SEO Audit Services for Maryland Businesses and Shopify Stores
Most SEO audits are software exports: hundreds of rows, no priorities, no clear next step. Kause Marketing Agency reviews your site by hand — technical health, on-page, content, backlinks, local signals and AI search readiness — and delivers a prioritized 90-day roadmap your team can act on. For Maryland businesses, the audit includes a local SEO review of your Google Business Profile, citations and city-level rankings; we are based in Randallstown, Baltimore County. For ecommerce and Shopify stores, we audit collections, product pages, filters, product schema and theme speed.
What an SEO Audit Actually Reveals — And What Most Audits Miss
A real SEO audit answers four questions: what is currently broken, which of those problems actually suppress rankings (versus issues that are flagged but harmless), what to fix first based on ranking impact and implementation effort, and exactly what to do. Not "fix Core Web Vitals", but "bring mobile LCP under 2.5s by deferring the third-party chat widget". Anything less is a checklist, not an audit.
The issues that matter most are often the ones automated audits misprioritize or miss: canonical tags pointing at a staging site in production, faceted navigation generating thousands of indexable filter URLs that waste crawl budget, or five pages competing for the same keyword while Google ranks the weakest one. Finding these takes manual diagnostic work, and that is what our audit is built around.
Eight Audit Components. Every Issue Prioritized by Ranking Impact.
Here is exactly what our full SEO audit covers.
Who Needs an SEO Audit
Five scenarios where an audit is the right next step — before any retainer, content investment, or link building.
If rankings have plateaued or declined despite content and link investment, the cause is often technical. Crawl errors, indexation problems, Core Web Vitals failures, schema gaps, and faceted navigation problems suppress rankings in ways that do not show up in standard analytics.
Ecommerce sites have audit needs service-business audits do not touch — faceted navigation, product schema completeness, Core Web Vitals on image-heavy pages, out-of-stock product handling, and platform-specific issues such as Shopify's duplicate collection-based product URLs and app script bloat. We audit Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento stores in Maryland and nationally.
Many content programs have more ranking opportunity in existing content than in producing new content — but only if the audit identifies which pages can move with optimization, which need full rewrites, which should be merged, and which should be deleted to protect crawl budget.
Many sites with weak rankings have backlink profiles that are part asset, part liability. A backlink audit identifies toxic links to disavow, surfaces strong existing links to protect, and maps the off-page gap explaining why competitors outrank you. Do this before any new link building investment.
A local SEO audit covers GBP health, NAP consistency across directories, and local keyword positioning down to city and ZIP code level — useful for Maryland service businesses and professional practices. An AI search visibility audit benchmarks your appearance across AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Apple Intelligence, and Copilot — a part of search visibility most audits still ignore.
What a Real SEO Audit Looks Like vs What Most Agencies Deliver
Most audits gather dust because they were never built to drive implementation in the first place.
Our SEO Audit Methodology
A five-phase audit process, delivered in 5 to 21 days depending on site size. Built to produce findings you can act on, not a report nobody reads.
Discovery & Goal Alignment
We map your tech stack — CMS or Shopify theme, hosting, CDN, plugins or apps, third-party scripts — and pull data from Search Console, Analytics, rank tracking, log files, and any SEO tools you use. We document your business goals, priority keywords, and conversion targets so the audit is scoped against what matters for your business, not generic best practices.
Multi-Tool Audit Execution
Crawls with Screaming Frog and Sitebulb. Field data from PageSpeed Insights and real-user monitoring. Backlink data from Ahrefs, Semrush, Majestic, and Google Search Console. Log file analysis where access is available. AI search visibility testing across the major AI platforms. Manual review on top of every automated tool output.
Issue Prioritization & Impact Scoring
Every flagged issue is manually reviewed and scored on two dimensions: ranking impact (high, medium, low) and implementation effort (hours, days, weeks). Automated tools flag hundreds of issues without priorities. Manual review cuts that down to the issues that actually matter for your rankings, and explains why each one matters for your business.
Roadmap & Implementation Specs
We build the prioritized 90-day roadmap with a specific recommendation for every priority issue: the exact technical change, an effort estimate, and who is needed to do it — in-house team, agency, or developer. This is the document most audit projects never produce.
Delivery & Walkthrough
You receive the written report, an executive summary, and a 60–90 minute walkthrough call where we explain findings, answer questions, and agree on priorities. If you move to a retainer, we start implementation directly. If you implement in-house or with another agency, the specs are detailed enough to execute without ongoing back-and-forth.
Our SEO Audit Methodology
A five-phase audit process, delivered in 5 to 21 days depending on site size. Built to produce findings you can act on, not a report nobody reads.
Discovery & Goal Alignment
We map your tech stack — CMS or Shopify theme, hosting, CDN, plugins or apps, third-party scripts — and pull data from Search Console, Analytics, rank tracking, log files, and any SEO tools you use. We document your business goals, priority keywords, and conversion targets so the audit is scoped against what matters for your business, not generic best practices.
Multi-Tool Audit Execution
Crawls with Screaming Frog and Sitebulb. Field data from PageSpeed Insights and real-user monitoring. Backlink data from Ahrefs, Semrush, Majestic, and Google Search Console. Log file analysis where access is available. AI search visibility testing across the major AI platforms. Manual review on top of every automated tool output.
Issue Prioritization & Impact Scoring
Every flagged issue is manually reviewed and scored on two dimensions: ranking impact (high, medium, low) and implementation effort (hours, days, weeks). Automated tools flag hundreds of issues without priorities. Manual review cuts that down to the issues that actually matter for your rankings, and explains why each one matters for your business.
Roadmap & Implementation Specs
We build the prioritized 90-day roadmap with a specific recommendation for every priority issue: the exact technical change, an effort estimate, and who is needed to do it — in-house team, agency, or developer. This is the document most audit projects never produce.
Delivery & Walkthrough
You receive the written report, an executive summary, and a 60–90 minute walkthrough call where we explain findings, answer questions, and agree on priorities. If you move to a retainer, we start implementation directly. If you implement in-house or with another agency, the specs are detailed enough to execute without ongoing back-and-forth.
SEO Audit Pricing
One-time audits priced by site size. 50% of the audit fee is credited to an SEO retainer signed within 60 days. Not sure which fits? Start with a free 30-minute audit call.
| Service Tier | Investment | Best For |
|---|---|---|
| Foundation Audit | $1,200 one-time | Sites under 100 pages, delivered in 5 days — Maryland local businesses, service sites, professional practices, and small Shopify stores |
| Deep-Dive AuditMost Popular | $3,500 one-time | Sites with 100–1,000 pages, delivered in 10 days — ecommerce and Shopify stores, multi-location businesses, or moderate technical complexity |
| Enterprise Audit | From $7,500 one-time | Sites with 1,000+ pages, delivered in 14–21 days — large catalogs, Shopify Plus, Magento, headless or multi-region stacks |
SEO Audit Services — Common Questions
Straight answers on cost, timelines, deliverables, and what happens after the audit.
An SEO audit is a full diagnostic of how your website performs in search: technical health, on-page optimization, content quality, backlink profile, local SEO signals where relevant, and AI search readiness. A useful audit does more than list issues. It filters automated findings through manual review, ranks each issue by its impact on rankings and the effort to fix it, and turns the result into a specific implementation roadmap.
Our one-time SEO audits are priced by site size. Foundation: $1,200 for sites under 100 pages, delivered in 5 days. Deep-Dive: $3,500 for 100–1,000 pages, delivered in 10 days. Enterprise: from $7,500 for 1,000+ pages, delivered in 14–21 days. 50% of the audit fee is credited to an SEO retainer signed within 60 days. Full details are on our pricing page.
It depends on site size: 5 days for a Foundation audit (under 100 pages), 10 days for a Deep-Dive (100–1,000 pages), and 14–21 days for an Enterprise audit (1,000+ pages), where log file analysis and cross-platform checks take longer. If you are dealing with a sudden traffic drop or a suspected manual action, tell us on the first call so those checks come first.
Our free SEO audit is a 30-minute review call plus a short written snapshot of your top issues, usually within 48 hours. It shows you where the biggest problems are. The paid audit is the full report: a complete crawl, manual review of every finding, each issue scored by ranking impact and effort, implementation specs for your developers, and a 90-day roadmap. Free automated tool reports are a useful reference, but they flag hundreds of issues with no priorities and no guidance.
It can help, especially if rankings have plateaued or dropped despite ongoing work. An independent audit gives you a second opinion on your current agency's priorities. Sometimes it confirms they are on the right track; sometimes it shows gaps worth raising with them. Either way, the audit is a diagnostic, not a sales document for our retainer services.
A written audit report, an executive summary for leadership, a prioritized 90-day implementation roadmap with effort estimates, technical specifications your developers can work from, and a 60–90 minute walkthrough call to review findings and answer questions. The documentation is detailed enough for an in-house team or another agency to execute without ongoing consulting.
Often, yes. Problems that slip past tool-based audits include canonical tags pointing at a staging site in production, several pages competing for the same keyword that were treated as unrelated, faceted navigation creating large numbers of junk URLs that were flagged as low priority, and AI search visibility gaps that were never on the checklist. These need manual diagnosis, which is the core of our audit.
Either works. Many businesses hire us for the audit and then move to a retainer so we implement the fixes ourselves; 50% of the audit fee is credited to a retainer signed within 60 days. Others implement in-house or with their existing developers using our specifications. There is no pressure to continue — the audit stands on its own.
Yes. Kause Marketing Agency is based in Randallstown, Baltimore County, and works with local service businesses and professional practices across Maryland. A local SEO audit adds Google Business Profile health, NAP consistency across directories, citation gaps against local competitors, review signals, and rankings by city and ZIP code. See our local SEO Maryland and Baltimore County SEO pages.
Yes. Ecommerce and Shopify SEO is our founder's specialty. A Shopify audit covers collection and product page optimization, duplicate URLs from collection-based product paths, filter and faceted navigation handling, product schema, image weight and theme speed, apps that add render-blocking scripts, and out-of-stock handling. We audit Shopify stores in Maryland and nationally. See ecommerce SEO.
Ready to Find Out What's Actually Holding Your Rankings Back?
A full SEO audit finds the issues suppressing your rankings, scores each one by impact and effort, and gives you a roadmap your team can execute. Start with a free 30-minute review call and a short written snapshot of your top issues, usually within 48 hours.