SEO audit report: what it should contain

Most audit reports fail the same way: they are long, accurate and impossible to act on. Two hundred warnings from a crawler, sorted by the tool’s own severity, tell the reader that the site has problems. They do not say which three problems cost the business money this quarter, or what to do on Monday.

Google’s advice to site owners hiring help sets the bar. An SEO audit should give realistic estimates of improvement and an estimate of the work involved; anyone who guarantees first place in the results should be replaced; and the person auditing needs only read access to Search Console at that stage, not write access^[1]. Before making significant changes on the strength of a tool’s audit, Google says, check its recommendations against Google’s official guidance^[1].

An audit report reads from the decision down to the evidence. The reader who stops after the first page has what they need to approve the plan; the reader who goes on can check every claim.

Write the summary last and put it first. It answers four questions in plain words, with no term a board member would have to look up.

1. 1What is wrong: the two or three findings that matter most, each in one sentence, named by what they do to customers or to Google, not by the tool’s label.
2. 2What it costs: the pages, searches and revenue each one touches, with the label the revenue figure carries.
3. 3What to do first: the first month of the plan, and why it comes first.
4. 4What we need from you: approvals, access, budget or a decision, with the date it is needed.

A sentence such as “Google cannot reach the product pages added in the spring, because of one rule in the robots file, and those pages carry most of the shop’s organic revenue” does more for a decision than a health score. Scores are useful inside the report, as a way to compare one audit with the next; they do not belong in the summary.

Half a page that says what was examined, and how, protects every finding after it. Name the property and the dates of the data, the date and settings of the crawl, the tools used, the groups of pages and the markets covered, and what was deliberately left out. A finding that turns out to be wrong usually turns out to be outside its data.

The data should come from the site’s own records first: Search Console and analytics, server logs where they exist, then the crawl. A third-party estimate of traffic can fill a gap, as an estimate, but it does not replace what the site recorded.

Group the findings by area, so that each team can find its own. Six areas cover a full audit: crawling and indexing, speed and phones, pages and searches, content, competitors, and reputation with AI search. Each area has primary evidence the auditor should use before any tool’s opinion.

Read Google’s reports for what they claim. The Page indexing report does not aim at full coverage: the goal is the canonical version of every important page in the index, and Google says not to expect every URL on the site to be indexed^[2]. A duplicate marked as such is usually good news, because Google found the canonical URL and indexed that instead^[2]. The Core Web Vitals report groups similar pages and labels each group by its most poorly performing metric, from the data of real visitors, and it shows a sample of indexed pages, not all of them^[3].

For pages and searches, the Performance report is the richest single source. Google suggests looking for queries with high impressions and a low click-through rate, which are opportunities to improve a page’s title and description^[4]. For content, Google’s own questions are the checklist: whether the page was written for people or to attract search visits, and whether its dates were changed to look fresh without the content changing^[5]. The AI search area has its own checks, set out in the audit checklist for AI search.

Every finding follows the same template, so that a reader can compare two of them and a developer can act on one without a meeting.

The last two fields are the easiest to leave out, and the ones that make the next report possible. A finding that names how its effect will be measured can be closed with a result; one that does not can only be closed as done.

Ranking is the audit’s real work. Give every finding the same four questions, and the order follows from the answers.

• How serious is it? A rule that blocks the product pages outranks a missing description.
• How close does it sit to a sale? A problem on the checkout path outranks the same problem on an old blog post.
• How much work is the fix? A one-line change can go before a rebuild of equal value.
• How surely can its effect be measured? A change whose result can be seen in a month is easier to judge, and to defend, than one that may never show.

Dependencies cut across all four. A new page is no use if search engines cannot reach it, so the fix that unblocks it comes first, whatever its own score.

The plan turns the ranked list into time: who does what, in which month, and what has to be decided first. Ninety days is long enough for the first fixes to show and short enough to correct course; beyond it, give a direction rather than dates.

1. 1Month one: the Fix first findings, each with an owner and a date, and the decisions the rest of the plan depends on.
2. 2Month two: the Fix next findings, grouped by template or page, so each is changed once.
3. 3Month three: the larger Fix next items, the Look closer questions answered, and the first measurement of month one’s fixes.
4. 4Every month: the Keep an eye on items in the monthly report, so a watched problem is not forgotten.

Each month’s progress against the plan then belongs in the monthly SEO report, and the revenue each fix touches is labelled as the guide to SEO reporting in revenue sets out.

The best time for an audit is before a site changes shape. Google names a redesign or a new site as a good time to bring in an SEO, the earlier the better, so that the site is built to be found from the start^[1]. An audit before a move adds three things to the report: a list of every URL that earns traffic or links, the redirect each will receive, and the measures to watch afterwards.

Set expectations in the summary. Google says that with any significant change to a site, rankings may fluctuate while it recrawls and reindexes; a medium-sized site can take a few weeks or more before the new URLs replace the old ones, and larger sites longer^[6]. Google also advises keeping the redirects for as long as possible, generally at least a year^[6]. An audit that says this before the move saves a difficult conversation after it.