SEO audit: what it is and what the report should contain

What is an SEO audit

An audit isn't the work on the site. It's the list of what to work on and in what order — and that's exactly why it comes first. Without it, a monthly retainer starts where the agency is used to starting, not where your site is broken.

Result

An ordered list

Ordering

By severity, not A–Z

When

Before a monthly retainer

Ranking promises

None

In short

What it is and what it isn't.

The word gets used for far too many things — from one click in a free scanner to a three-month analysis. Here's where the line is.

A list ranked by severityAn audit is a document in which the findings are ordered by how much they cost you, not by the order in which they were found. If the first three items on the list aren't also the three most important, the ordering isn't done.

It isn't a tool printoutEvery scanner spits out two hundred lines. The work is saying which eight of them matter for this site, in this niche, with these pages — and that work is done by a person.

It isn't the work itselfThe audit says what to do. Doing it is separate and usually costs more. An agency that gives you an audit and, in the same document, an invoice for “implementation” has merged two things that are better kept apart.

It isn't a promise of rankingsNo audit can say “after this you'll be in first place”. It can say what's holding you back right now, and which of those things can be removed.

It isn't a design auditWhether you like the site is another conversation. The audit looks at whether the pages can be found, whether they answer a question and whether they load fast.

It isn't done every monthIt's done when something changes — before work on visibility starts, after a site change, or when rankings drop without explanation.

Content

What gets checked inside.

The order here isn't random: each point only makes sense if the previous one is in order. There's no point writing content for a page Google can't see.

IndexingHow many of your pages are in Google at all, and which are missing. This is the first check, and it changes the whole direction — this article also describes the version you can do yourself in thirty seconds.

Technical basicsThe robots.txt file, the sitemap, canonical URLs, duplicate versions with and without www, pages that return an error. Quiet things that are usually fixed in hours.

Titles and descriptionsEvery page with its own title. The audit pulls out the repeated ones, the empty ones and the ones that say nothing — and suggests what to write instead.

Content versus queriesWhether there's a page for everything you sell, and whether it answers the question people arrive with. The most common finding here is a missing page, not bad copy.

Internal linksWhich pages lead to which, and which is an orphan — with no links to it at all. It's the cheapest lever, and almost nobody uses it.

Speed and mobile layoutGoogle's thresholds are published, and they're measured with free tools. The details of what weighs how much are in a separate article.

Presence beyond the siteYour Google profile, and whether your name, address and phone match across the places you're listed. For a local business this often moves more than anything on the site — see what the profile does.

BaselineToday's numbers: impressions, clicks, average position, number of indexed pages. Without them there's nothing to compare against in six months.

Note

What a free audit that isn't an audit looks like.

Most “free SEO audits” are an automatic PDF sent by a system that has never looked at your site. You can recognize them by six things.

A score out of a hundredThe figure “your site: 58/100” means nothing. There's no such measure at Google, and no tool knows how rankings are calculated in order to compute it.

A count of “errors”“412 problems found” sounds scary, and it's usually a list of missing alt texts on decorative images. The severity is missing — and that's the whole job.

Everything is criticalWhen twenty things are coloured red, the ordering has vanished. A real list has three things at the top and a long tail of trifles.

Advice that isn't about your siteRecommendations about things your site doesn't have — a blog, a shop, multiple languages. A sign that the text is a template and only the domain name has been changed.

It doesn't say who made itAn audit is a person's opinion, and it gets signed. A document with no name behind it takes no responsibility for any of its claims.

It ends with a subscriptionIf the only way out of the document is to pay the same company monthly, it isn't an audit but a quote with charts.

Afterwards

How to read it and what comes next.

The most common mistake with a finished audit is tackling everything at once. Then, two months later, nobody knows what helped.

The three worst first

The rest waits. If the first three aren't fixed, the trifles below them have nothing to act on.

Split it by who does it

One thing is done by a developer, another by the person who writes the copy, a third by you in half an hour in the site's admin. Splitting it up saves the most time.

Record the baseline

The numbers from the day before you start. Search Console is free and is the only source that tells you what Google sees, not what we think it sees.

Give each one a deadline

Without a date, the list stays a list. Technical things take days; content takes months.

Don't touch everything at once

Big changes at the same time make the result impossible to read. If rankings drop, you won't know which change caused it.

Check after two months

The first signs show up in impressions and in the number of different queries, not in rankings — the calendar is here.

Questions

Short answers.

If your question isn't here, call us — we answer by phone too.

+359 882 95 89 89

How long does an audit take?

For a small site — a few days. For a shop with thousands of pages it takes longer, because the checks go through samples and the data in Search Console rather than through every page individually.

If someone sends you an audit two hours after your enquiry, it's automatic.

Are free audits any use at all?

As a first look — yes. Google's free tools show speed and indexing honestly and cost nothing.

What's missing is the ranking by severity and the judgement of what applies to your case. That's exactly the work.

What's the difference between a technical audit and a full one?

The technical one checks whether the machine works: indexing, URLs, speed, errors, duplicate content. It's quicker, and it's almost always the first step.

The full one adds content and queries — whether there's a page for everything you sell, and whether it answers the question people arrive with.

Does a brand-new site need an audit?

Not in the first month. A new site has no data, and most findings would be guesses.

It's useful after two or three months, once Search Console has collected impressions and you can see what the site is showing up for at all.

Can I do an audit myself?

Half of it — yes. The indexing check, the titles, the speed and the sitemap can be done with free tools and a little patience.

The hard part is the ordering: which of twenty findings to touch first. That comes from having seen how the same list played out on other sites.

Let's look at your site.

Send us the address. We'll tell you what can be seen from outside in half an hour's work, and whether a full audit is worth it — with no obligation.

+359 882 95 89 89 office@illumi.bg

Sofia, Bulgaria We reply within 24 hours In business since 2012