SEO Diagnostic
Find the binding constraint. Get a prioritized, dev-ready roadmap. One engagement, not a retainer.
Most SEO audits produce a spreadsheet of issues ranked by severity. The problem is that severity without sequence is noise. Fixing a hundred medium-priority items while the site has an unresolved crawlability problem is wasted engineering time. The diagnostic exists to answer one question: what is the single constraint that, if removed, unblocks everything downstream?
That question has to be answered in order. Eligibility before access. Access before representation. Representation before retrieval. The diagnostic framework defines the sequence. The diagnostic applies it to your specific stack.
What you get
The deliverable is a prioritized roadmap, not a list of findings. Every recommendation is sequenced by the framework and scoped for engineering handoff.
Binding constraint identification. Which layer of the framework is failing, and why. Not twenty things to fix — the one thing that matters most right now.
Sequenced action plan. A prioritized roadmap that respects the dependency chain. What to fix first, what to defer, and what not to touch at all until earlier constraints are cleared.
Engineering-ready specifications. Each action item is scoped with enough technical detail that your engineering team can estimate and execute without a second round of discovery.
Ceiling vs. weight assessment. Whether your constraint is an eligibility ceiling (the site cannot rank regardless of content quality) or a competitive weight problem (the site can rank but is being outcompeted). These require fundamentally different responses.
What it covers
The diagnostic walks the framework layers in order, stopping at the binding constraint:
Eligibility (Layer 1). Can Google index this content at all? Penalties, manual actions, robots directives, noindex patterns, rendering failures that prevent content from entering the index.
Access (Layer 2). Can crawlers reach the content efficiently? Crawl budget waste, spider traps, redirect chains, internal linking structure, faceted navigation control.
Representation (Layer 3). Does the content signal what it is? Schema markup, title and heading alignment, canonical consistency, structured data accuracy.
Retrieval (Layers 4-6). Lexical matching, semantic relevance, and generative retrieval readiness. Whether the content is findable by traditional keyword matching, by meaning-based retrieval, and by AI systems that synthesize answers from source material.
Competition (Layer 7). Authority signals, backlink profile assessment, competitive gap analysis. Is the constraint about quality or about weight?
Satisfaction (Layer 8). Core Web Vitals, engagement patterns, UX signals. Does the page deliver on what it promises in the SERP?
Who this is for
Teams that have execution capacity but no diagnosis. You have engineers, you have a content team, but nobody has identified what to prioritize or why previous efforts haven't moved the needle.
Companies evaluating whether to invest in SEO at all. Before committing to a retainer or a hire, a diagnostic tells you what the actual opportunity is and what it would take to capture it.
Sites that have plateaued. Traffic that has flatlined despite ongoing work usually means the team is optimizing below a ceiling constraint. The diagnostic identifies whether the ceiling is technical, structural, or competitive.
How it works
The engagement is scoped and time-bound. No open-ended retainer, no scope creep.
Initial call (30 minutes). We align on the site, the business context, and the specific questions you need answered. I confirm whether the diagnostic is the right engagement or whether something else would serve you better.
Diagnostic execution. I walk the framework layers, identify the binding constraint, and build the sequenced roadmap. Timeline depends on site complexity — typically one to two weeks.
Deliverable and walkthrough. You receive the prioritized roadmap with engineering-ready specifications. We do a live walkthrough so your team understands the reasoning behind the sequence, not just the actions.
If the diagnostic reveals that the right next step is ongoing strategic direction, we can discuss a fractional engagement. But the diagnostic stands on its own — it is not a sales funnel for a retainer.