--- title: "Meet the client and scope the audit | Optimize All Academy" description: "The client for this workshop Throughout this course you will audit one fictional business end to end. Everything about it is invented for teaching, and…" url: https://optimizeall.com/learn/technical-seo-audit-in-practice/meet-the-client-and-scope-the-audit updated: 2026-10-05 --- Technical SEO Audit Workshop · Scoping the audit and setting up · lesson 1 of 14 · 12 min # Meet the client and scope the audit ## The client for this workshop Throughout this course you will audit one fictional business end to end. Everything about it is invented for teaching, and every number is **illustrative**. **Kiran Home** (`www.kiranhome.example`) sells handmade homeware — cushions, block-print bedding, brassware and rugs — from a workshop in Lahore. It ships to Pakistan, the UAE and the UK. | Fact | Detail | |---|---| | Platform | Headless storefront (React with server-side rendering) on a hosted commerce back end | | Size | Around 4,000 products, 180 categories, 300 blog posts | | Markets | `/en-pk/`, `/en-ae/`, `/ar-ae/`, `/en-gb/` subdirectories | | Team | Founder, marketing manager (your contact), two in-house developers, a freelance designer | | Recent change | New storefront launched three months ago; organic sessions have fallen noticeably since | | Tooling | Search Console (URL-prefix property only), GA4, Cloudflare CDN | The marketing manager's brief: *"Organic traffic dropped after the relaunch. Find out why, tell us what to fix first, and give our developers something they can actually work with."* ## Why scoping comes first Audits fail more often from poor scoping than from missed issues. A 300-row spreadsheet of every warning a crawler produces is not an audit — it is a data dump. Scoping tells you **which questions matter**, **which templates carry revenue**, and **who can act on your findings**. ## The scoping call: questions to ask **Business** 1. Which products, categories and markets generate most revenue? Which have the best margin? 2. What does success look like in six months — revenue, leads, visibility in a new market? 3. Any seasonal peaks? (For Kiran Home: Eid gifting, wedding season, Black Friday in the UK and UAE.) **History** 4. What changed and when? Relaunch date, URL changes, redirects, content removed, tracking changes. 5. Any known manual actions, security incidents or outages? 6. Were any previous audits done — and what happened to their recommendations? **Team and process** 7. Who implements changes? How do they receive work (Jira, Linear, Trello, email)? 8. Sprint length and release process? Is there a staging environment? 9. What can the marketing team change without developers (CMS fields, redirects, content)? **Constraints** 10. Budget and time for fixes this quarter. Platform limits (for example, fixed URL patterns). ## The access checklist Request everything in one message so you are not blocked mid-audit: - [ ] Search Console — ideally a **Domain property** (the client only has URL-prefix; ask them to verify the domain via DNS so you see all subdomains and protocols). - [ ] Bing Webmaster Tools (can be imported from Search Console). - [ ] GA4 with at least read access, plus pre-relaunch data for comparison. - [ ] CDN or server logs (Cloudflare Logpush or equivalent) — at least a few weeks. - [ ] Staging URL and credentials. - [ ] Old site crawl or URL list, and the redirect map used at launch. - [ ] CMS read access; list of apps/plugins installed. - [ ] Rank-tracking history, if any. - [ ] Search Console **bulk data export** to BigQuery switched on now (it has no backfill) and any existing Looker Studio dashboards. - [ ] Bing Webmaster Tools **AI Performance** and Search Console **generative AI report** access (for AI search visibility). - [ ] CDN/WAF bot settings (Cloudflare Bot Management / "AI crawlers" rules) and any written AI crawler policy. - [ ] Status of the Search Console **Search generative AI control** (on/off, who decided). ## Writing the scope statement Capture the agreement in a short document the client signs off: ```text Audit scope — Kiran Home (www.kiranhome.example) Objective: Identify technical causes of the post-relaunch organic decline and produce a prioritised, developer-ready fix plan. In scope: All four market subdirectories; product, category, blog, home and static templates; indexing, crawling, rendering, redirects, hreflang, structured data, Core Web Vitals. Out of scope: Keyword research, content rewrites, link building (separate workstreams). Deliverables: Findings workbook, prioritised roadmap, up to 15 developer tickets, stakeholder report, 30-minute walkthrough. Timeline: Access by day 2; findings by day 10; walkthrough day 12. Owners: Client PM — marketing manager; Dev lead — senior developer. ``` ## Forming initial hypotheses Before crawling, write down what you suspect. Hypotheses focus the audit and prevent you from drowning in data. For Kiran Home, sensible starting hypotheses are: 1. **Redirect gaps** — some old URLs were not redirected, or were redirected to irrelevant pages. 2. **Rendering or indexability regressions** — the new storefront may output different canonicals, noindex tags or thinner content. 3. **International signals broke** — hreflang or market routing may have changed. 4. **Performance regressions** on mobile templates. 5. **Bot access changed** — the relaunch may have come with new CDN bot rules that block or challenge crawlers (including Bingbot or AI search bots). You will confirm or reject each with evidence. Keep an open mind: the cause could also be non-technical (for example, seasonality or a broad core update coinciding with the relaunch). Check the dates of confirmed Google updates against the traffic drop before blaming the relaunch. ## Hands-on: a scoping pack you can send today ```text Subject: Technical SEO audit — access request and kickoff agenda Hi [name], to start on [date] we need: 1. Search Console: Owner/Full user on a Domain property (DNS verification) + bulk export ON 2. Bing Webmaster Tools: add [email] (or import from Search Console) 3. GA4: Viewer on the property, incl. data from 12 months before the relaunch 4. Logs: 4+ weeks of Cloudflare Logpush (or origin logs) incl. user agent + status 5. Staging URL + credentials; the launch redirect map; list of plugins/apps 6. CDN/WAF: read access to bot and firewall rules Kickoff agenda (45 min): goals & revenue templates · what changed & when · team & release process · constraints · hypotheses · timeline & deliverables ``` ## Worked example 2: scoping a much smaller job Not every audit is a 4,000-product storefront. A Leeds physiotherapy clinic (illustrative) with a 60-page WordPress site asks for "an SEO audit" after a redesign. Good scoping keeps it proportionate: objectives (restore enquiries from the "physio near me" style pages), in scope (indexability, redirects from the old site, local landing pages, Business Profile consistency, mobile performance), out of scope (content strategy), deliverables (a 10-item prioritised list and 5 tickets for the freelance developer), timeline (one week). The same discipline — objectives, hypotheses, access, owners — at a fraction of the size. ## Common mistakes - Starting to crawl before understanding what makes money. - Accepting a URL-prefix property and missing half the picture. - Promising "we will recover traffic by X date". Promise a diagnosis and a plan, not a ranking outcome. ## Video lecture: Meet the client and scope the audit Lecture coming soon · 13 chapters · about 8 minutes. Read the full transcript below. 1. Meet the client, scope the audit 2. The client (illustrative) 3. Why scoping comes first 4. The scoping call 5. Access checklist 6. The scope statement 7. Hypotheses before data 8. Alternative explanations 9. Example 2: a small clinic (illustrative) 10. Hands-on: the scoping pack 11. Watch me do it: the kickoff call 12. Common mistakes 13. Recap and try this now ## Lecture transcript ### 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. ### 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. ### 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. ### 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. ### 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. ### 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. ### 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. ### 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. ### 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. ### 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. ### 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. ### 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. ### 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. ## Key takeaways - Scope before you crawl: revenue templates, markets, history, team and constraints. - Request all access in one message, including logs, pre-launch data and the launch redirect map. - Write a signed scope statement with objectives, in/out of scope, deliverables and owners. - Form testable hypotheses, and check algorithm update dates before blaming a relaunch. ## Try it Write a one-page scope statement and five hypotheses for a real or fictional client that recently relaunched its website. - [Next: Configuring the crawl like Googlebot](https://optimizeall.com/learn/technical-seo-audit-in-practice/configuring-the-crawl) - [All lessons of Technical SEO Audit Workshop](https://optimizeall.com/learn/technical-seo-audit-in-practice)