Ideas, strategies and digital trends.

A blog is usually organised by date, but nobody arrives with a date in mind. They arrive with a question, and the useful way into this one is by the stage you are at.

The articles on auditing happen to follow the order in which the work is done, so they read well as a sequence:

• Start with the idea. What a website audit actually covers and when it is worth asking for one.
• Then the practical side. The cost article and the template let you judge a quote and see what a finished audit looks like before you commit to one.
• Then the technical layer. Whether Google can crawl and index the site comes before everything else, which is why that article is worth reading first of the detailed ones.
• Then the on-page and off-page pieces. They go deeper into what is on each page and what points to your site from outside.
• Last, the tools. Looking at tools before you know what you are trying to find is how people end up with five dashboards and no decision.

If you only have time for one piece, pick the one closest to a decision you are about to make: hiring someone, redoing a site, or working out why traffic fell.

One caution when reading any SEO material, ours included. Advice written for large e-commerce sites does not transfer unchanged to a ten-page service business, and the reverse is also true. Check the size and type of site an example comes from before applying its numbers to yours.

And if three articles in you still have the same question, that is usually a sign it needs a conversation, not another read.

Related: what is a website audit, technical SEO audit and SEO audit cost.