Site Survey
SEO consulting and development
SEO consulting and development for publishers with a deep archive.
Site Survey is a comprehensive SEO and content audit of your site. Instead of a checklist of things to fix, you get a plan ranked by what will actually move your traffic, from quick fixes across thousands of pages to larger projects worth the effort. Take it to your developer, or have us do the work in a sprint or as your quarterly SEO team.
For the digital director who knows the site has search problems and needs someone who can fix them.
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You publish the smartest work on your subject, but you’re invisible in search results and AI answers.
You’ve already done the hard part. Your site has years of research and the authority to show for it. The problem isn’t the wrong content or too few links. It’s usually structural, and it hides in places nobody looks.
Hundreds of publications share the same title. A robots.txt rule blocks the entire site. Older articles sit behind JavaScript pagination that crawlers cannot follow, or can only be found through the site’s search feature. These problems keep Google from finding or understanding the work you have already published.
Other SEO consultancies will give you a list of keywords, but your writers aren’t going to follow a checklist to satisfy an algorithm. You need SEO advice that focuses on technical improvement and broad content organization, not micromanaging content.
What a survey finds
| Finding | What we found |
|---|---|
| Repeated publication titles | Hundreds of weekly publications shared a title. Annual reports reused the same title year after year. |
| A blocked site | A robots.txt rule kept search crawlers out of the entire site. |
| An unreachable archive | Older publications could only be reached through JavaScript pagination that crawlers could not follow, or through the site’s search feature. |
| Content organized around the wrong concepts | You’ve been writing about SCOTUS decisions for over 25 years. Data reveals that search volume is centered around the names of those court cases, but your content is organized around broad legal concepts. |
Cord explains the approach in his guide for Search Engine Land.
Survey the site. Do what pays off. Organize the archive.
Site Survey is the consulting and development side of Tallest Tree. We work only with publishers, we build the topic analytics product many of them run, and as a full-service development shop we can make the changes we recommend ourselves. Every engagement starts with a survey of the whole site that tells you three things: which changes will bring the most traffic for the work they take, where you stand against your peers, and how your content should be organized to best fit search and AI demand.
See everything behind the site
We start with everything behind the site: the host, the CMS, the plugins and integrations, analytics and tag containers, forms and email, feeds and sitemaps. Then we crawl the whole site twice, join the results to Search Console, Google Analytics, Ahrefs, and Top Stories data, and score every check on our publisher audit list: crawling, canonicals, internal links, authors, structured data, Google News and Discover, and the controls that decide what AI search engines may use.
Get a plan ranked by return
Each change names the problem, the pages it affects, the work it takes, who should do it, and the test that shows it’s done. A quick fix that repeats across thousands of pages can rank above a project that takes months. A large development project can rank first when it improves the whole archive. Large technical changes and small content clarifications sit on the same list, and every item is there to increase visibility and real traffic, not to tick a box. Checks your site already passes stay in our evidence file, not in your report.
Compare your site with its peers
See where your search footprint stands against organizations like yours, measured the same way, using our public rankings of national and state policy organizations or a peer set built for your field.
Organize the archive around what people search for
Learn which topics or larger themes should hold your work together, where the hub pages belong, and what to do with the categories nobody searches for.
We bring real human expertise and two decades of experience working with think tanks and magazines to every survey. Then we can do the work in one of two ways:
The sprint: fixed work, fixed time
A sprint is a fixed batch of planned work. Before we start, we agree on the scope, price, and schedule. A full sprint usually takes about two weeks. A mini-sprint covers a smaller scope using the same process. We choose the work with you from the top of the survey’s ranking, build and test it on staging, and release it. If your own developer makes the changes, we write the requirements and check the result instead.
The retainer: a quarterly SEO team
For publishers who want the work to continue, Site Survey runs as a quarterly retainer. A monthly report on traffic, search, and links. Recommendations with the numbers behind them. A call to decide what to do. Oversight when the site changes. Field Guide comes with it.
How an engagement runs
Before the engagement, we have an introductory call about your site and follow up with a short diagnostic from your site’s own data: specific pages, counts, and the few things worth paying to fix.
- A 60 to 90-minute discovery conversation. We begin the engagement by discussing what you publish, what has changed, and what you want to achieve.
- A client questionnaire. We send you the questions we cannot answer from your site’s data, such as which organizations you consider your competitors.
- The survey, then the work. You receive the survey’s findings and recommendations, then choose a sprint, your developer, or the retainer.
Pricing and scope
Discovery, the survey
$5,000, fixed fee, applied in full to a sprint if we do the work.
Work after the survey
- Single sprint · $20,000: An agreed scope of work, usually completed in about two weeks. No annual commitment. Mini-sprint · $10,000: A smaller agreed scope of work, with the same planning and review process. One-off sprints usually start within four to six weeks.
- Annual development: $65,000 for four reserved sprints, or $50,000 for three. Reserved sprints don’t roll over.
- The retainer: $10,000 a quarter. The proposal sets the scope.
Our work is guaranteed. If you find a bug in code we wrote, we fix it free.
We scope larger builds and migrations separately.
Questions
We already have an SEO agency.
Most sell keyword research, content, and link building. We don’t write content or build links. Site Survey is about the site itself: templates, structure, redirects, and how Google reads the archive. The two rarely overlap, and we’ll say so if yours already covers it.
We don’t have a developer.
Then the sprint is for you. If you have an agency, we write the requirements and check their work.
We’re about to redesign or move the site.
That is the best time to call. A survey before the move produces the URL inventory, redirect map, and launch checklist that keep your traffic through the cutover.
Do we need Field Guide?
No. Many survey findings are template and configuration fixes. Where the archive needs topic pages and internal links at scale, Field Guide is how we build them, and the retainer includes it.
How is this different from the monthly report we get now?
The report tells you what happened. The survey tells you what to change, ranked by the traffic each change should bring for the work it takes, with the test for done. The retainer does both.
What does the peer comparison show?
Where your site stands against organizations like yours on the measures that move together: authority, search traffic relative to peers, and the searches they win that you don’t. We never quote a tool’s traffic estimate for your site on its own. The numbers mean something only next to peers measured the same way.
Where does your site need attention?
Tell us what you publish, where you want it to reach, and what’s getting in the way.