SEO Audit Methodology That Actually Works
We don't follow cookie-cutter templates. Over the past four years, we've refined our audit process through work with 87 Bulgarian businesses—from Sofia tech startups to Varna tourism operators. Each audit reveals what's truly holding back your rankings, not just what's easy to check.
Discuss Your ProjectHow We Approach Technical Audits
Most agencies run automated scans and call it a day. We start there, sure—but then comes the real work. Our team manually reviews crawl patterns, analyzes server logs, and tests mobile experiences across actual Bulgarian network conditions.
Foundation Analysis
First week of March 2025, we crawled a client's 2,400-page site and found their sitemap included 340 pages that returned 404s. Fixing that single issue improved their indexing by 23% within two weeks. We check server response codes, redirect chains, and canonical implementations before anything else.
Content Gap Mapping
Here's where it gets interesting. We compare your existing content against what's actually ranking in Bulgarian search results. Not just keywords—we look at search intent, content structure, and how competitors are answering queries. Sometimes the problem isn't missing content but content organized in ways search engines can't understand.
Mobile Reality Check
Testing on actual Bulgarian mobile networks changed our methodology last year. A client's site loaded fine on office Wi-Fi but took 8 seconds on mobile data in Plovdiv. We now test across different connection speeds and devices, because that's how your customers actually access your site.
The Manual Review That Makes the Difference
Automated tools miss context. They'll flag every h1 tag but won't tell you if your page structure makes sense to users. In January 2025, we worked with a Burgas e-commerce site where tools reported perfect scores—but their category pages weren't ranking. Manual review revealed their filtering system created duplicate content issues the tools didn't catch.
- Line-by-line schema markup validation against Google's documentation
- Manual mobile usability testing on five different devices
- Competitive analysis of top 10 results for your target queries
- Server log analysis to understand actual crawl behavior
- Page speed testing under real Bulgarian network conditions
This takes longer than running automated scans. A thorough audit usually spans two weeks, not two hours. But you get recommendations based on what we actually found, not generic best practices that may not apply to your situation.
Learn Our Process
What We've Learned From Bulgarian Sites
Local Hosting Matters More Than Expected
Through 2024, we tracked performance for 23 Bulgarian sites. Those using Sofia-based servers showed consistently better Core Web Vitals scores for users accessing from Bulgarian IPs. Not a huge difference—but in competitive niches, that 0.3 second improvement can shift rankings.
Bilingual Sites Need Careful Planning
Half our clients serve content in both Bulgarian and English. The ones who implement hreflang correctly and maintain separate URL structures see better results than those mixing languages or using automatic translation. We caught one site serving Bulgarian content with English meta descriptions—took three months to recover from that indexing mess.
Image Optimization Gets Overlooked
Bulgarian tourism and real estate sites often upload high-resolution images straight from cameras. We've seen 8MB hero images on mobile-first indexed sites. Simple image compression and WebP conversion typically cuts page weight by 60% without visible quality loss. Makes a noticeable difference on mobile networks.
