For agencies that grow D2C brands
What should an SEO audit check first on a D2C brand's site?
An SEO audit checks whether search engines can reach, index and understand a brand's site, then ranks what to fix by what it costs. Pages Google can't reach come first, then broken product links, missing product schema and slow mobile pages. Run it on a schedule, because sites break between audits, often after a theme or catalogue change.
Website health 70% · 1 critical and 10 high findings across 150 pages · Moolwanai-dm · 150-page crawl · Sep 2026 · real data
What you'll see in 10 minutes
- Your first brand's report, built from its domain alone.
- Its website health run: a crawl of the site with findings ranked by severity.
- Its search visibility from the same starter runs, next to the crawl.
Why does a 60-page SEO audit rarely get fixed?
Day one with a new brand. Your team runs a crawler and sends a 60-page report with 400 issues. The brand's developer fixes the easy ones. Three months later, a theme update quietly adds noindex to the collection pages, and nobody notices until traffic from category searches halves.
A long list hides the one issue that matters. When 400 findings carry equal weight, the developer starts at the top of the PDF, not with the pages Google can no longer reach. And a one-off audit can't see what breaks after it was run. Here is how the common approaches compare.
| What you need | One-off audit | Scheduled crawl | ai-dm |
|---|---|---|---|
| Issues found | Hundreds, on the day | Hundreds, every run | Every run, ranked by severity |
| What broke since last time | Not covered | If someone compares the runs | Flagged as a change |
| What to fix first | Up to the reader | Up to the reader | A recommendation for each finding |
| Every brand at once | One report per brand | One project per brand | All brands, in one morning view |
What should an SEO audit check first on a D2C site?
Check in the order Google meets the site: reach, index, understand, then load. A product page with perfect copy earns nothing if Google can't reach it. Five checks cover most of what costs a D2C brand its search traffic.
Reach: pages Google can't crawl
Check robots.txt, noindex tags and server errors on product and collection templates. One wrong setting on a template hides every page built from it.
Index: pages Google has left out
Search Console's page indexing report lists pages that were crawled but not indexed, and why. Look for collections and best sellers on that list first.
Product pages: structured data and variants
Product markup with price and availability makes pages eligible for product rich results. Check that colour and size variants don't create duplicate pages.
Speed on mobile
Google's good thresholds are LCP within 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds and CLS under 0.1. Test product and collection templates, not only the home page.
Category pages and internal links
Thin collection pages with no text, duplicate titles and products linked from nowhere lose to marketplaces with richer pages.
Speed thresholds come from Google's Core Web Vitals guide. The same pages feed AI answers. Engines that can't crawl a guide can't cite it, so a clean crawl is the first step to track AI search visibility that improves. For a brand with a store, accurate location pages and business details on the site also support its local pack rank.
Which SEO issues should a brand fix first?
Rank by severity and reach, not by count. One template set to noindex can hide more revenue than 300 images without alt text. Weigh each issue by how badly it blocks search and how many pages it touches, then hand the developer a plan for the week.
Turn a crawl report into a fix-first plan
Pick each issue from the brand's audit and enter how many pages it affects. The plan ranks them by severity and reach, and splits them into this week, this month and later.
- Pages blocked by robots.txt or noindex · 48 pagesthis week
- Slow mobile pages (LCP over 2.5 s) · 120 pagesthis week
- Missing or invalid product structured data · 31 pagesthis week
- Links to pages that return 404 · 23 pagesthis month
- Duplicate titles or meta descriptions · 40 pagesthis month
- Images without alt text · 300 pagesthis month
Start with the 48 pages blocked from Google. Until they can be reached, nothing else on this list can earn traffic.
Free, no login. The starting issues are an illustrative example. Severity weights follow the check order on this page.
(login required) · Hand the developer one plan, not 60 pages.
How does ai-dm audit a brand's site and keep watching it?
A crawl, a ranked list and a watch on what changes. ai-dm crawls the brand's pages, schema, headings and links, runs PageSpeed checks, and ranks every finding by severity with a recommendation. With Search Console connected, it adds Google's own indexing and product snippet reports. Each brand's site health sits in one morning view of every brand you manage.
last crawl 82% · down 11 points
Collection template now carries noindex · 48 pages
new since last crawl · after a theme updateProduct structured data missing offers.price · 31 pages
product rich results at riskMobile LCP 3.4 s on product pages
Google's good threshold is 2.5 sIn this illustrative example, a crawl of 212 pages finds Saltpan Snacks' website health down from 82% to 71%. New since the last crawl, a theme update set the collection template to noindex on 48 pages. 31 product pages are missing a price in their structured data, and mobile product pages take 3.4 seconds to show their main content.
What broke reaches you the day it breaks. A new critical finding, or a fall in the brand's site health, arrives as a daily change alert with the pages affected. ai-dm can draft fixes such as titles, descriptions and schema; nothing changes on the site until your team approves it. Once the crawl is clean, find keyword and content gaps to see what the brand should publish next.
On our own brand. Moolwan's website health is 70%, with 1 critical and 10 high findings across a 150-page crawl (ai-dm · Sep 2026). Its product markup is in better shape: 1,400 items are valid for product rich results, with 24 flagged to fix (Search Console · Product snippets · 26 Sep 2026). You can watch ai-dm run Moolwan, weak numbers included.
Related pages
Questions agencies ask about SEO audits
What does an SEO audit include?
An SEO audit crawls a site the way a search engine does and reports what stops pages from being found, indexed or understood: blocked pages, server errors, broken links, wrong canonicals, missing structured data, slow pages and thin or duplicate content. A useful audit ranks the findings by what they cost, so the team knows what to fix first. ai-dm runs one for every brand you add, from its domain.
How often should an agency audit a brand's site?
Run a full crawl at least monthly, and again after any theme update, platform migration or large catalogue change, because that is when templates break. Compare each crawl with the last one so new problems stand out from old ones. ai-dm keeps the crawls and flags what changed between them.
Is a free SEO audit tool enough?
For one site, once, a free crawler finds most technical issues. The cost comes later: someone has to rerun it for every brand, compare the results by hand and decide what to fix first. ai-dm does that across your brands and ranks each finding with a recommendation. Try the fix-first plan on this page with any tool's report.
Which SEO issues hurt a D2C store most?
Collection or product templates set to noindex, discontinued products left as broken links, colour and size variants creating duplicate pages, product pages without price and availability in their structured data, and slow mobile pages. Each one touches many pages at once, which is why templates come first in the check order on this page.
Does ai-dm fix SEO issues itself?
No. ai-dm finds and ranks the issues and can draft fixes such as titles, meta descriptions and schema. Nothing changes on the brand's site until a person on your team approves it, and changes to the theme or code stay with the brand's developer.
Can an SEO audit explain why a brand's traffic dropped?
Partly. An audit shows technical causes, such as pages that stopped being indexed or a template that slowed down. A drop can also come from rankings, seasonality or a rival's move, so check the audit against Search Console's clicks and queries for the same dates. ai-dm puts the crawl next to the brand's search numbers so you can see both.
No plan to pick. Billed in USD and INR. A brand's data is deletable on request.