Structural audit, no keyword plan
This is intentionally light. You don't win on "coliving Japan" search SERP and you don't need to. The audit covers 3 angles: structural site health (130 to 180 page crawl), backlink profile (referring domains + anchor distribution), and AI-platform visibility (where you show up in ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overview). No keyword plan, no content cluster strategy, those would be the wrong moves.
3 headline findings
Solid foundation, thin content depth
Vercel-hosted, HTTP/2, valid SSL (Let's Encrypt, valid through August 2026), sitemap present, robots.txt present, no directory browsing, HTTPS redirect on. The stack choices are right. The gap sits at page-level CRO + structured data on themed-week and accommodation pages, plus a partial sitemap-vs-crawl picture (queue depth is healthy, only a slice has been pulled in the snapshot window).
See site-crawl deep-dive →Thin and concentrated
Referring domains in the low double digits, backlinks in the low double digits, mostly nofollow, anchor distribution concentrated on a small cluster of friendly sources. This is normal for a 1 to 2 year old community brand. The 90-day target is to triple referring domains via earned mentions (podcast appearances, themed-week recap posts, member-built case studies), not outreach link-building. Spam score is low, which means the profile is clean, just small.
See backlinks deep-dive →Invisible to poor across major platforms
Zucity rarely surfaces in ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overview for queries adjacent to its niche ("best coliving for builders in Japan", "Edge City alternatives", "themed-week residencies"). Competitors like Edge City and Network School are cited more often. The fix is entity-building (Wikipedia stub, Crunchbase, founder profile consistency, structured data) plus earned mentions in trust-source content, not SEO.
See AI-visibility deep-dive →3 deep-dive pages
Each headline above links to a deep-dive page with the underlying data, methodology, and recommended moves. Pick whichever feels most useful to start.
Site Crawl
34+ pages crawled (live crawl continuing to ~180), URL inventory, schema gap map, image audit, fix sprint. Use these findings to prioritise the cro.html fixes.
OPEN →Backlinks
DataForSEO rank, referring domains, anchor distribution, who's linking, who SHOULD be linking. 90-day target list of earnable mentions, not cold outreach.
OPEN →AI Visibility
12-query probe across 4 platforms (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overview, Claude). Where Zucity shows up vs. where Edge City / Network School do. Entity-build moves to close the gap.
OPEN →What's NOT in this audit
- No keyword research plan. Intentional. Wrong move for this stage. You win on community, narrative, and themed-week reputation, not on ranking for "coliving Japan".
- No content cluster topology. Intentional. A 50-post cluster strategy is what you'd do if Zucity were a SaaS chasing organic. It isn't.
- No competitor SEO backlink-gap. We look at structural gaps and where you could earn links, not who you should snipe links from.
- No Lighthouse or PageSpeed deep-dive. Vercel handles core web vitals well by default; it's not a leverage point for a community brand at this stage.
Honest caveats
- Crawl is partial. 34 of ~180 pages pulled at time of writing; the live crawl continues in the background and the deep-dive pages will reflect the fuller picture once complete.
- AI-visibility probe is 12 queries across 4 platforms, not 40. Kept the scope light. Happy to deepen if useful.
- Backlinks data is a DataForSEO snapshot. Ahrefs or Semrush would show a similar shape with different absolute numbers; the directional read holds.
- This is v1. A full DataForSEO + Firecrawl deep-run is available if you want it; happy to scope.
Light audit. Three honest findings. The leverage isn't in the audit itself, it's in the wedge-offers and cro pages. Treat this as context, not a deliverable.
If any of the three deep-dives sparks something concrete you want scoped (entity-build playbook, earned-mentions target list, structured-data sprint for themed-week pages), ping me and I'll write a 1-pager in 30 minutes.