We recently rebuilt this website from top to bottom — new design, new templates, the works. Once it was live, we did something we don't always see agencies do to themselves: we ran it through the exact same audit process we offer clients in our free SEO report, rather than assuming a fresh rebuild meant a clean bill of health.
It didn't. Here's what a brand-new site still had wrong with it, and what we did about it.
The starting point
Around the time of the rebuild, Google Search Console had already started showing rising impressions for searches related to SEO reports — "seo report," "free seo report," "cheap seo report," and similar terms. That's a good early signal: it means the pages we'd built for this were getting shown for the right kind of searches. The question was whether the rest of the site was set up to support them, or quietly working against them.
Finding 1: the sitemap was missing a third of the site
The XML sitemap was a hand-maintained static file. On paper that's fine — until someone adds new pages and forgets to update it. When we checked, the sitemap listed the core pages and blog posts, but all 14 portfolio project pages were completely absent. Not broken, not deprioritised — just never added, because nothing forced anyone to remember.
The fix: we rebuilt the sitemap to generate itself automatically from the site's actual page and content data, rather than being a list someone has to keep in sync by hand. Add a new blog post or portfolio project now, and it appears in the sitemap without anyone touching the file.
Finding 2: two pages were quietly competing with each other
We have two SEO-report-related pages: a free lead-generation page and a full paid-audit comparison page. Both had grown to say almost the same thing — same "free snapshot in 2 days" framing, same feature bullets, no real distinction between them. Two pages chasing the same search intent risk splitting authority between them instead of both ranking well.
The fix: we gave each page a distinct job. The free page owns the zero-cost, lead-gen intent. The full-audit page owns the pricing and comparison intent, with an added FAQ specifically reframing "is this affordable" rather than competing on the same "free" framing.
Finding 3: the highest-authority page on the site said nothing about our own core service
The homepage — the single most-linked, most-visited page on the site — made no mention anywhere in its body content of the SEO reports we run, despite "SEO Reports" being prominently placed in the main navigation. All the link equity from the homepage was going everywhere except the pages Google was starting to reward.
The fix: we added a direct link from a relevant homepage feature card straight through to the reports page, plus a matching link in the footer, which had also been inconsistent — linking to one report page but not the other.
Finding 4: one relevant blog post had zero links to the actual service
We had a blog post specifically about small business SEO fundamentals. It never once linked to either report page. It's an easy mistake — content gets written, published, and then nobody goes back to connect it to the commercial pages it's actually most relevant to.
The fix: we added direct, contextual links from that post (and from a mobile-first design post covering Core Web Vitals) straight through to the free report — plus new supporting content, including the website health score, technical SEO checklist, and a full Core Web Vitals breakdown, each one cross-linked back to the reports.
Finding 5: one report page had no FAQ section at all
The free report page had a strong feature breakdown but no FAQ section — despite an FAQ-and-schema pattern already working well on three other pages. It meant we were missing an easy chance for both visitor reassurance and FAQ-rich-result eligibility in search.
The fix: we added a matching FAQ section with structured data, answering the objections people actually have before requesting a free report — including directly addressing the overlap with the paid option.
What this means if you're wondering about your own site
None of these issues would show up if you just looked at the site. It looks finished. It loads fast. The design is right. Every one of these findings only surfaces when you actually run the checks — which is exactly why "it looks fine" and "it's technically healthy" are two different things, and why we build that distinction into every report we send a client.
If a site we built ourselves, audited by the people who built it, still had five real issues worth fixing — it's worth asking what a report would find on a site nobody's checked yet. Get your free SEO report and find out, or see how the free and full options compare.