Nadia Mohamed
Technical foundations
Lock down access, audit the foundations.
- Crawl & rendering
- Hreflang & sitemap
- Robots & index strategy
- Internal linking
Service · Productised audit
GEO & Technical SEO — the three-week architecture audit
Fixed scope, fixed fee, three weeks. A structural audit covering both halves of organic visibility — the technical SEO layer (crawl, rendering, hreflang, canonical, performance) and the GEO layer (structured data, entity signals, AI-citation readiness). Ends with a workbook your developers can execute from. Built for SaaS and tech teams who need a structural answer, not a list of generic SEO tips.
When this is the right call
This audit is built for specific structural problems — the kind where the basics seem to work but the architecture underneath is doing less than you think it is. Some of the patterns that come up most often:
- You're planning a migration CMS, platform, domain consolidation — and you need a redirect map and equity-protection plan before, not after.
- Multi-domain or multilingual stack Regional domains, locale routing, hreflang at scale — the canonical model has to be defensible.
- Headless or JAMstack Modern rendering chain, Next.js / Remix / similar — and you need to know what Googlebot is actually receiving.
- Rich results disappeared Product ratings, breadcrumb trails, video markup or review stars stopped showing — usually a schema-rollout, validation or eligibility issue.
- AI search isn't surfacing you Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity are citing your competitors and not you. Structural fix, not content fix.
- Your brand entity isn't legible to AI Wikidata is wrong or missing, sameAs links don't tie back, Person / Organisation signals are inconsistent across pages. AI engines can't reliably attribute content to you.
- You shipped schema and nothing changed The markup validates, but rich results don't appear and AI engines aren't citing. Usually a strategy, eligibility or entity-context issue, not a markup one.
- Internal SEO is blocked on engineering Your in-house SEO knows what needs to ship but can't get the dev tickets executed. The audit produces a workbook engineering can actually open.
- You scaled internationally Locales added one at a time, and the architecture has drifted. Hreflang reciprocity, canonical strategy, regional URLs.
- You think Google is getting something different What renders in a browser doesn't match what Search Console reports, and you can't tell where the gap opens.
What you get
Six pieces, designed for an async team across engineering, content and brand. Not a slide deck — a workbook your developers can sequence work from.
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Master Audit Document
The long-form narrative. Every finding written up with what was found, why it matters, the impact, the fix, and a severity rating.
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Dev-Ready Action Plan
The execution workbook. Every finding as one row — severity, owner (frontend / backend / CMS / content), estimated effort, expected impact, cross-reference back to the document. Six per-workstream detail tabs for engineering drill-down.
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Schema templates
Ten ready-to-implement JSON-LD blocks pre-filled with your content structure. Discontinued patterns (HowTo, sitelinks search box, legacy video carousel) explicitly excluded.
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Schema Implementation Guide
Rollout order, locale handling, and the pitfalls to avoid.
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Video Schema Reference Guide
The decision tree for when a video earns its own markup and when to nest it inside an Article.
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Baseline Data Overview
Verified pre-audit numbers so your team can measure progress from here against a known starting point.
Plus a short walkthrough video, recorded async so anyone you forward it to can watch in their own time.
How it works
Three weeks, sequenced deliberately. No keyword research, no content briefs, no implementation — strictly the architecture.
Architecture & GEO
Where structural SEO meets AI-citation readiness.
- URL logic & canonical strategy
- Structured-data strategy
- Brand-entity audit (Wikidata, sameAs)
- AI / GEO citation readiness
Synthesise & ship
Build the deliverables, hand them over.
- Master Audit Document
- Dev-Ready Action Plan workbook
- Schema templates & guides
- Walkthrough video
How this works alongside your team
Most teams already have someone doing SEO, or someone who could implement if they had time. This audit is shaped to slot in next to them — not replace them.
If you have an internal SEO who owns content
Common pattern: an experienced SEO who lives in content strategy, editorial and on-page work, but is permanently blocked on the technical tickets that local engineering can't get to.
This audit produces what your SEO has been trying to get sequenced for them — but as a workbook engineering can actually open. You don't replace your SEO; you unblock them.
If you don't have a dedicated SEO yet
The Master Audit Document doubles as an onboarding for whoever inherits it. Findings are written up with reasoning, not just verdicts — so the next person can follow the thread, push back on it, or extend it without having to redo the audit.
Access for an external freelancer
The audit needs read access to Search Console, GA4 (or your analytics), your CMS in a sandbox or staging env, and the codebase if it's a headless build. Not write access. Not your prod credentials.
Everything is scoped, time-boxed, and revoked at the end of the engagement. If your security review needs specifics, ask and I'll send the access list before kickoff.
Async-first, no daily standups
Updates land in your shared workspace (Notion, Slack, whatever you use). One scheduled mid-engagement sync if useful, the rest async. I take a maximum of three retainer clients per quarter — the audit slot is separate and books faster.
What this audit actually moves
Mariia, a former colleague, asked me directly: "In a scenario with only technical SEO — no content — what would be the impact, compared to a company that does have content production?" The honest answer is different across the two halves of the audit.
Technical SEO — the honest version
Technical SEO is the foundation. Content is the engine. The foundation alone doesn't drive growth — but the engine can't compound without it.
The audit produces ceiling-raising changes: fixing what's preventing your content from being crawled, indexed, rendered and cited cleanly. If your content is good, you see the gains within a couple of quarters as the underlying signals strengthen. If your content is thin, the technical work removes blockers but doesn't substitute for what the content layer has to do.
GEO — and why it sometimes moves first
GEO has a different signature. 80% of URLs cited in AI responses don't rank in Google's top 100, so traditional SEO performance doesn't predict AI visibility. Pages with proper entity signals and prompt-matched structure can earn AI citations even when their organic rankings are modest.
For teams with decent content and weak entity authority, the GEO half of the audit can move visibility before the technical SEO half fully compounds — because AI engines are looking for different signals and weighting them differently.
The case I see most often: a team with decent content that isn't ranking or being cited the way the content quality would suggest it should. That gap is almost always structural — technical, GEO, or both — and structural fixes have a long, compounding tail.
The case I steer away from: a team with thin or non-existent content hoping technical changes will move traffic. They won't. If that's the picture, content investment comes first; the audit comes later when there's a foundation worth building underneath.
Common questions
The questions that come up before kickoff. If yours isn't here, drop a line — I'll answer directly and add it.
How long does the audit take?
Three weeks, end to end, from access being granted to delivery of the workbook. The timeline is fixed because the scope is fixed — the engagement doesn’t expand mid-way.
Do you implement the recommendations, or just hand them off?
The audit itself stops at the workbook. Implementation is your engineering team’s call — the workbook is built so they can open it and start sequencing work from row one. If your team is overwhelmed and needs implementation support afterwards, that’s a separate engagement we’d scope after the audit lands.
What’s the difference between this and a standard SEO audit?
A standard SEO audit usually covers content, keywords, backlinks and on-page in addition to technical. This one is strictly the architecture — rendering, hreflang, canonical, structured data, entity layer, performance — because that’s the layer most teams either don’t have in-house or can’t get implemented when they do. If you want content / keyword / link work as well, those are separate engagements I can refer or scope independently.
Is FAQ schema still worth implementing now that the rich result is gone?
Yes — but for a different reason than it used to be. Google deprecated FAQ rich results on 7 May 2026, so the snippet expansion in search results is gone. FAQ structured data still earns two things that matter, though: Google continues to use it to understand page content (their own documentation confirms unused structured data doesn’t harm rankings), and AI engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews — preferentially extract from FAQ-structured content when generating answers. The audit treats FAQPage as a GEO signal, not a SERP feature. Same logic applies to HowTo (deprecated 2023): the schema is no longer a rich-result vehicle, but a well-structured Q&A block can still earn AI citations when the entity signals around it are right.
How does the scope work for larger or more complex sites?
The engagement format stays the same regardless of size — three weeks, fixed scope, workbook output. What changes is the discovery call: for larger sites (multi-domain, many locales, very large product catalogues, complex headless stacks) it’s used to define which specific architectural questions the audit will answer, so the scope stays focused and the timeline stays honest. Drop a one-paragraph description of your stack when you book and I’ll come back with the right scope.
Can you work with our existing in-house SEO?
Yes — and it tends to be the strongest setup. Your SEO knows the content, history and politics; this audit brings the structural and engineering depth they’re often blocked from getting implemented. The workbook becomes the artefact they use to push work through.
What access do you need?
Read access to: Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster (if used), Google Analytics (or equivalent), your CMS in staging or a sandbox, the codebase if you’re on a headless build, and any rank-tracking tool you already use. No write access. No prod credentials. All access is scoped, time-boxed and revoked at the end of the engagement. If your security review needs a specifics list ahead of contract, ask before kickoff.
Do you do content too?
No — and that’s a deliberate boundary. Content is a different discipline, done well by people who specialise in it. The audit makes content’s job easier (cleaner crawl, schema, entity signals) but doesn’t try to substitute for it.
Can the audit be delivered in Italian?
The deliverables (Master Audit Document, Dev-Ready Action Plan, Schema templates) are delivered in English by default. Walkthrough video and async communication can be in English or Italian — your call.
Ready to start?
Get in touch with a one-paragraph description of your stack and the structural question you'd like answered. I'll come back within 24 hours with whether this is the right engagement and what the next step looks like.