Every new SEO client gets the same first hour. Eight checks, in this order, before we talk about content or links or anything else. Four of the eight uncover a fix that pays for the first month of work on its own. The other four are the foundation. We won't take an SEO client until this hour is done.
The eight checks, in order
- Index coverage in Search Console : how many pages Google has, how many it's chosen not to. Sites that should have 40 indexed pages often have 4 or 400.
- Core Web Vitals on mobile : the field data, not the lab. LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200ms, CLS under 0.1.
- Internal linking depth : how many clicks from the home page to the deepest important page. Anything past three is hiding.
- Canonical tags : are duplicate URLs pointing at one source. About 70% of WordPress sites get this wrong.
- Redirect chains : multi-hop 301s waste crawl budget and dilute equity. One hop only.
- Robots.txt and sitemap.xml : do they exist, do they list the right URLs, are they referenced in Search Console.
- Schema markup : Organization, LocalBusiness, Product, Article — the four types that move rankings. The rest is noise.
- Mobile rendering : pull the URL through Google's Rich Results Test, look at the rendered HTML. JavaScript that hides content from the bot is common and quietly disastrous.
What's broken on 80% of the sites we audit
Four patterns repeat. We've seen them on builds from one-person shops and from $30k agency builds equally.
- Image weight : 4MB hero images on the home page. Cuts LCP by 60% on phones.
- Indexed staging environments : a forgotten subdomain leaking duplicate content to Google.
- H1 duplication or absence : either no H1 on key pages, or three of them on one page.
- Schema generated by plugins that don't match the visible content : a Google penalty trigger.
The half-day fix list
404s, redirect chains and canonical tags can be cleaned up in half a day for most sites. We don't quote SEO work without that half-day priced in — it changes what the next 60 days can deliver. The fixes don't make a great monthly report, but they're the reason the second month's report looks good.
Schema markup — the three types worth doing
Three types of schema move rankings for SMB sites. Organization (sitewide), LocalBusiness (for service-area trades), and Article (for blog posts). Add Product if you sell direct. Anything beyond those four — Event, Recipe, HowTo — only matters if the content fits. Don't sprinkle schema; specify it.
The second-hour deep dive
If the first hour throws up a red flag — usually crawl budget or duplicate content at scale — we run a second hour. Log files, server response codes, hreflang if the site has multilingual variants. Most SMB sites don't need this. The ones that do, need it badly.
The takeaway
Technical SEO doesn't earn you new rankings. It removes the things stopping you from earning them. Run the eight checks before you spend a dollar on content or links. If you'd rather not run them yourself, the SEO offer starts here, and most builds benefit from a parallel pass on the underlying website work — built around the day-one checklist.