What is an Illucrum SEO audit?
The featured-snippet answer, in plain language.
An Illucrum SEO audit is a 52-point manual review across technical SEO, on-page SEO, keyword visibility, backlinks, competitor positioning, and conversion UX. It is delivered as a written report with each finding scored by impact and prioritised for action. Delivery runs 5 to 8 business days.
The five stages of an Illucrum audit
Every audit follows the same five stages from intake to delivery. The order matters: skipping stages produces shallow reports, which is what makes most cheap audits useless.
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Intake (Day 1)
A short brief, written or over a 15-minute call (your choice). The intake covers:
· The site's URL and current state
· What are your main goals
· Anything you already know is broken
· Any business context the data won't surface (a recent replatform, a Google update that hurt rankings, a competitor that out-flanked you)
The intake is where most audits go wrong; without business context, the auditor scores findings against an abstract idea of "good SEO" instead of against your goals.
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Crawl and tooling (Days 1 to 3)
Automated tooling runs across the site. The standard stack:
· Google Search Console for indexing, coverage, performance, and Core Web Vitals
· PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse for performance and CWV deep-dives
· SEOptimer for backlinks, keyword visibility, competitor analysis and full crawl
· Google Analytics for average session duration and bounce rate
Manual research on your business and industry. Main goals:
· Understand customer profile different customers pay attention to different details
· Competition as your website needs to outperform theirs
· Read your website, to understand its content and structure.
Tools give us the raw data. Research gives us context.
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Manual review (Days 3 to 5)
The 52-point checklist is applied by hand. This is where most of the audit's value comes from. A few examples of what the manual stage catches that tools miss:
· A llms.txt that is missing information
· A robots.txt rule that's accidentally blocking a high-traffic content cluster
· Comparison pages that target the right keyword but fail to match the search intent
· Internal link anchor text that's optimised for the wrong page
· Schema markup that validates but contradicts the on-page content
Roughly half of the findings come from this stage. Tools alone produce a report that's 90% noise.
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Scoring and prioritisation (Days 5 to 7)
Every finding is scored on two axes:
· Impact: not every fix and improvement carries the same weight
· Effort: how much engineering, content, or external work is required
The scoring rubric is consistent across every audit. The output is a prioritised list: fix these first, fix these next, ignore these. Two-thirds of the value comes from knowing what to ignore.
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Report and handoff (Days 7 to 8)
The final report is delivered as a single PDF containing everything. It includes:
· A brief overview of the current situation, covering main issues and opportunities.
· The full 52-point scoring table
· A prioritised action plan grouped by impact
· Specific implementation notes for the top findings
If you want a 1h walkthrough call after delivery, that's included at no extra cost. If you don't, the report is written to stand on its own.
Timeline expectations
From the day you confirm the audit to the day the report lands, expect five to eight business days. The exact length depends on site size and audit type.
| Audit type | Points | Delivery window |
|---|---|---|
| SaaS SEO audit | 52 points | 5 to 8 days |
| E-commerce SEO audit | 52 points | 5 to 8 days |
| Website SEO audit | 52 points | 5 to 8 days |
| Technical SEO audit | 36 points | 3 to 5 days |
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What you actually receive
The deliverable is concrete. Here's exactly what's in the PDF report at the end of an Illucrum audit. Everything below sits inside one PDF. An optional 1h walkthrough call after delivery is included if you want it.
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Overview
A summary of the website's current situation, main issues and opportunities.
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Top issues found
A list of the most important issues detected, ranked by severity
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Detailed analysis by section
Each section scored, point by point all the findings explained in a simple language
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A To-Do list
A list containing the suggested order in which improvements should be implemented.
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Optional 1h walkthrough call
If you need it, we can schedule a call after the delivery.
What an Illucrum audit isn't
The audit is a diagnosis, not a treatment. To set expectations honestly.
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01
No monthly retainer
You don't sign up for ongoing work to get the audit.
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02
No vague "strategy session" output
The deliverable is structured, scored, and specific.
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03
No 200-page PDF dumps
Audits do not have to be long. They need to be useful.
If you decide you want help with implementation after the audit, that conversation happens after delivery, not before. Read the audit vs retainer comparison.
Process FAQs
The questions that come up most often about how the audit runs.
Do I need to give you access to GSC and Analytics?
Yes. Read-only access to Google Search Console and Google Analytics is the minimum. For e-commerce audits, we also need access to the platform admin (Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento) so we can see the configuration that public-facing crawlers can't. Access is granted to a dedicated audit email; revoked at delivery.
What if the audit finds something urgent before delivery?
If we find something that's actively bleeding traffic or revenue (a serious indexing block, a misconfigured canonical sweeping the site, a Core Web Vital failure causing rankings to collapse), we flag it immediately rather than waiting for the report. The report still lands at the scheduled time.
Can I pay after delivery instead of upfront?
No. The report is only released once payment has been received. The order is: we agree the scope, we send the invoice, we do the work, and the finished PDF goes out once the invoice is paid. This is standard for fixed-scope diagnostic work. You can cancel any time before delivery, and if you have already paid we return the full amount.
Can the audit cover multiple sites?
The price covers one domain. If you operate multiple distinct sites, each needs its own audit. If you operate one site with multiple country subfolders or subdomains, that's still one audit; we'll discuss scope during intake.
Ready to start the audit?
Send a short message describing your site. We'll confirm the right audit and start the intake within 24 hours.
Curious about our offer? See the different audit types.