SEO
Auditing
Understanding your business, industry, and customers to deliver maximum ROI.
Content & website audit
Research targeted keywords & phrases
Benchmark metrics for keywords
Optimise content for target keywords
Continuously test, track, & update
A comprehensive SEO audit is where every good digital strategy starts. At Digital Hothouse, we’ve been auditing websites for over 15 years. But just like search itself, the way we audit your site is evolving. Today, it’s not just about identifying broken links or improving page speed (although we still do that). It’s also about making sure your website is visible, accessible, and understandable by AI-powered search engines and tools.
We audit your site through the lens of SEO + AI, giving you the best foundation for traditional search and emerging platforms like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and more.
What’s Included in a Modern SEO Audit?
Historically, our SEO audits have focused on three key areas: Search Phrase Research, Technical Audit, and Content Audit. Today, we are evolving our auditing process to keep you competitive in a rapidly changing search landscape.
Traditional SEO Elements
Many of the elements in our SEO audit are still highly relevant today and these include:
- Technical crawl and indexation analysis
- Mobile responsiveness and site speed
- On-page SEO and keyword usage
- URL structure and internal linking
- Backlink profile and toxicity review
Whilst we would typically kick off with keyword research, this has now been replaced by entity analysis to ensure your pages are optimised for the entities that are most relevant. As people begin to search more conversationally, keyword strings become longer and the number of unique queries rapidly expands, making traditional keyword research and rank analysis less important.
AI-Ready Enhancement
Auditing for Google only is no longer an option. Websites need to be visible across every channel that people are searching and that means our auditing has to evolve to encompass those channels and identify your visibility across the web. This includes:
- Entity Optimisation Review
Does your content clearly establish your expertise, products, and relevance using language AI systems understand? - Structured Data & Schema Analysis
Is your site sending the right signals to AI systems like Google SGE or ChatGPT for summarisation? - LLM Crawlability
We assess and recommend the usage of LLMs.txt to help generative AI tools discover your best content (think of it as a sitemap for AI). - Third-Party Platform Audit
We check how your brand is mentioned and referenced on platforms like Reddit, TikTok, Quora and LinkedIn, all key citation sources for AI answers.
Content Clarity and AI Summary Potential
The content on your website remains as important as ever; however, how we audit the content and what we are looking for is evolving. We now analyse how easily your content can be interpreted, summarised, and reused by generative AI platforms.
As well as auditing the content on your site, we also look at how content about your brand is presented across the web, identifying opportunities to enhance or add to that content, helping to build up brand citations and increase the opportunities for citation in AI platforms.
Website Migration Strategy
As SEO specialists, we are often brought in when a business is looking to develop a new website or migrate its website from one domain or platform to another. Either of these migrations can have significant implications for SEO and it is important to have a strategy in place to effectively manage the migration process.
Our website migration strategy includes steps such as creating a 301-redirect plan, updating internal and external links, submitting sitemaps to search engines, and monitoring traffic and ranking fluctuations post-migration.
By following a comprehensive website migration strategy for SEO, you can ensure that your new website retains its search engine authority, visibility, and traffic, resulting in continued growth and success.
How do you conduct an SEO audit?
Our SEO auditing process combines the best of both worlds: data-driven insights from industry-leading tools and decades of hands-on SEO expertise.
We use tools like Screaming Frog, SEMrush, Geoptie, and Google Search Console to crawl your site and identify issues across architecture, speed, technical health, content quality, on-page SEO, and backlinks.
But we go far beyond the basics.
We also evaluate your site for AI-readiness, looking at structured data, entity optimisation, brand presence on third-party platforms (like Reddit or LinkedIn), and whether your content is suitable for AI-generated summaries in tools like ChatGPT or Google AI Overviews.
With a combined amount of 50 years of experience, we translate complex audits into clear, actionable insights that improve your visibility across all modern search surfaces, not just Google.
How to perform a technical SEO audit?
A technical SEO audit is a vital part of our overall SEO auditing process, and it now includes more than just fixing broken links or improving site speed.
Using tools like Screaming Frog, SEMrush, Geoptie, PageSpeed Insights and Search Console, we audit your site for issues such as:
- Crawlability and indexing
- Site architecture and internal linking
- Mobile responsiveness and page speed
- Redirect chains, 404 errors and server issues
- Duplicate content and canonicalisation
- Core Web Vitals performance
We now also include AI-focused technical checks, such as:
- Structured data markup for AI consumption
- Evaluation of LLMs.txt (a file that guides AI models to your best content)
- Entity tagging and clarity for large language models
Our audit delivers a prioritised technical roadmap that we can implement directly or collaborate on with your internal dev team, always with ROI and visibility in mind.
How long does an SEO audit take?
It depends on the size and complexity of your website. For small, brochure-style websites, we can typically complete a foundational audit in 3–5 working days. For larger sites or eCommerce platforms, a full audit may take 2–4 weeks.
What’s changed is the scope of what we check. We now include AI-readiness and multi-platform visibility as part of your audit, adding real value, not just more hours.
If you’re on a monthly SEO retainer with us, we treat auditing as an ongoing process, not just a one-off health check. We regularly re-audit technical performance, content quality, and emerging AI-related visibility to ensure you stay ahead of competitors and algorithm changes.
How much does an SEO audit cost?
There’s no one-size-fits-all cost for an SEO audit. It depends on your website’s size, your goals, and how deep we need to go.
For most new clients, we recommend a comprehensive audit to set the foundation for success, both in traditional SEO and now also in AI-powered search environments. This ensures we leave no stone unturned when it comes to improving your visibility.
We provide a clear, fixed quote before we begin. In many cases, we can spread the audit cost across the early stages of an engagement to keep things flexible while delivering fast wins.
Our audits are intensive, strategic, and ROI-focused, and they often uncover hidden opportunities you can act on straight away.
Is AI changing how SEO audits are done?
Yes, significantly. While traditional SEO audits focused on your website and search engines like Google, we now also evaluate your site’s visibility across tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini.
We assess how well your content performs in AI-generated summaries, whether it’s being cited by third-party sources, and if your structured data is readable by large language models.
This broader view of search, sometimes called Search Everywhere Optimisation, is now essential if you want to be discoverable across the entire web.
What’s an LLMs.txt file, and why does it matter in audits?
LLMs.txt is a new file format similar to robots.txt, designed to tell large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT or Claude where your best content lives.
We include LLMs.txt evaluations and recommendations in our audit to help generative AI systems find and accurately reference your content, giving your brand more visibility in AI-generated responses.