If your website has been online for several years, it may have been built, changed, updated or managed by several different people.

SEO settings may have been added at different times. Pages may have changed. Google may be indexing things you didn’t expect. Analytics may or may not be configured properly. And sometimes it’s simply unclear who has actually been responsible for SEO.

Before trying to improve rankings, add more content or commit to ongoing SEO, it makes sense to establish where you are now.

SEO Essentials provides a structured starting point.

A detailed review of your website’s existing SEO foundations, search visibility and current position, followed by clear priorities and practical recommendations.

Many small-business owners don’t.

Perhaps your website developer said SEO was included when the site was built. You may have previously paid someone for SEO. You might have installed an SEO plugin, written some page titles or created a Google Business Profile.

Or perhaps nobody has really looked at it for years.

None of those situations automatically means your SEO is good or bad.

The important first step is to find out what you actually have.

That’s why SEO Essentials starts with diagnosis rather than immediately selling you a monthly SEO package.

Before examining individual SEO issues, we establish the background to your website.

We’ll discuss how the website was created, significant changes that have been made, previous SEO activity, who currently manages it and what other providers may be involved.

We’ll also establish access to the relevant information and systems available to us.

This gives us something extremely important:

a clear starting point for the work.

We then examine the evidence.

This can include your website’s technical SEO foundations, Google Search Console data, indexing, search performance, website structure, important pages, on-page SEO, local visibility and the way Google currently understands and presents your website.

We don’t simply generate an automated SEO score and send you a report.

The purpose is to understand what the evidence means for your particular website and business.

Finding twenty problems doesn’t necessarily mean you should pay someone to fix twenty problems.

Some issues matter considerably more than others.

Some may be straightforward to correct. Others may sit with your website developer, hosting company or another provider. Some may not justify doing anything at all.

We’ll turn the findings into a practical set of priorities so you can understand:

what matters now, what can wait, what could create an opportunity and who should be responsible for what happens next.

Your assessment concludes with a personal review of the findings.

We’ll take you through what we’ve discovered, explain the priorities, answer your questions and discuss the available next steps.

This isn’t simply the delivery of a technical report.

Understanding the findings is part of the service.

That depends entirely on what we find.

You might discover that your SEO foundations are actually in reasonable shape and only need ongoing SEO monitoring.

There may be a small number of important issues worth correcting.

The website may require a more substantial SEO Essentials Improvement programme.

Or the foundations may already be strong enough that the better investment is actively developing visibility around particular products, services or locations.

That’s why we don’t prescribe the solution before we’ve diagnosed the problem.

You remain in control

Finding an issue doesn’t commit you to paying Clarity Digital Results to fix it.

We’ll explain what needs attention, why we think it matters and what we’d recommend doing next.

If you’d like us to undertake the work, we’ll clearly scope and price it.

You can also use your existing developer, deal with appropriate actions yourself or simply take the recommendations away and consider them.

Clarity first. Then decide what happens next.

Where the assessment identifies work that you’d like Clarity Digital Results to undertake, we’ll create an SEO Essentials Improvement proposal.

Rather than charging a generic monthly SEO fee, we’ll define the work that needs doing and agree the scope before we start.

Depending upon the findings, this could include improvements to areas such as:

• search indexing and technical foundations;
• SEO configuration;
• page titles, descriptions and headings;
• website structure and internal linking;
• important service or product pages;
• local search foundations;
• measurement through Google Search Console and Google Analytics.

The actual programme depends upon your website.

That’s why we assess first and price the improvement work second.

SEO Essentials isn’t an undertaking to correct every historic issue that may exist on a website.

It isn’t unlimited website development.

And it isn’t a promise to achieve a particular Google ranking.

The Assessment establishes the condition of the website and identifies priorities. Any subsequent work undertaken by Clarity Digital Results has an agreed scope, so everybody understands what is — and isn’t — included.

This is particularly important with older websites that may have accumulated years of changes.

The standard SEO Essentials Assessment is designed for typical small-business websites without substantial e-commerce or unusual technical complexity.

If you have a large website, extensive product catalogue, multiple domains, several locations, a bespoke platform or a complicated history of migrations and redesigns, we’ll discuss the scope with you first.

If we discover during our initial conversation that your website falls substantially outside the standard assessment, we’ll explain why and agree an appropriate approach before additional work or cost is incurred.

That’s absolutely fine.

You don’t have to move your website hosting or maintenance to Clarity Digital Results to use our SEO services.

We can work alongside your existing developer, hosting company or internal team.

Where something needs their involvement, we’ll identify it.

Website support and SEO & Visibility are related, but they’re not the same service.

I don’t know whether I need an SEO Assessment

Start with our Free Website Visibility Review. It’s a lighter first look designed to identify whether there are obvious visibility issues or opportunities worth investigating.

You shouldn’t need to commit to months of SEO work simply to discover whether you need it.

SEO Essentials Assessment — £695

Understand where you are. Identify what matters. Then decide what happens next.