Tucson SEO Audit: Find Out What Is Actually Holding Your Site Back
An audit is a diagnosis, not a checklist. I read your site the way Google reads it, find the specific things costing you rankings, and hand you a list ordered by what to fix first.
Almost no site I look at is failing because of one dramatic problem. It is failing because of six or eight small ones stacked on top of each other, and nobody has ever sat down and put them in order. That is the whole job.
Key Takeaways
- An SEO audit answers three questions: can Google reach your pages, do those pages deserve to rank, and does anything outside your site vouch for you.
- The deliverable that matters is not a list of 400 issues. It is a short list of the problems actually costing you money, in priority order, with the exact location of each one.
- Most of what I find lives in a theme setting, a plugin, or a template — not in the page a client can see. That is why a crawler report on its own is not enough.
- Structured data that contradicts the visible page is the single most common serious problem I find on small business sites, and almost no free tool flags it.
- You should get a full audit once a year, plus a short check after any redesign, migration, plugin change, core update, or unexplained traffic drop.
What an SEO audit actually is
An SEO audit is a systematic review of a website against the things search engines use to crawl it, index it, understand it and rank it. It is not a scan. A scan takes twenty minutes and produces a spreadsheet. An audit is the part after that, where somebody who has done this since 1990 decides which of those flagged items is a real problem for your business and which is noise that will never cost you a dollar.
Every audit I run comes down to three questions, in this order. Get them out of order and you waste money polishing pages Google cannot see.
1. Can Google reach it?
- Crawl errors, redirect chains, server errors
- robots.txt and robots meta blocking pages you want ranked
- Canonical tags pointing at the wrong URL
- XML sitemap accuracy and Search Console coverage
- Core Web Vitals, mobile rendering, HTTPS
- Orphan pages and click depth from the homepage
2. Does the page deserve it?
- Search intent match — is this page even the right shape
- Titles, meta descriptions, heading structure, single H1
- Thin, duplicate and cannibalizing pages
- Internal links and anchor text
- Image alt text, file sizes, dimensions
- Structured data that matches what the page actually says
3. Does anyone vouch for you?
- Backlink quality, not backlink count
- Google Business Profile completeness and categories
- Name, address and phone consistency across directories
- Reviews, and whether you are asking for them
- Author and business identity in schema
- What competitors ranking above you have that you do not
Real problems from real audits
Rather than describe an audit in the abstract, here are things I have actually found and fixed on client sites in the last year. None of them showed up as a red item in a free crawler.
A dental practice whose schema disagreed with its own pages. Every FAQ on the site was marked up as FAQPage structured data. Over two years the visible questions had been edited and the markup had not. Google was being handed one set of answers and shown another. We rebuilt every page so the visible text and the JSON-LD match word for word, and I now validate that mechanically on every build rather than trusting my eyes.
A junk removal company with the wrong address on thirty pages. The business had moved, changed its hours, and revised its pricing. The footer was updated. The LocalBusiness markup, the individual service pages and a dozen directory listings were not. For a local business that is not a cosmetic problem — inconsistent name, address and phone data is one of the fastest ways to fall out of the map pack.
A site silently dropping its own stylesheet. The host's web application firewall was rejecting CSS custom properties and C-style comments in an inline style block. The page looked fine to the logged-in owner and broken to everyone else. No SEO tool on earth reports that. You find it by loading your own site in a private window and reading the source.
Two plugins declaring the same business with two different phone numbers. An SEO plugin was generating LocalBusiness markup, the theme was generating a second copy from a separate settings panel, and a hand-coded block in the header was generating a third with a phone number from a previous city. Three identities, no @id references, all fighting each other.
WordPress quietly breaking its own layout. WordPress runs a filter called wpautop that inserts paragraph tags into raw HTML. Dropped into a flex container or an accordion, it breaks both. The fix takes ten minutes. Finding it takes knowing it exists.
The common thread: every one of those problems lived in a template, a plugin or a theme setting, not in the page content the owner could see in the editor. If your last audit was a PDF export from a crawler, that whole category was invisible to it.
You can see what a full remediation looks like on my Tucson SEO case studies page.
What you get at the end
A written document, in plain English, that gives you four things for every finding:
- What is wrong, described so you could hand it to a developer who has never seen your site.
- Where it lives — the specific page, template file, plugin, or theme settings panel. Not "your site has canonical issues." The URL and the setting.
- What it is costing you, so you can tell the difference between a page that is invisible to Google and an image that is 40KB larger than it needs to be.
- What to do about it, and in what order.
Findings are ranked by impact, not grouped by category, because the ranking is the actual value. Anyone can tell you that you have 137 issues. The useful sentence is "fix these four things first and ignore the other 133 until next quarter."
I also walk you through it on a call. In my experience the document gets skimmed and the call gets remembered.
A free audit tool is not an audit
I use crawlers. They are genuinely good at what they do and they are the first hour of the job. What they cannot do is exercise judgment, and judgment is what you are actually paying for.
| What you are comparing | Free audit tool | An audit from me |
|---|---|---|
| What it looks at | The HTML it can crawl | Rendered HTML, Search Console, Google Business Profile, directories, competitors |
| Priority | Severity labels applied the same way to every site on the internet | Ranked against what your business actually sells |
| False positives | Many, and you cannot tell which | Removed before you ever see the list |
| Structured data | Checks whether it is valid | Checks whether it is true, and whether it matches the visible page |
| Theme and plugin conflicts | Not detected | A large share of what I find |
| What happens next | You get a PDF | I fix it, or your developer does, from instructions specific enough to act on |
Who actually does the audit
I do. There is no team, no account manager, and nothing gets handed to a junior. The person who reads your source code is the person you called.
I have been working in search since 1990. I built and sold two internet marketing companies, Lotus411.com and MSD2D.com, took an economics degree at UCLA and an MBA at the University of Washington, started Temecula SEO in 2007, and moved the practice to Tucson in 2022. I work with a small number of local businesses at a time, at $1,000 a month, with no contract.
More about my background is on the about David Cragg page, and the way I charge is spelled out on SEO pricing.
On the question everybody now asks: I use AI in my work and I say so plainly. It helps me draft, synthesize research and check my own work. It is not allowed to supply facts about your business, invent numbers, or publish anything I have not read. Findings in an audit come from your actual site, your actual Search Console data and citable documentation — every claim in a report is traceable on request. The full position is on the content creation page.
Where the audit fits with everything else
The audit is the diagnosis. These are the treatments, and most engagements use two or three of them.
Technical SEO
Crawling, indexing, Core Web Vitals, schema, redirects, site architecture. Where most audit findings get fixed.
Local SEO services
Google Business Profile, citations, map pack visibility and geo-targeted pages for Tucson and Southern Arizona.
Content creation
When the audit says the page is fine technically but does not answer what people are actually searching for.
Website design
When the findings are structural enough that rebuilding is cheaper than patching. The audit tells you which case you are in.
Reputation management
Reviews and trust signals, which the audit measures and which move local rankings more than most owners expect.
SEO audit tips
Articles on running parts of this yourself, if you would rather start with the free version.
If you want to check some of this against the source, Google publishes its own documentation on troubleshooting crawling errors, Core Web Vitals, supported structured data types and what it considers helpful content. Nothing in an audit I run contradicts those documents. If it did, I would be wrong.
Questions about SEO audits
What is an SEO audit?
An SEO audit is a systematic review of a website against the factors search engines use to crawl, index, understand and rank it. It covers three areas: whether Google can reach and index your pages, whether those pages answer what people are actually searching for, and whether anything outside your site vouches for you. The output is a prioritized list of specific problems and the order in which to fix them.
What does an SEO audit cover?
A full audit from Tucson SEO covers crawling and indexing, site architecture and internal linking, Core Web Vitals and page speed, mobile rendering, titles and meta descriptions, heading structure, search intent and content quality, structured data, duplicate and thin pages, redirects and status codes, Google Search Console coverage, Google Business Profile and local citations, and backlink quality. I read the rendered source of every page that matters rather than relying on a crawler summary.
How long does an SEO audit take?
For a typical small business site of twenty to sixty pages, about a week. Crawling takes an afternoon. The rest of the time goes into reading the rendered source of the important pages, reconciling Google Search Console against what the crawl found, and working out which problems are actually costing money and which are cosmetic.
What do I receive at the end of an SEO audit?
A written document listing each problem, what it is costing you, exactly where it lives — the page, the template, the plugin or the theme setting — and how to fix it. Findings are ordered by impact rather than grouped by category, and I walk you through the list on a call.
Do you fix the problems you find, or only report them?
I fix them. Tucson SEO is a one-person practice, so the person who found the problem is the person who edits the template, rewrites the page or corrects the structured data. If you would rather hand the report to your own developer, that works too — every finding is written specifically enough to act on without calling me.
Can I just run a free SEO audit tool instead?
Free crawlers are useful and I run one as a first pass. What they cannot do is tell you which of the hundreds of issues they flag actually matters for your business, and they miss the problems that only appear in rendered HTML: structured data that contradicts the visible page, a theme injecting a second meta description after the SEO plugin's, or a stale phone number buried in schema. That judgment is the audit.
How often should a website be audited?
A full audit once a year, plus a short check any time something changes: a redesign, a platform migration, a new plugin, a Google core update, or an unexplained drop in traffic. Clients on the monthly engagement get this continuously, so the annual audit is really aimed at sites nobody is watching.
Does an SEO audit include my Google Business Profile?
Yes. For a local business in Tucson, the Google Business Profile, the consistency of your name, address and phone number across directories, and the quality of your local landing pages are all part of the audit. A well-built website with a mismatched address in a dozen directories will still lose the map pack.
Can an audit tell me why my traffic dropped?
Usually. Traffic drops have a short list of causes: a Google core update, a technical change that blocked crawling or indexing, lost backlinks, a competitor overtaking you, or a seasonal pattern that was always there. Comparing Search Console data from before and after the drop against a fresh crawl of the current site normally identifies which one it was.
Want to know what is wrong with your site?
Call me and describe what you are seeing. If it is something I can answer in ten minutes on the phone, I will, and you can go fix it yourself. If it needs a real audit, I will tell you that too.
Tucson SEO — David Cragg, SEO consultant
Tucson, Arizona • Serving Tucson, Oro Valley, Marana, Sahuarita, Green Valley, Vail and Catalina Foothills
(520) 207-6000 • $1,000 a month, no contract • In search since 1990
