What I Look at Before We Meet, and What I Keep Back

When a business gets in touch about SEO, I’ve usually been through their website before we’ve spoken. No logins, no access to their Google accounts. Just the site as Google and any visitor can see it.

Two recent enquiries show what that look turns up and what I do with it. Both owners thought their site was in reasonable shape. One was right about the content and wrong about something underneath it. The other had problems on almost every page, and a new site already on the way.

The outside look

Without access, I can crawl every page in a site’s sitemap and check what each one tells Google about itself: the page title, the main heading, which address the page claims as its real version, whether it can be indexed, how fast it responds, how the pages link to each other. Third-party tools give me a rough picture of what the site ranks for. Those figures are estimates, and I treat them as a direction of travel.

The first site had good content and a sensible structure. It also had twenty live pages, the homepage and nearly every service page among them, telling Google that the real version of each page lived on a test copy of the site. That test copy no longer existed. Every affected page had been edited in the weeks after work on the site changed hands, and the untouched pages were fine. The likely explanation is an update pushed from the test copy by mistake. From the outside I can’t confirm that.

The second site was technically clean. Its problems were in what the pages said. Fourteen of its eighteen page titles were duplicated or wrong, including a project page that showed in Google under a different project’s name and town. Eight pages had no main heading. Nine blog posts sat on the site with nothing linking to them, and the blog’s own index page returned an error. Service pages averaged around 105 words, most of it repeated boilerplate. A set of product spec sheets, one of them 10MB, were indexed and outranking the pages they belonged to. Across the web, the business appeared under three different names, which makes it harder for Google to work out they’re all one business.

What the outside look can’t tell me matters just as much. Whether Google has indexed the pages. When traffic changed. Which page Google prefers when two of them compete. Whether enquiries have dropped off. Those need Search Console and Google Analytics, and I don’t ask for them yet.

What I do with the findings before we talk

Mostly, I keep them for the conversation. At this stage I don’t know what you want. You might need ads more than SEO. The thing keeping you up at night might be something I don’t do at all. Opening with a list of faults before I know the brief is a pitch, and a blunt one.

If you ask what I found, you’ll get one specific example and an invitation to talk it through. Refusing to say anything looks evasive, and a wall of findings doesn’t help you decide anything.

The exception is a fault that’s costing you right now. On the first site, the test-copy problem was steering Google away from the most important pages every day it stayed live. Our call was booked for the next day, so my email said a couple of technical issues had crept in that were likely affecting how Google sees key pages, and that I’d walk through them on the call. If the meeting had been a week away, the specific problem would have gone in writing straight away. I won’t sit on something that’s hurting a business to give myself a better opening.

The first conversation

I go in with questions. What prompted you to get in touch now. Where your work comes from at the moment. What a good enquiry looks like. What you see when you search your own business name, and what you’d want to see. Whether you’ve run ads. Who else works on the site.

The second meeting changed the job entirely. A new website was already being built by another developer, with launch a few months off, and so far it existed only as design files. Fixing the current site would have been money spent on something about to be replaced. The useful work was checking the new build before it went live: titles, headings, page structure and content from the design files first, then a technical pass once there was a test version to crawl. The owners’ brief came down to two things, showing up for their services across the region and showing up properly when someone searched their name, both sorted before launch.

I don’t critique another developer’s work in those meetings. Issues on a build in progress go on a list of things to check before launch, because that’s what they are.

Access, and how much of it

If there’s a fit after we’ve talked, I’ll ask for access to Search Console and Google Analytics. Usually whoever set up your Google tags can add me.

Before you’ve agreed to anything, I ask for view-level access. That covers indexing, traffic and search queries, which is everything an audit needs. Admin access, the kind that lets someone add or remove other users, waits until we’re working together and there’s a reason for it, usually tidying up who still has access from earlier providers. If anyone asks for full control of your Google accounts before you’ve signed anything, it’s fair to ask why.

On the first site, the questions waiting on that access were specific. Were the twenty affected pages still indexed? When did traffic dip? Which of two competing service pages was Google choosing? Had enquiries tailed off since regular work on the site stopped? Only the real data can answer those. I’ve written separately about what a full SEO audit tends to turn up once that data is in hand.

The proposal

You get one clear first step with a price, and the rest as options for later. For the second business, the first step is the pre-launch review of the main site, with a check against real Search Console data about 90 days after launch as a later option. Where I haven’t seen the thing I’m quoting on yet, design files or a test site, the price is an estimate until I have, and the proposal says so.

There’s no lock-in contract. I also take one business per industry in a region, so while I’m working with you, I’m not working with the competitor down the road.

If I don’t hear back, I follow up once. After that the decision is yours, and more chasing wouldn’t help either of us.

If you’re talking to a few consultants

A handful of questions that tell you a fair bit:

• What did you look at before we spoke, and what did you find?
• What can’t you tell without access to my accounts?
• What level of access do you need right now, and why that level?
• What’s the first step, and what does it cost on its own?
• Who does the work?

Answers to the last one vary more than you’d expect.