seo audits
Why Owens SEO?
the owens difference
NZ-Based, NZ-Focused
NZ search volumes are often a fraction of US or UK equivalents, which changes how keywords should be prioritised. In NZ service sites, it is common to see multiple pages competing for the same low-volume keyword, splitting what little search demand exists. Strategy involves deciding when to consolidate and when lower-volume terms still warrant standalone pages.
Clarity Over Complexity
Strategy documents can become unusable if they rely on unexplained metrics. Each keyword recommendation should connect to a specific page type, and each content gap should link to a clear action. Without this, content often ranks for queries it was never intended to target. If technical fixes need to happen before content work begins, that sequencing is stated upfront.
Results You Can Verify
Tracking is configured in Google Search Console and GA4 before content execution begins. Both parties see the same data. If a page targets the wrong intent or cannibalises another, that shows up as fluctuating rankings between URLs, indicating intent overlap or internal competition. When this happens, the data shows where to act. Corrections are made based on evidence.
SEO Services
Not every site needs the same work. What matters depends on where you're starting from.
Website Rebuilds
Website migration and redesign with SEO built in from the start. Proper redirect mapping, URL structure, content preservation, and technical setup that protects your existing rankings during transition. Frequently mishandled, most ranking losses after a rebuild are preventable with proper planning.
Google Ads
Paid search advertising for businesses that need leads before organic rankings develop. Covers campaign structure, keyword targeting, budget allocation, and conversion tracking. Suits businesses with active search demand and margins that support click costs. Not every business needs paid search, a conversation about goals helps clarify whether it makes sense for your situation.
Web Design
Websites for small businesses, tradies, and local service operators. Built for mobile performance, site speed, and search compatibility. Page structure planned around your actual services and locations rather than forced into generic templates. Designed to generate local enquiries across Auckland and wider New Zealand.
SEO Auckland
Search visibility for Auckland-based businesses. Appear when local customers search for services in your area. Focuses on geographic intent, suburb-level positioning, and local search signals that connect your site to Auckland searchers.
Technical SEO
Crawl errors, indexing problems, and slow load times stop Google from finding your pages. When migrations break redirects or Core Web Vitals fail on mobile, rankings drop. We identify and fix the technical barriers preventing search engines from accessing and ranking what you’ve built.
SEO Audits
A documented assessment of your website’s search performance. Examines technical infrastructure, content signals, and indexing behaviour to identify issues, contextualise their impact, and inform decisions before committing to fixes or ongoing SEO work.
OUR PROCESS
Every project moves through five stages. Here's how we approach yours.
We start by understanding your business: what you sell, who buys it, and what success looks like. Before any SEO work begins, we need to know what you’re trying to achieve and what constraints exist. Skipping this step usually means optimising for the wrong things.
A thorough technical audit identifies what’s broken. Keyword research finds what your customers actually search for. Rival analysis reveals what’s working in your market. You receive a sequenced action plan. The audit often changes what seemed like the obvious priority. What looks like a content problem frequently turns out to be a technical one, or vice versa.
Technical fixes come first. There’s no point creating content for a site Google can’t properly crawl. We address crawlability issues, site speed problems, mobile usability, and structural problems before moving to content. This stage is where most rushed projects fail.
With technical foundations solid, we focus on content that matches search intent and earning links that build authority. Ongoing work that compounds over time rather than quick fixes that fade. The ratio between content and links depends on where the site is weaker.
SEO isn’t set-and-forget. We track rankings, monitor traffic, watch for technical issues, and adjust strategy based on what’s actually working. Monthly reporting keeps you informed of progress and next steps. Sometimes the data suggests a different direction than planned.
The Scope of SEO Diagnostics
An SEO audit assesses multiple layers of a website’s search presence. These typically include technical infrastructure, content signals, and indexing behaviour.
On the technical side, audits examine crawlability, whether search engine bots can access and navigate the site’s pages. This involves checking robots.txt directives, XML sitemaps, internal linking structures, redirect chains, and server response codes. Audits also assess page speed metrics, mobile usability, and structured data implementation.
Content evaluation looks at how pages communicate relevance to the search queries they target.
Indexing analysis reviews which pages Google has included in its index, which it has excluded, and why, using data from Google Search Console.
What an SEO Audit Does and Does Not Include
An SEO audit is a diagnostic exercise. It identifies technical faults, content gaps, and indexing anomalies. It produces a documented record of the site’s current state against known search engine requirements. Issues are contextualised against their potential impact and prioritised according to severity and effort required to address them.
What an audit is not: ongoing SEO management, content creation, link building, or the implementation of fixes. These are separate services that may follow an audit but sit outside its scope.
The distinction matters because diagnosing a problem and resolving it require different resources and timelines. An audit might identify duplicate content issues, missing meta descriptions, or pages blocked from indexing. Fixing those issues requires development time, content work, or configuration changes. These activities happen after the audit delivers its findings.
Businesses sometimes expect an audit to include implementation. Clarifying this boundary upfront avoids misaligned expectations.
Timing and Trigger Points
Certain business events commonly prompt an SEO audit. New website launches, platform migrations, traffic declines, and annual planning cycles are typical triggers.
Audits are often commissioned when uncertainty exists about a website’s search performance. For New Zealand businesses, this commonly follows website rebuilds by local agencies or after noticing competitors appearing above them in Google results. Before committing resources to ongoing SEO work, content production, or technical development, businesses may want to understand what problems actually exist and which warrant attention. An audit reduces the risk of misallocating resources toward issues that don’t exist or overlooking problems that do.
After a website migration, rankings may shift as search engines reprocess the site’s structure. Research into domain migrations suggests recovery timelines vary considerably.
A 2024 study published by Search Engine Journal, analysing 892 domain migrations using third-party traffic estimation tools, reported an average recovery time of 523 days. Individual cases ranged from under a month to well over two years, and some migrations in the dataset had not recovered after 1,000 days. Audits conducted before and after migration can identify redirect errors, lost metadata, and indexing problems that may contribute to extended recovery periods.
When Google releases core algorithm updates, which occurred in March, August, and December 2024, and again in March, June, and December 2025, some websites experience ranking changes. An audit can compare a site’s characteristics against Google’s published quality guidelines to identify potential areas of misalignment.
For businesses planning annual expenditure, an audit provides baseline data. Knowing where a site currently stands helps inform whether investment should go toward technical fixes, content development, or other channels entirely.
Infrastructure Issues Audits Uncover
Technical problems often prevent otherwise sound content from appearing in search results. Audits identify issues that may not be visible from the front end of a website.
Common findings include broken internal links, redirect loops, pages returning 4xx or 5xx errors, and duplicate content created by URL parameters or session IDs. Sites built on JavaScript frameworks may have content that users can see but search engines cannot render. Canonicalisation errors can cause search engines to index the wrong version of a page.
Core Web Vitals, the page experience metrics Google uses as ranking signals, are also assessed. These include Largest Contentful Paint (loading speed), Interaction to Next Paint (responsiveness), and Cumulative Layout Shift (visual stability).
According to HTTP Archive data from 2025, fewer than half of mobile websites pass all three Core Web Vitals thresholds. Poor scores in these areas may contribute to lower rankings, particularly in competitive queries. New Zealand websites often face additional latency considerations due to server locations and local hosting infrastructure.
How Audits Evaluate On-Page Factors
Search engines assess content to determine whether a page is relevant to a given query. Audits review how well a site’s content communicates that relevance.
Title tags and meta descriptions are the elements that appear in search results and influence click-through behaviour. Heading structures (H1, H2, etc.) signal content hierarchy to both users and crawlers. On-page copy is reviewed for keyword presence, topical depth, and alignment with search intent.
Audits may identify pages targeting the same keyword (cannibalisation), thin content that provides insufficient value, or outdated information that no longer reflects current conditions.
Google’s quality guidelines emphasise content that demonstrates experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). Audits assess whether content includes signals that align with these published guidelines, such as author attribution, citations, and substantive depth.
Be Seen, Be Known
Get Started
If you reckon it's time to sort your search rankings, we can take a look by getting in touch below.
Auckland-Based • NZ-Focused • Real Results