I check indexation, structure, redirects, speed and rendering by hand and with tools, rank every issue by its effect on traffic, and hand over tasks with acceptance criteria instead of a list of three hundred “errors”.
Paying for SEO and not sure it is working? I give an independent second opinion on your agency's work.
Technical problems rarely show up in the CMS. They show up in Search Console and in your traffic graph.
The most expensive mistake I keep seeing: a redesign without a redirect map. Traffic drops in a week and takes months to come back.
You pay for SEO every month and cannot tell what has actually been done. I look at the site and at the agency's reports and tell you plainly what you are paying for.
I do not sell monthly SEO retainers. So I gain nothing from telling you your agency is bad, and nothing from telling you it is good.
If you recognise at least two of these, the check pays for itself
The report answers three questions
Your agency will not know about the check. I contact nobody and ask no third party for access. Only you receive the report.
Request a second opinionA one-page checklist: what to ask at your next meeting, what a good answer looks like, and what counts as a red flag. A two-page PDF.
The email is used to send you the updated version when there is one. Nothing else.Twelve areas. In each one I check not just whether an error exists, but whether it affects traffic on your site.
A “87 out of 100” score in a tool says nothing about traffic. I have yet to see a business that made money by raising that number.
robots.txt, meta robots and X-Robots-Tag directives, sitemap.xml, the Search Console coverage report, orphan pages, crawl budget.
important pages out of the index, junk URLs in it, sitemaps with errors or 404s.
3xx chains and loops, broken internal links, soft 404s, 5xx errors, correctness of 301s after migrations, redirects for old URLs that still have backlinks.
redirects longer than one hop, internal links to 3xx/4xx, lost equity from old URLs.
Parameters, pagination, http/https, www, trailing slash, letter case, rel=canonical, hreflang between language versions.
the same content on several URLs, canonicals pointing to a 404 or another language, canonical and hreflang conflicts.
Click depth, link equity distribution, navigation, breadcrumbs, anchors, linking between categories, products and articles.
money pages sitting 4–5 clicks deep, key pages getting fewer links than utility pages.
LCP, INP and CLS from CrUX field data and lab measurements; image weight, scripts, fonts, caching, server TTFB.
page templates that fail the “good” threshold for real users, with the specific cause of each.
What Googlebot sees without executing scripts, content and links that only appear after JS, lazy loading, SSR/SPA, render caching.
text, links or metadata missing from the rendered HTML, and pages that depend on clicks.
Mobile-first indexing, content and link differences between desktop and mobile, viewport, tap targets, hidden blocks.
content available only on desktop and elements that break the mobile page.
Title, description, H1–H3 per page template; duplicate, empty and truncated values; auto-generation logic for large catalogs.
templates that give hundreds of pages the same title, pages without an H1 or with several.
Schema.org types for each page type, validity, whether the markup matches visible content, rich result eligibility.
validation errors, markup with data that is not on the page, missed rich result opportunities.
HTTPS and mixed content, HSTS, response headers, staging environments visible to search, response stability under load.
an exposed staging subdomain, a site copy on the IP or http, periodic 5xx in Googlebot logs.
Search Console, GA4, GTM: whether data is collected correctly, whether tags fire twice, whether you can measure the effect after implementation.
events that do not fire and filters that distort traffic in reports.
For large sites: how Googlebot really moves through the site, which sections it crawls most, where it spends budget, what it ignores for months.
sections the bot never visits, and thousands of requests to pages that should not be in the index.
Tools: Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, Semrush, Google Search Console, GA4, Google Tag Manager, PageSpeed Insights and CrUX, Rich Results Test, manual checks in the browser and log analysis.
Not a PDF with charts, but working documents your developer and marketer can use the next day.
A report that never turned into tickets does not exist. That is why I write the tasks, not your developer after 60 pages of reading.
I use the tools too. The difference is what happens after they return a list.
| Automated report | This audit | |
|---|---|---|
| What it checks | Everything that can be measured by template | What affects traffic in your niche |
| Priorities | Hundreds of issues of roughly equal weight | The 3–7 things that change the outcome, on page one |
| Context | Knows nothing about your migration, seasonality or competitors | Accounts for competitors, site history and your team's capacity |
| Output | A PDF with charts and a score out of 100 | Tasks with acceptance criteria and a re-check |
| Who reads it | Usually nobody | Your developer picks up the tasks |
From the first email to the re-check. It takes about two hours of your time in total.
I do not ask for CMS admin access. Everything I need is visible from outside and in Search Console.
Fixed price after a short brief. No hourly billing and no extra charges along the way.
Why not hourly: you pay for the answer, not for the hours. How long it takes me to find the problem is my concern, not yours.
$250
Sites up to 300 URLs, or one specific problem: not indexing, traffic dropped after a release, slow pages.
Most requested
$750
Sites up to 10,000 URLs: company sites, service businesses, content projects, smaller stores.
from $1,500
Over 10,000 URLs, several language versions, a move to a new domain or CMS, marketplaces.
Prices in US dollars. Payment by bank transfer or card, invoice provided.
Oleh Semeniuk. I do the audit myself from start to finish, nothing is handed to juniors.
“A good audit does not end with ‘there are problems’. It ends with a task list after which nobody asks where to start.”
Eleven years in SEO. I started with my own and client sites, then ran international projects at an agency: local services, hospitality, healthcare, e-commerce, construction. In recent years I have worked in the highly competitive iGaming and affiliate niches, where a technical mistake on a site costs real money every day and therefore gets noticed and fixed fast.
I have built and launched more than a hundred sites, mostly on WordPress and static HTML, so in an audit I write tasks the way I would want to receive them as a developer: with example URLs, the expected result and a criterion for closing the task.
An express diagnostic is $250, a full technical audit of a site up to 10,000 URLs is $750, and an audit of a large site, e-commerce store or migration starts at $1,500. The price is fixed after a short brief and does not change during the work.
Crawling and indexation, status codes and redirects, duplicates and canonicalization, site structure and internal linking, speed and Core Web Vitals, JavaScript rendering, mobile version, metadata, structured data, server and security, analytics setup, and server log analysis for large sites. The full list is in the section “What exactly I check” above.
An express diagnostic takes 2–3 business days, a full audit 5–8 business days, large sites and migrations 10–15 business days. Timing depends on site size and how quickly access is granted.
A tool checks everything by template and returns hundreds of issues of roughly equal weight. I select what affects traffic in your niche, account for competitors, site history and your team's capacity, and deliver tasks with acceptance criteria that a developer can pick up.
Your developer, using my tasks, or I can do it for WordPress and static HTML sites. Implementation is quoted separately based on the audit tasks. A re-check after implementation is included.
No. I do not contact the agency or ask them for access. Everything comes from the site, Search Console and the reports you share with me. What you show the agency afterwards is your decision.
Then I say so, with evidence. You get confirmation that the money is working and a list of what to ask the agency for next. That is a result too.
Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4 with view access. For large sites, 2–4 weeks of server logs. CMS admin access is not required.
Send your site address and what worries you. I reply with clarifying questions and an exact quote, usually within one business day.
SF IT