I've onboarded over 22 clients across B2B SaaS, e-commerce, and professional services. Every single engagement starts the same way: a structured 5-step audit before a single piece of content gets created or a single link gets built.
The five pillars are: (1) Crawlability & Indexation — making sure Google can actually access and understand the site; (2) Topical Authority Mapping — identifying where you own a topic vs. where you're diluted; (3) Intent-Revenue Alignment — matching your keyword strategy to the buyer journey; (4) Competitive Gap Analysis — finding the exact pages your competitors rank for that you don't; and (5) Technical Debt Scoring — prioritising the technical fixes with the highest ROI.
Most audits I inherit are either too broad or too technical to be actionable. This framework is built around one constraint: every finding has to trace back to a revenue metric. If it doesn't affect sign-ups, trial starts, or MRR — it waits.