Site crawl · DataForSEO · Lighthouse · LLM Mentions

SEO Audit / optimizationtheory.com

A full technical, content, authority and AI-search audit, run October 17, 2026 against Google US. The short version: the content is strong, the plumbing is mostly clean, and almost none of it is reaching searchers.

137 URLs crawled374 resources132 sitemap URLs checked85 keywords18 live SERPs1,000 referring domains classified4 Lighthouse runs
31 logged issues by severity, across 7 audit pillars
Open the data in Google Sheets ↗ All 31 issues → Fix timeline →

01 · Executive summary

The verdict

Seven pillars, weighted into one score, then the six findings that explain it.

Overall SEO health
Needs work

Optimization Theory publishes agency-grade research, ships proper structured data and runs on a technically clean core. It ranks for 13 keywords, none above position 41, because only 2 independent websites link to it. The 1,676 referring domains in third-party tools are an October junk-link flood. Meanwhile the sitemap advertises 72 theme-demo and legacy pages while hiding the 45 best ones, and the WordPress theme loads the homepage in 19.9 seconds on mobile.

Six fallouts

Pillar scores

Weighted · 0 to 100

Weight in brackets · hover a row for the rationale

Crawler checks

Site crawl

160 automated checks

Passed
127
To fix
9
Investigate
7
Optimize
11

What is working

02 · Organic visibility

Present in the index, absent from the results

DataForSEO Labs tracks every Google US keyword where the domain sits in the top 100. The answer is 13, and the best of them is on page five.

Ranked keywords
13
Best position
41
Top 10 keywords
0
Est. visits / mo
0.23
New / lost this month
7 / 6

Keywords in the top 100, by month

DataForSEO Labs

Oct 2024 to Oct 2026 · hover for details

Where today's 13 rankings sit

Position bands

Count of keywords · nothing above 41

Observation

Churning, not compounding

Visibility climbed through early 2026, peaked in April at 20 keywords and has slid back to 13. This month 7 keywords are new and 6 were lost. One of the 13 still ranks through the legacy /blog/ page that the sitemap audit flags as a duplicate. Every current ranking is page 5 or deeper, so organic clicks round to zero.

All ranked keywords

Google US

Search volume · position · ranking URL

Brand SERPs

Live SERP

Who shows up when someone searches the name

Fallout

The name doesn't find the business

Search "Jourdan Rombough" and you get LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Flickr and jgrl.ink, but not the agency. "Optimization theory" is a branch of mathematics, so Wikipedia, UPenn and Stanford will always own the bare query. Capture brand demand with the personal name and a modifier like "Optimization Theory SEO".

03 · Competitive landscape

Who wins the queries you write about

Peers pulled from the live SERPs for consultant and topic keywords, benchmarked with DataForSEO Labs and the Backlinks API.

Ranked keywords

Google US

optimizationtheory.com in cyan

Estimated monthly organic traffic

DataForSEO model

Visits per month

Authority vs. visibility

Backlinks + Labs

x = domain rank (0 to 1000) · y = ranked keywords (log) · hover a dot

Observation

Same rank band, a fraction of the keywords

Your domain rank (242) sits beside elkhq.com (244) and fratzkemedia.com (258), which rank for 528 and 629 keywords. Yours is propped up by the junk flood; theirs was earned editorially. DataForSEO's competitor algorithm returns CrowdStrike, Zscaler and MITRE because the only meaningful rankings are "SEO poisoning" variants, which shows how search engines currently categorize the site.

Rank 24213 vs 528–629 keywords

05 · Technical health

A clean core with a messy sitemap

Status codes, redirects and canonicals are in good shape. The sitemap is where the problems live.

Crawled URLs by status

137 URLs

HTTP status

Indexability

Crawl

All crawled URLs

Crawl depth

Clicks from home

URLs per depth

What the sitemap actually contains

Live-checked

All 132 URLs from sitemap.xml, matched to the crawl

Fallout

Stock-theme filler under the brand

8 fake staff profiles (one titled "Peter Spencer" at /staff-view/libby-oliver/), 9 Live Composer templates (including a "404 Page Not Found" template that returns 200) and 8 demo e-books like "SEO Warrior" are live, indexable and self-canonical. 7 demo testimonials and 5 header/footer parts redirect home but still sit in the sitemap.

Missing

And the good pages are left out

45 indexable pages are in no sitemap, including all 37 Black Hat Terminal chapters, both 2026 ranking-signals reports and the AI fan-out deep dive. robots.txt has no Sitemap line.

Redirects, errors and canonical conflicts

Crawl + live checks

Every URL that needs a redirect or relink

06 · Page experience

The theme is slower than the content

Mobile Lighthouse runs through the DataForSEO On-Page API on four representative templates.

Lighthouse scores

Mobile lab

Performance · Accessibility · Best practices · SEO

Largest Contentful Paint

Seconds

Dashed line = 2.5 s "good" threshold

Homepage vitals

Mobile lab run

Target in small print

Image weight distribution

252 images · 135.7 MB

Files per size band

Observation

The static build proves the point

The hand-coded Black Hat Terminal scores 83 / 100 / 100 / 100 with a 3.8 s LCP and a 449 KB page. Every WordPress template lands between 14.5 and 19.9 s LCP with 2.9 to 10.6 MB pages. Compression and caching help, but the SEOWP + Live Composer stack (52 scripts, 32 stylesheets on the homepage) caps how good it can get.

Heaviest images

Top 10

MB per file

Resource weight by type

All resources

MB across crawled resources

07 · On-page

Good copy, a few structural leaks

Indexable HTML pages only (102).

Title length

Characters

Aim for 30 to 60

Meta description length

Characters

Aim for 120 to 160

H1 tags per page

Count

Exactly one is ideal

Crawler on-page and link findings

Non-passing

URLs affected

Page-builder junk in search snippets

Rewrite

Titles and metas that need a manual rewrite

Observations

Where the on-page signals leak

  • The homepage has no H1; it opens with an H2 "The Mechanics of Being Found".
  • All 37 Terminal chapters ship the same source H1, "$ cat ▋", which JavaScript then types out.
  • 48 indexable titles run past 70 characters, often from the " – Optimization Theory" suffix.
  • Service-page titles and metas are the best on the site: specific, priced and under length.

08 · Content & architecture

Deep content, scattered signals

How pages, words and internal links are distributed, and where topics compete with themselves.

Pages by section

Indexable

The research archive is the largest section

Avg internal links in, by section

Crawl

Nav pages hoard links; static reports get almost none

Content depth

Words per page

Content words per indexable page

Internal link distribution

Inlinks per page

Unique internal pages linking in

Flagship posts vs. the links they get

1,500+ words

Longest first · the two at 61 sit in the nav menu; everything else gets 1 to 9

Fallout

Cannibalization splits what little authority exists

Four PageRank simulators compete for one topic, and none ranks for "pagerank simulator" (10 searches, KD 28) where a Netlify student demo sits at #2. The same pattern repeats across ranking factors, GEO explainers, fan-out, CTR, SEO poisoning and four blog index pages.

Cannibalization clusters

09 · AI search (GEO)

Ready for AI crawlers, invisible in AI answers

DataForSEO LLM Mentions for Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT, plus the SERP layout of 18 target queries.

AI Overview mentions
0
ChatGPT mentions
0
SERPs with an AI Overview
17 / 18
SERPs with UGC in top 10
15 / 18

GEO readiness checklist

What AI can see

Signals AI retrieval systems rely on

SERP features across 18 queries

Live SERP

How often each feature appears

Observation

The missing piece is corroboration

Crawlable HTML, permissive snippet directives, llms.txt and a strong JSON-LD graph are already in place. What is missing is external corroboration, the same gap as in classic search. Reddit, YouTube, Quora, Medium and LinkedIn sit in the top 10 for 15 of 18 target queries, which makes them the fastest route into AI answers while domain authority builds.

10 · Keyword opportunities

Where the openings are

85 terms tied to the services and content, with volume, difficulty and intent from DataForSEO.

Difficulty vs. demand

Keyword overview

x = keyword difficulty · y = US monthly searches (log) · color = intent · the shaded zone is the fastest ground to take

Top commercial targets

By opportunity

Service-intent keywords

Top content targets

KD ≤ 35

Informational keywords

Live SERP checks

Google US · top 20

optimizationtheory.com does not appear for any of these

11 · Issues register

Every finding, with the fix

Issues Register in Sheets ↗

12 · Roadmap

The 6-month plan

Clean up first so new authority lands on a tidy site, then speed and structure, then sustained authority and demand.

KPI targets · 6 months

13 · Fix timeline

Every fix, on one timeline

All 31 issues scheduled across 26 weeks, Oct 19, 2026 to Apr 18, 2027. Hover any bar for the issue, dates and fix; switch the grouping to see the work by pillar.

Bars are colored by audit pillar and the dot beside each task is its severity. Striped bars are ongoing programs. Dotted violet lines mark monthly KPI reviews and green diamonds are milestones. Dates assume one person working on fixes part-time, with Dec 21 to Jan 1 treated as a holiday slowdown.

All the data behind this report

Every crawled page, sitemap URL, keyword, SERP, competitor, referring domain and Lighthouse run, plus the scored issues register and action plan, lives in the companion spreadsheet.

Open in Google Sheets ↗