerequisite for our Done-For-You package when you already have a site — we don’t quote a rebuild for a site nobody has looked at.
It is not for you if you already know what’s wrong and just need it built; go straight to the build. It’s not for a brand-new business with no site to audit. And if what you want is a tool you can run yourself whenever you like, that’s a different product — our free audit runs instantly and costs nothing, and Meridian One includes the ongoing tooling. Paying $2,000 for a one-time human report when what you wanted was software would be our fault for selling it to you.
An honest word
We can’t control Google’s algorithm, your competitors’ budgets, or what an AI engine decides to cite this week. We don’t promise rankings, traffic, or revenue, and you should be wary of anyone who does. AI answer engines in particular are non-deterministic and personalize their results, so the visibility findings are a point-in-time sample rather than a fixed measurement — the agreement says so, and so do we here.
What we commit to is this: every check named on this page is a check that actually runs, the report is written for your site specifically, and the roadmap is ordered the way we would genuinely do the work. If a finding is uncertain, it will say so rather than sound confident.
Frequently asked questions
How much does an SEO audit cost?+
Meridian’s is $2,000 one-time, credited in full against the $15,000 Done-For-You build if you proceed. Market-wide: under $100 for an automated tool report, $500–$800 for a freelancer, $2,000–$3,500 for an agency-delivered audit of a small site.
What does an SEO audit include?+
Seven areas — indexability, on-page, technical, content and keyword density, local and AI answer readiness, NAP and directory citations, and AI answer-engine visibility across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and AI Overviews — plus up to three competitors benchmarked and a severity-graded roadmap.
How long does an SEO audit take?+
Within three weeks of payment. A good-faith commitment in the agreement, not a guaranteed date; if we’re late you may cancel any undelivered portion.
Do I need an SEO audit?+
If your site isn’t producing enquiries and nobody can say why, yes — it answers that before you spend on a fix. If you already know what’s wrong and just need it built, skip it. An audit is diagnosis, not treatment.
Is it worth it, or should I use a free tool?+
Run the free one first — ours is instant and costs nothing. A free tool is excellent at finding what a crawler can see: missing tags, broken structure, slow pages. It cannot tell you whether ChatGPT cites your competitor instead of you, whether your NAP is inconsistent across citation sources, or which of forty findings to fix first. That judgement is what the paid audit is.
Is the fee refundable?+
No, once the audit has started — the report is prepared specifically for your site and is delivered whether or not you hire us for anything further. It is credited in full toward a Done-For-You build if you proceed.
Do you fix what you find?+
Not under this agreement. The deliverable is the report and recommendations. Implement it yourself, hand it to your developer, or engage us separately under Meridian One or Done-For-You.
How many pages do you review?+
The audit is scoped to your site’s significant pages rather than a fixed page count — the homepage plus the pages that carry your services, products and locations. Where more than one page is reviewed we also report titles and meta descriptions duplicated across pages, which is a common and quietly damaging problem. If you have an unusually large site, tell us on the call and we’ll scope it before you pay.
See the free scorecard first
A minute, no signup. If it shows nothing you didn’t already know, don’t buy the paid one.
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