How we conduct SEO and AEO audits for clients

Failing to consider SEO during a website migration can be an expensive mistake. And with AI search platforms and LLMs driving more and more traffic – or at least, visibility – to your brand’s website and content, it’d be a missed opportunity if you didn’t consider that for a new website project too.

At Adaptable, we ensure every web project is rooted in solid foundations when it comes to optimisation for search (organic or AI).

We do this by starting every website project with an SEO and AEO audit, which takes place during the discovery phase, when we’re learning about your organisation, project objectives and functional requirements.

This audit help us set out:

• Structural, design or development considerations related to optimisation – for example URL structure, content hierarchy, schema markup opportunities
• Guidance on key themes, topics and queries to focus when it comes to content production and population
• Current rankings and high-performing pages/content that should be preserved
• Considerations around tracking and analytics setup – for example integration with cookie control, Google Tag Manager events and custom event listeners, etc
• Actions for us and the client before, during and after development to ensure the project hits the ground running

Read on for more detail on how and why we conduct SEO and AEO audits for website projects.

SEO and AEO audit process

In the main, our audits aim to answer the following key questions:

• What’s currently working well?
• Where are the opportunities on AI platforms?
• What are the technical considerations?
• How will you track everything?

What’s currently working well?

We look at current rankings, impressions and clicks, sessions and page views by query/keyword and page to assess what’s performing well on your current website and what needs to be preserved. This could be services content, landing pages, guides or blog posts. We’ll also look at other metrics like engagement rate and event completions if applicable too. We’ll then provide recommendations on content to migrate across, modify, or produce from scratch, to protect existing performance and also align with the wider project goals.

Where are the opportunities on AI platforms?

We’ll use a combination of specialist tools and “manual” research to assess how your brand and content is currently understood and perceived by AI search platforms and LLMs such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. This insight can then be used to guide topics, themes and narratives to focus content on, which helps you prioritise but may also inform some design and development decisions for us, such as page types, content blocks, and content hierarchy.

What are the technical considerations?

In addition to looking at content performance, we’ll also do a technical crawl of your current site to understand structure and get a clearer idea of how content is mapped out. There may be certain observations that come about as part of the audit that inform more technical decisions and considerations around the technical setup of your website. This could include things like URL structure, content hierarchy, existing errors or redirected pages to be addressed and factored into the migration process, or schema markup opportunities to boost AI visibility.

How will you track everything?

A key part of the puzzle for any digital marketing team is analytics and reporting. Without the right tracking in place, you won’t be able to measure whether your website project has been a success, and you may even lose access to historical data if you don’t migrate tracking across carefully. We’ll audit your current tracking setup, particularly if you’re using Google Tag Manager, and identify what considerations we’ll need to make when moving this across to the new site. This may involve updating event triggers for things like form fills, ensuring enhanced ecommerce tracking is moved across, and setting up and configuring cookie controls.

What we don’t do  ❌

We don’t just generate white-labelled reports from SEO audit tools; we use a variety of analytics platforms, audit tools and our knowledge and experience to assess and interpret raw data into actual actionable insights.

We don’t just plug everything into AI and ask it to spit out recommendations or observations; AI can help you with some high-level insight, but doesn’t have extensive context, technical detail and can also hallucinate things to fill in gaps if it doesn’t have all of the information. We might use it to aid us in where to go looking, or to ask a technical question, but never to provide unverified or unchecked recommendations.

How this process helps launch successful projects

Our SEO and AEO audits aren’t just a box-ticking exercise. They can help us – and you – shape your new website project around actual wider industry data than relying on our collective assumptions. What your potential customers are searching for, how AI platforms perceive your brand, and how search platforms currently understand your content is vital information that feeds into our wider user-first approach.

Find out more about how we’ve helped other clients set a foundation for SEO and AEO in their website projects:

• Shaping SEO and AEO strategy for Basel Area, the non-profit that promotes economic development in Basel
• Using SEO to inform website structure and content strategy for Verity & Co, a regional homebuilder

Want to launch a website that actually gets results? Get in touch and find out how we could help.