Run Your Own Bespoke Website SEO Audit — Step by Step

This guide is written for bespoke business owners — custom furniture makers, portrait artists, tailor studios, bespoke jewellers, and similar artisan practices — who have an existing website and want to understand why it isn't generating consistent enquiries from search.

It is not a beginner's introduction to SEO. It assumes you have a live site, have heard terms like 'indexing' and 'backlinks', and want a structured process for diagnosing specific problems rather than a general overview.

It is also not a technical deep-dive for developers. Where technical concepts appear, they're explained in plain terms and paired with the business reason they matter.

What Makes Bespoke Sites Different to Audit

Most SEO audit frameworks are written with e-commerce stores or service firms in mind. Bespoke businesses present a distinct set of diagnostic challenges:

• Portfolio pages accumulate without strategy. Each completed commission gets its own page, but without intentional content, those pages become thin-content liabilities rather than ranking assets.
• Products are unique by definition. Standard advice about product page optimisation — include the SKU, write a category description, use structured data — doesn't map cleanly onto a handmade piece that exists once.
• The buying journey is long. A prospective client commissioning bespoke furniture or a wedding dress doesn't convert in one visit. Your site needs to support a multi-session research process, which changes how you prioritise content gaps.
• Visual-first site builders create crawlability problems. Squarespace, Cargo, and similar platforms favoured by makers often render content in ways that search engines struggle to read.

This audit addresses each of these constraints directly. Work through the sections in order, or jump to the diagnostic that matches your highest-priority concern.

Before opening a single tool, establish a triage principle: fix what blocks revenue first, then fix what builds authority, then fix what tidies presentation. Bespoke site audits frequently surface dozens of issues. Without a severity framework, it's easy to spend a week on broken alt text while your flagship commission page has no indexable copy at all.

High Severity — Fix Within Two Weeks

• Key service or process pages are not indexed (verify in Google Search Console using the URL Inspection tool)
• Homepage or main portfolio page returns a slow load time on mobile — industry benchmarks suggest anything beyond three seconds measurably reduces enquiry rates
• Contact or enquiry form is broken, or the confirmation page is not set up as a conversion goal
• Thin or duplicate content on pages targeting your highest-value commissions (e.g., your bespoke bridal page has 80 words and three images)
• No title tag or meta description on core pages

Medium Severity — Fix Within 60 Days

• Portfolio project pages have no descriptive copy — just image galleries and a project name
• Internal linking is sparse: your process page and portfolio are not connected to each other or to your contact page
• Local signals are inconsistent: your address, phone number, or business name differs between your website footer, Google Business Profile, and any directory listings
• Images are not compressed — common on visual-heavy maker sites, this compounds mobile speed issues

Low Severity — Address in Ongoing Maintenance

• Missing alt text on archived project images
• Older portfolio pages targeting keywords you no longer pursue
• Social media links in footer pointing to inactive profiles

Use this matrix as a filter throughout the rest of the audit. Every issue you find, assign it a tier before moving on.

A technical crawl maps your site the way a search engine sees it — not as a visitor with a browser, but as a bot following links and reading code. For bespoke sites, the most common technical issues fall into three categories.

Indexing and Crawlability

Open Google Search Console and navigate to Coverage (or Indexing > Pages in newer versions). You're looking for:

• Pages listed as Excluded that you want indexed — particularly any commission type pages, your process page, or your about page
• Pages listed as Crawled — currently not indexed — Google has seen them but judged them not worth including, often a signal of thin content
• Any Redirect errors or 404s — common after site redesigns or when old portfolio URLs are not redirected

For a free crawler you can run locally, Screaming Frog's free tier handles up to 500 URLs, which covers most bespoke sites. It will surface broken internal links, missing title tags, and duplicate page titles in minutes.

Site Speed on Mobile

Run your homepage and your most important commission-type page through Google PageSpeed Insights. Bespoke sites built on visual-first platforms routinely fail mobile speed tests because of uncompressed hero images and render-blocking scripts loaded by third-party portfolio embeds.

The fixes are usually: compress images to WebP format, lazy-load below-fold images, and remove unused third-party scripts. Your platform may limit how much you can control here — this is worth noting as a constraint if you're on a hosted builder.

Mobile Rendering

Use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console and request a live test. Look at the rendered HTML — does your main body copy appear? On some visual-first themes, body text is loaded via JavaScript in a way that means Google sees an almost-empty page. This is a high-severity issue if it affects your service or process pages.

Portfolio pages are where most bespoke site audits reveal the biggest gap between what the maker has invested and what search engines can use. A gallery of ten beautifully photographed commissions is genuinely impressive to a human visitor — and nearly invisible to a search engine if those pages contain only images and a project title.

The Thin Content Test

For each portfolio entry, ask: if someone searched for the commission type this project represents, does this page give them enough context to understand what you made, for whom (in general terms), and how? If the answer is no, the page is a thin-content liability. That doesn't mean delete it — it means add descriptive copy.

A useful structure for each portfolio project page:

• Commission brief (2-3 sentences): What the client needed, expressed in the language a prospective client with that same need might search
• Materials and process (2-3 sentences): What you made it from and why — this naturally incorporates the craft terms that knowledgeable buyers search for
• Outcome (1-2 sentences): What the piece accomplished — where it lives, how it functions, any notable constraints you solved

This approach gives each portfolio page a distinct content angle. Two bespoke oak dining tables will have different client briefs, different constraints, and different outcomes — which means they can target related but non-duplicate keyword angles.

Orphan Page Check

An orphan page is indexed but not linked to from anywhere else on your site. Portfolio entries added directly through a CMS without being connected to a category or portfolio index page frequently become orphans. In Screaming Frog, filter for pages with zero internal links pointing to them. Each orphan is invisible to both users navigating your site and to search engines following your internal link structure.

Canonical Tags on Similar Projects

If you have multiple highly similar projects — ten nearly identical product shots of bespoke leather wallets, for instance — consider whether they should be separate pages or whether one consolidated page with a gallery serves your SEO better. Splitting thin similar content across many URLs dilutes authority. Consolidating it onto one strong page concentrates it.

If portfolio pages are where past work lives, commission type and process pages are where future clients decide whether to enquire. These pages — 'Bespoke Wedding Rings', 'Custom Portrait Commissions', 'Made-to-Measure Suits' — are often the highest-intent pages on a bespoke site and, in our experience working with artisan businesses, frequently the most underdeveloped.

Content Depth Check

A commission type page that will rank for a competitive query needs to answer the questions a prospective client has at the research stage:

• What does the process involve, and how long does it take?
• What information do you need from the client before starting?
• What is the price range or how is pricing determined?
• What makes your approach distinct from another maker's?
• What does the commissioning experience feel like from the client's perspective?

Pages that answer these questions in full — typically 600 words or more of substantive copy — give Google enough signal to understand what query the page satisfies. Pages that offer a brief paragraph and a contact form do not.

Keyword Alignment Check

Open Search Console and navigate to the Performance report. Filter by page to see which queries are bringing impressions to each commission type page. Compare the queries you're appearing for against the queries you want to appear for. Common findings:

• Ranking for the maker's own name or brand rather than the commission type
• Appearing for generic terms ('custom furniture') but not the specific style or material terms your ideal clients search ('mid-century bespoke walnut sideboard')
• Zero impressions on pages that have never been properly indexed

Internal Links to Commission Pages

Every portfolio project page should link back to the relevant commission type page. If your bespoke jewellery portfolio entries don't link to your 'Bespoke Engagement Rings' page, you're missing the most natural internal link your site has. Map these connections during the audit and add them systematically.

Not every bespoke maker operates locally — some ship nationally or internationally. But if your studio is tied to a location, or if most of your commissions come from clients within a defined geography, local SEO signals matter and are worth auditing separately.

NAP Consistency Check

NAP — Name, Address, Phone — should be identical across your website footer, your Google Business Profile, and any directory listings where your business appears (Houzz, Checkatrade, Etsy if applicable, local guild directories). Variations like 'St.' versus 'Street', or a phone number format that differs by platform, create weak inconsistency signals. Audit each source and standardise.

Google Business Profile Diagnostic

If you have a GBP listing, check:

• Primary category: Is it specific enough? 'Furniture maker' is more useful than 'Retailer'. 'Custom jeweller' outperforms 'Jewellery store'.
• Services listed: Have you added individual services with descriptions? This is indexable content that can match specific search queries.
• Photos: Are they recent? Google favours actively maintained profiles. Geotagged images — photos with location metadata embedded — can reinforce local relevance.
• Reviews: What is your response rate? Responding to all reviews, including negative ones, signals an active business to both Google and prospective clients.

Location Page Assessment

If you serve multiple areas or have a physical studio location that clients visit, your site should have at least one location-specific page with substantive copy — not just 'We're based in Bristol' but a page that describes what working with your studio in Bristol looks like, references local landmarks or design influences if relevant, and includes a proper address and map embed.

For more detail on the local SEO elements that affect bespoke businesses specifically, the local SEO guide for bespoke makers covers GBP optimisation and review generation in full.