Guide
An SEO audit template that gets acted on
Most audit reports are a list of everything wrong with a site, sorted by category, delivered as a spreadsheet nobody opens. This is a structure for the other kind - the one that produces work.
There are two audiences for an SEO audit and they want opposite things. The person who has to implement it wants a complete list. The person who has to approve it wants to know what it costs, what it earns, and what to do on Monday. A report that serves only the first reader gets filed; a report that serves only the second is not an audit.
The structure below serves both by separating them: a short section that could be read alone by someone who will never touch the site, and a long appendix for whoever will.
The report structure
Six sections, in this order. The order is the argument - findings before fixes, impact before detail.
- 1
1. What we found, in one page
Three to five findings, each stated as a consequence rather than an observation. Not "1,240 pages lack meta descriptions" but "the pages that earn the most traffic are being shown to searchers with text Google wrote itself, and we can write it instead." If a finding cannot be stated as something the business loses, it belongs in the appendix.
- 2
2. What it is worth
For each headline finding, the traffic or revenue at stake, with the arithmetic shown. Ranges are honest and more persuasive than false precision. This is the section that decides whether anything happens, and it is the section most audits skip.
- 3
3. What to do first
A ranked list of actions, each with an owner type (developer, writer, someone with CMS access) and a rough size. Ranking is by impact over effort, not by category - a title-tag rewrite and a server-response fix belong next to each other if that is the order that pays.
- 4
4. Technical findings
Crawlability and indexation first, because a page that cannot be indexed cannot be improved. Then response codes and redirects, canonicals and duplication, site speed on real devices, structured data, and mobile parity. Each with the affected URL count and how it was measured.
- 5
5. Content and intent
Which pages target which searches, where two pages compete for one query, where the intent of the ranking page does not match the intent of the query, and which topics the site has no page for at all. This section produces the most work and the most revenue.
- 6
6. Authority and competition
Referring domains against the sites currently outranking them, what those sites have that this one does not, and which link gaps are realistically closable. Be honest when the gap is not closable - it changes the strategy rather than the tactics.
What to actually check
The working list. Ordered so a half-finished audit is still a useful one.
Indexation - do this first
- Which pages are indexed against which should be, and the gap in both directions.
- robots.txt and meta robots: nothing important blocked, nothing private open.
- XML sitemap present, current, submitted, and free of redirects and 404s.
- Canonical tags: self-referencing by default, pointing somewhere sensible when not.
- One canonical host, with everything else redirecting to it in one hop.
Crawl health
- Internal links to 404s and to redirect chains longer than one hop.
- Orphan pages that exist but nothing links to.
- Crawl depth: how many clicks from the home page to the money pages.
- Parameter URLs and faceted navigation generating near-infinite crawl paths.
Content
- Two or more pages targeting the same query, competing with each other.
- Title tags and H1s written for a person rather than a keyword list.
- Thin pages: under a couple of hundred words with nothing unique on them.
- Pages that rank on page two - usually the cheapest wins in the whole audit.
- Topics the competition covers and this site does not.
Speed and experience
- Core Web Vitals on the templates that matter, measured on mobile.
- Images sized for their container and served in a modern format.
- Render-blocking resources on first paint.
- Layout shift from banners, cookie notices, and late-loading fonts.
Writing recommendations people implement
The difference between a recommendation and a finding is that a recommendation names who does what. "Improve internal linking" is a finding wearing a verb. "Add links to the six service pages from the three highest-traffic blog posts, listed in appendix C - about an hour in the CMS" is a recommendation.
Size everything, even roughly. An audit with no effort estimates forces the client to guess, and the guess is always "more than we can afford right now".
Common questions
- How long should an SEO audit take?
- A useful first pass on a small site is a few hours with the right tools. A full audit of a large e-commerce site is days. Sell the first pass, quote the rest once you know what you are dealing with.
- What should an SEO audit report include?
- A one-page summary stated as consequences, the value at stake, a ranked action list with owners and sizes, then technical, content and authority sections in full. The summary should survive being read on its own.
- How often should a site be audited?
- A full audit annually, or after a migration, redesign, or a ranking drop nobody can explain. Between those, a monthly check of indexation and the pages that matter catches most problems while they are small.
- Should I use an audit template or start fresh each time?
- Use a template for the checks and write the summary fresh every time. Templated findings are obvious to read and are the reason most audit reports feel generic.
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