Look, I get that it’s easy to make fun of someone for recommending "in-depth" tech SEO audit for a small website. Trust me, I do. (Especially if they’re doing it to sell unneeded services, which is never okay.) BUT IT ALSO GOT ME THINKING...

I think non-enterprise SEO (coughSMBcough) is a lot harder than we’re giving it credit for, and gets a bad rap for being somehow less prestigious than (gestures vaguely) every other “type” of SEO.

For starters, it’s fair to point out that “in-depth” is kinda relative to industry in some cases, perhaps?

Like, if I’m talking to an SMB about doing more “in-depth” work for them, the baseline for “in-depth” isn’t going to be a 1.5M ecomm site; it’s going to be other sites in their industry (which are probably smallish as well).

And maybe no one has even looked at their page speed, etc. before.

If an small SMB asked for an “in-depth tech audit” I would probably give them an audit. I wouldn’t over-charge or over-prescribe, but I also wouldn’t tell them it's unneeded because there are other websites out there with more URLs and more URLs mean more issues to address.

Like, you don’t think WE’RE frustrated that there isn’t more sh*t to fix? We are.

But you still gotta check for ‘em because...we’ve SEEN things in SMB Land. Bad. Technical. Things.

All that to say, SEO for smaller sites can be super difficult! It doesn’t provide the luxury of “we updated this and that across X URLs and saw such-and-such impact” much of the time. The needle can actually be REALLY hard to move when you're working with less.

</end sympathetic rant for SEOs who work on small websites>

PS - SEOs really ~shouldn’t~ oversell like that, though. It’s a bad look and undermines the legitimacy of SEO for the “little guy,” which can be extremely valuable and also challenging.