Your car gets inspected against a published standard and comes back with a pass, a fail, and a list of exactly what needs fixing. Your website deserves the same. SEOWof inspects45 items, issues a determination, and turns every fault into a scoped, priced job you can action today. Free recheck within 28 days.
Fails on 1 critical fault. Score alone would grade C.
90-day score trend
+26
Next work order
IX-01Critical
noindex on 84 product URLs
X-Robots-Tag set at CDN. 0.5–2 hrs · Developer
NZ$80–240Assign →
Recheck free within 28 days
The problem
Nobody needs another list of 200 issues
The SEO industry has no shortage of tools that find problems. It has a chronic shortage of anything that gets them fixed. Roughly 85% of audit recommendations are never implemented — not because owners do not care, but because a spreadsheet of findings is not a decision, an owner, or a job.
Everything is flagged, so nothing is urgent
A missing meta description on a dead blog post gets the same red icon as a canonical error on the page that pays your salary. When every item is critical, the list stops being a priority order and becomes wallpaper.
The score is a black box
Every tool gives you a different health percentage and none of them will tell you the formula. You cannot audit the auditor, you cannot compare across tools, and you cannot argue with a number nobody will explain.
A finding is not a job
"Fix your redirect chains" is not something a developer can pick up. It has no scope, no acceptance criteria, no effort estimate and no owner. So it sits in the backlog behind work that does.
SEOWof exists to close that gap. The inspection is only the first seven minutes. The product is the work order queue that comes out of it — and the certificate you get when the queue is empty.
Every stage produces an artefact you can read, challenge, or hand to somebody else. Nothing is a black box and nothing ends at a PDF.
01
Inspect
We crawl the site and pull field data, Search Console and rendering diffs. Nothing is self-reported.
02
Score
Every check in SW-1:2026.2 returns pass, advisory or fail against a published criterion.
03
Diagnose
Each fault is explained in plain language: what is wrong, where, and why it costs you.
04
Prioritise
Faults are ranked by impact against effort — not by category, not alphabetically.
05
Fix
Each fault becomes a work order with acceptance criteria. Do it yourself or assign it.
06
Verify
We re-run the exact check that failed. Free within 28 days, same as a vehicle WOF.
07
Monitor
Continuous re-inspection catches the regression before it costs you a quarter.
The output
Faults come out as work, not as findings
Every failed check is converted into a work order: what is broken, where, who fixes it, how long it takes, what it should cost, and how we will confirm it is done. These are real examples from the sample inspection.
WO-4821-01IX-01
Open
1pri
Remove X-Robots-Tag noindex from 84 product URLs
A noindex directive is being injected at the CDN edge on /products/* responses. It is not present in the application source, which is why it survived the last two audits. 84 indexable product pages are affected.
Acceptance criteria
X-Robots-Tag header absent on all /products/* responses
Affected URLs return no meta robots noindex in rendered DOM
URLs resubmitted and showing "Indexed" in Search Console within 14 days
Severity
critical
Owner
Developer
Effort
S · 0.5–2 hrs
Est. cost
NZ$80–240
Est. impact: High — pages currently ineligible for search
Do it myselfAssign
WO-4821-02AU-02
Assigned
2pri
Recover 31 referring domains pointing at dead URLs
Nine URLs removed in the 2024 replatform still receive inbound links from 31 referring domains. All currently return 404. Highest-value target has 12 referring domains including two news sites.
Acceptance criteria
Each dead URL 301s in one hop to its closest genuine equivalent
No redirect resolves to the homepage as a fallback
All nine URLs return 200 at the destination with matching topical intent
Severity
minor
Owner
SEO
Effort
S · 0.5–2 hrs
Est. cost
NZ$120–480
Est. impact: Medium — reclaims existing external equity
Do it myselfAssign
WO-4821-03AR-01
In progress
3pri
Link 12 orphaned service pages from relevant hubs
Twelve service pages are reachable only via the XML sitemap. They receive zero internal links, sit at effective depth infinity, and four of them already have recorded impressions despite the orphaning.
Acceptance criteria
Each page linked from at least two topically relevant pages
Links are contextual body links, not navigation-only
Anchor text describes the destination service
Severity
major
Owner
SEO
Effort
M · 2–8 hrs
Est. cost
NZ$240–800
Est. impact: High — 12 commercial pages currently unreachable
Do it myselfAssign
WO-4821-04PF-01
Open
4pri
Fix LCP on the category template (4.8s → target 2.5s)
Field p75 LCP is 4.8s on mobile across category pages. The LCP element is a 2,400px hero served unsized to all viewports, lazy-loaded, and blocked behind a render-blocking font stylesheet.
Acceptance criteria
Hero served responsively with srcset and fetchpriority="high"
loading="lazy" removed from the LCP element
Field p75 LCP at or under 2.5s after the 28-day collection window
Severity
major
Owner
Developer
Effort
L · 1–3 days
Est. cost
NZ$800–3,200
Est. impact: High — affects 61% of organic entrances
Published criteria. Published weights. No proprietary score.
Every check is listed publicly with its pass criterion, its weight, its severity, who typically fixes it and what that usually costs. You can read the entire standard before you ever run an inspection — and you can argue with any of it.
SEOWof standard SW-1:2026.2 — inspection categories and weights
SEO has a credibility problem because the incentives are bad. Here is what we have deliberately built out of the model — you can hold us to all of it.
We do not guarantee rankings
Nobody can. Any provider who does is either lying or does not understand what they are selling. A pass certifies technical fitness on the inspection date — nothing more, and the certificate says exactly that.
We do not invent toxicity scores
No third party can observe how a search engine values a link. We report the observable pattern — anchor distribution, velocity, network concentration — and let you judge. A made-up number presented as a measurement is worse than no number.
We do not mark harder to sell services
Scoring is deterministic and the criteria are public. Two inspections of the same site on the same day produce the same result whether or not you buy anything. You can recompute our score by hand from the published weights.
We do not charge to confirm your own fix
Rechecks are free within 28 days, borrowed directly from the vehicle WOF rule. An inspector paid per re-inspection has a reason to find faults. We removed the reason.
We label estimates as estimates
Field data is marked measured. Lab data is marked derived. Anything you tell us is marked declared. Every number on the checksheet carries its provenance so you know what is fact and what is inference.
We publish what we cannot check
No automated inspection can assess brand strength, commercial strategy or content quality in a real editorial sense. Our methodology page lists the limits explicitly rather than quietly implying full coverage.
Who it is for
Three sides of the same inspection
Website owners
Know whether your site is actually fit
You are told your SEO needs work by everyone trying to sell you SEO. An independent inspection against published criteria tells you what is genuinely broken, what it costs to fix, and what you can safely ignore — before you sign a retainer with anyone.
Every job arrives pre-diagnosed with acceptance criteria and a verification step already defined. No scope creep, no arguing about whether it is done — the recheck decides. You are matched on the check codes you have a verified track record against.
Run inspections across your whole client portfolio, show a third-party score moving month over month, and replace the monthly report nobody reads with a certificate and a closed work queue. White-label available.
An SEO Warrant of Fitness is a structured inspection of a website against a published, versioned standard. SEOWof inspects 45 items across 9 categories, records a pass, advisory or fail against a stated criterion for each, and issues an overall determination. It works the way a vehicle Warrant of Fitness works: objective criteria, a checksheet you can read, a clear pass or fail, and a free recheck window after you fix the faults.
How is this different from a normal SEO audit tool?
A typical audit tool tells you that you have 200 issues and leaves you to work out which matter. SEOWof does three things differently. It publishes the criteria before inspecting, so the result is auditable rather than proprietary. It issues a determination — you pass or you fail — instead of a soft health percentage. And every fault becomes a scoped work order with an owner, an effort band, acceptance criteria and a cost estimate, so the output is work rather than a report.
Do I need to buy the fixes from you?
No. Every work order includes the full remedy steps and acceptance criteria so your own developer can action it. Assigning it to a vetted specialist through SEOWof is optional, and the inspection result is identical either way. We do not mark inspections harder to sell services — the standard is published and the scoring is deterministic.
What does a pass actually certify?
A pass certifies that on the date of inspection, the site met every critical and major criterion in SW-1:2026.2 and scored 75 or above. It is not a guarantee of rankings, traffic or revenue, and we say so on the certificate itself. It certifies technical and structural fitness — that nothing on the published checksheet is preventing the site from competing.
How often should a website be re-inspected?
Every six months for a stable site, quarterly for a site that ships weekly, and immediately after any migration, replatform, redesign or CMS upgrade. Most serious faults we find were introduced by a deployment, not by a competitor — a certificate is valid for 180 days for that reason.
Is the recheck really free?
Yes, within 28 days of the original inspection, for the items that failed. This mirrors the vehicle WOF rule. It exists because an inspection that charges you again to confirm your fix worked has an incentive to find faults — we would rather remove that incentive entirely.
Find out if your site would pass
A free inspection covers the 13 critical and major checks — the ones that decide a pass or a fail. No card, no call, no obligation to buy a single fix from us.