Service 01 — Diagnostic
Find out exactly where search growth is blocked.
A structured diagnostic across six areas — from commercial demand through to AI search visibility and measurement. You finish with a prioritised 90-day roadmap where every recommendation carries an impact, an effort, a priority and an owner.
Diagnostics run for
- NORTHWIND
- HALCYON
- BRIGHTLANE
- VERTIQ
- MERIDIAN
- ASTRALIS
What this includes
Six areas, assessed in order.
Commercial context first, technical reality second. Assessing them the other way round is how audits end up recommending work nobody needed.
- 01
Business & Demand
Understand what the company sells, who buys it, where commercial value sits, how customers make decisions, and what search should contribute to the business.
- 02
Technical Search Health
Assess whether search engines can efficiently crawl, render, understand, index, and prioritize the right parts of the site.
- 03
Search Architecture
Evaluate how commercial pages, informational content, topic clusters, internal links, site structure, and intent are organized, including cannibalization and duplication.
- 04
Content & Authority
Assess whether existing content deserves visibility, where topical or commercial gaps exist, whether authority is being built around the right subjects, and where consolidation or expansion is needed.
- 05
AI Search Visibility
Benchmark how the brand appears across relevant AI search and answer surfaces, where competitors are visible instead, what sources are being cited, and where opportunities exist to improve retrieval and citation readiness.
- 06
Measurement & Commercial Alignment
Determine whether SEO performance is connected to meaningful business outcomes and whether tracking is sufficient to measure search contribution.
Primary deliverables
Ten artefacts you keep.
Yours whether you continue with us or not. The roadmap is written so another team could pick it up and execute it without a translation layer.
- Executive diagnosis
- Search health scorecard
- AI visibility baseline
- Competitor opportunity analysis
- Quick wins
- Structural growth opportunities
- Content opportunities
- Technical priorities
- Measurement gaps
- Prioritized 90-day roadmap
How recommendations are classified
Every material recommendation, decided.
Extract from a live roadmap. Nothing ships as an observation — it ships as a decision with a name against it.
| Recommendation | Impact | Effort | Priority | Owner |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Consolidate 340 near-duplicate product pages | High | Medium | P1 | Agency |
| Fix render-blocking JS on templated category pages | High | High | P1 | Client dev |
| Rebuild organisation and product schema | Medium | Low | P2 | Agency |
| Close attribution gap between organic and CRM | High | High | P2 | Client + agency |
| Expand comparison content for non-brand demand | Medium | Medium | P3 | Agency |
The goal is to convert observations into decisions.
An audit that lists problems moves nothing. The diagnostic ends where most audits stop: with a sequence, an owner and a reason.
What the diagnostic found
Three diagnoses that changed the plan.
Northwind Systems
Enterprise SaaS
71% of indexed pages had taken no organic entry in twelve months. The roadmap started with retirement, not publishing.
24,400pages retired firstHalcyon Industrial
Manufacturing
The AI visibility baseline came back at zero citations across four assistants — while two competitors held 60% of answers.
0 → 80%share of answers, 9 monthsBrightlane Capital
B2B fintech
Measurement was the real gap: organic couldn't be tied to a single closed deal until tracking was rebuilt.
4 weeksto board-ready reporting
Reviews
What clients say about the diagnostic.
The diagnostic told us to stop doing three things we'd budgeted for. That conversation alone paid for it twice over.
Elena MercierVP Marketing, Northwind Systems Every recommendation had an owner and an effort score. Our dev lead could plan a sprint off it without a translation meeting.
Daniel KøsterHead of Digital, Halcyon Industrial First audit I've read that opened with commercial context rather than a list of broken tags.
Priya RamanCMO, Brightlane Capital
Start here — every engagement begins with the diagnostic
Stop guessing which work matters.
Six areas assessed, ten deliverables, one prioritised roadmap. If we find the answer is that you don't need us, we'll say so.