Meet the client and scope the audit

0:00 Meet the client, scope the audit

Welcome to the Technical SEO Audit Workshop. For the next fifteen lessons, you'll audit one business from first call to final report. Our client is Kiran Home, a fictional Lahore-based homeware brand selling to Pakistan, the UAE and the UK, whose organic traffic fell after a storefront relaunch. In this first lecture you'll learn why scoping decides whether an audit gets implemented, the questions to ask, the access to request, and how to write hypotheses before you crawl a single URL.

0:35 The client (illustrative)

Meet the client. Kiran Home sells handmade cushions, block-print bedding, brassware and rugs from a workshop in Lahore. It runs a headless storefront, React with server-side rendering, on a hosted commerce back end. About four thousand products, a hundred and eighty categories and three hundred blog posts, across four market folders: English for Pakistan, English and Arabic for the UAE, and English for the UK. The team is a founder, a marketing manager, two developers and a freelance designer. Three months ago they relaunched. Organic sessions fell. Everything here is illustrative.

1:15 Why scoping comes first

Here's the key idea: audits fail more often from poor scoping than from missed issues. A three-hundred-row spreadsheet of every warning a crawler produces isn't an audit. It's a data dump. Scoping tells you which questions matter, which templates carry revenue, and who can actually act on your findings. Think of a doctor. A good one asks where it hurts and what changed before ordering every test in the hospital.

1:45 The scoping call

The scoping call has four groups of questions. Business: which products, categories and markets drive revenue and margin, what does success look like in six months, and what are the seasonal peaks? For Kiran Home, that's Eid gifting, wedding season and Black Friday in the UK and UAE. History: what changed and when, any manual actions, outages or previous audits, and what happened to their recommendations? Team and process: who implements, how work is tracked, sprint length, and what marketing can change without developers. And constraints: budget, time and platform limits.

2:25 Access checklist

Next, the access checklist. Request everything in one message so you're not blocked mid-audit. A Search Console Domain property, verified by DNS, because Kiran Home only has a URL-prefix property. Switch on bulk data export to BigQuery now, because it has no backfill. Bing Webmaster Tools, including its AI Performance report. GA4 with a year of pre-relaunch data. Four or more weeks of Cloudflare logs. Staging access. The launch redirect map. And, new for twenty twenty-six, read access to CDN bot and firewall rules, plus the status of the Search Console AI opt-out control.

3:06 The scope statement

Then write the scope statement and get it signed off. Objective: identify the technical causes of the post-relaunch decline and produce a prioritised, developer-ready fix plan. In scope: all four market folders, key templates, indexing, crawling, rendering, redirects, hreflang, structured data and Core Web Vitals. Out of scope: keyword research, content rewrites and link building. Deliverables: a findings workbook, a roadmap, up to fifteen tickets, a stakeholder report and a walkthrough. Timeline and owners, named. This one page prevents weeks of scope creep.

3:42 Hypotheses before data

Now the most underrated step: hypotheses. Before crawling, write down what you suspect. For Kiran Home: redirect gaps, meaning some old URLs weren't redirected or went to irrelevant pages. Rendering or indexability regressions, like changed canonicals or noindex tags. Broken international signals, meaning hreflang or market routing changed. Mobile performance regressions. And a newer one: bot access changed, because relaunches often come with new CDN bot rules that challenge Bingbot or AI search bots. Hypotheses focus the audit and stop you drowning in data.

4:19 Alternative explanations

Keep an open mind, though. The cause could be non-technical. A broad core update might coincide with the relaunch, or the comparison period might include Ramadan one year and not the other. So check confirmed Google update dates and seasonality against the traffic drop before blaming the relaunch. We'll test every hypothesis with evidence, and we'll record an alternative explanation too.

4:46 Example 2: a small clinic (illustrative)

Worked example one: that's Kiran Home, which we'll follow all course. Worked example two, much smaller, and illustrative. A Leeds physiotherapy clinic with a sixty-page WordPress site asks for an SEO audit after a redesign. Good scoping keeps it proportionate. Objective: restore enquiries from local service pages. In scope: indexability, redirects from the old site, local landing pages, Business Profile consistency and mobile performance. Out of scope: content strategy. Deliverable: a ten-item prioritised list and five tickets for the freelance developer, in one week. Same discipline, a fraction of the size.

5:26 Hands-on: the scoping pack

The hands-on for this lesson is a scoping pack you can send today. The lesson text has an email template listing exactly what access you need, and a forty-five-minute kickoff agenda: goals and revenue templates, what changed and when, team and release process, constraints, hypotheses, and timeline and deliverables. Adapt it once and reuse it on every client.

5:51 Watch me do it: the kickoff call

Watch me do it. Here's how I run the Kiran Home kickoff call, minute by minute. Minute zero: I share my screen with the scope template and say, by the end of this call, we'll agree what success looks like, what changed, and who does what. Minute two: goals. I ask the founder, which three product lines matter most in the next six months? She says brassware, block-print bedding, and cushions for the UAE Eid season. I type them in. Minute ten: history. I ask the marketing manager to walk me through the relaunch week. She mentions the new CDN setup and that the redirect map was built by a contractor. Two hypotheses appear on screen: redirect gaps and bot access. Minute twenty: team and process. The senior developer explains two-week sprints and Jira. I note that tickets must go into Jira, not a PDF. Minute thirty: access. I paste the access list into the chat and ask them to switch on Search Console bulk export today. Minute forty: I read the scope statement back, including what's out of scope, and ask for sign-off by email. Minute forty-five: I confirm the timeline and book the walkthrough. Everything we agreed is in writing before we hang up.

7:21 Common mistakes

Common mistakes. Starting to crawl before understanding what makes money. Accepting a URL-prefix property and missing half the picture. Forgetting to switch on bulk export on day one. And promising, we'll recover your traffic by a certain date. Promise a diagnosis and a plan, not a ranking outcome.

7:42 Recap and try this now

Recap. Scope first: business, history, team and constraints. Request all access in one go, including Domain property, bulk export, Bing, logs and CDN rules. Write a signed scope statement and five hypotheses. Try this now. Take the scoping email template and adapt it for a real or practice client, and write three hypotheses for their site before you open a crawler. In the next lesson, we configure the crawl for Kiran Home.