Putting it all together: Reporting and Recommendations

The purpose of an SEO audit is to tell you about areas of improvement across your website. 

This should be an easy-to-ready document that anyone with a basic understanding of SEO should be able to follow. In terms of writing style, that means avoid being overly technical in your descriptions unless strictly required. 

By the end of the SEO audit, those who read it should have a clear idea of what areas of the website can be fixed, as well as what next steps are. 

With that said, below we’ve left how we would usually compile an SEO audit report.

How Compile an SEO Audit Report

1. Introduction

This section is much like an executive summary in a business plan. Here we outline:

• The purpose of the report and major findings. 
• If there is anything that requires immediate attention then this would be the area to mention it. 

Outside of these two items, there’s not much to mention in terms of an introduction.

2. Preliminary health check

This section provides details about the general health of the website you’re auditing. Areas you should include in your report include:

• Indexability: whether or not search engines can find your site and then present it to your target audience
• Status codes: whether or not any codes e.g., 404 have been found, which would would be considered fatal to pages on your website

• Responsiveness: the ability of your website to load seamlessly across multiple device types including desktop, mobile and tablet
• Page speed: as the name suggests, how quickly a given page loads on your website

3. Keyword strategy review

In the keyword strategy review section, you will provide an overview of keywords that your website is currently ranking for. 

To begin with, you should already have existing keywords organised in a spreadsheet. We usually organise ours in groups based on their ranking i.e., 1 – 3, 4 – 10 and 11 – 20.

From there, you can provide general comments about the types of keywords that your website is ranking for in each of the keyword groups, and also provide examples. 

For example, you can write the following:

In position 3, the website ranks predominantly for branded terms i.e., those containing the company brand name, Platypus. In addition, the website also commonly ranks in the top 3 for informative intent keywords like “SaaS SEO audit”.

In general, you should make comments about what the keyword is, what the searcher’s intent is with regard to their query, and what stage of the sales funnel the keyword belongs to.

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4. Content quality and relevance

When you audit the quality and relevance of content on your website, it’s with respect to your target market and the search queries that they perform. 

Usually, you would tackle this section on a page-by-page basis, as it would be impractical to adopt a blanket approach. 

With that said, here are the areas you should look into:

• Does the content address the searcher’s query?
• Does the content provide depth and breadth of coverage?
• Engagement statistics
• Originality

For more info on how to tackle each of these areas individually, read up our dedicated piece on content quality and relevance.

5. Technical SEO assessment

Opposite to content quality & relevance, your technical SEO assessment should be performed on a site-wide basis. 

You should comment on the following areas:

• Sitemap: Provide comments on if the sitemap exists, whether it’s complete or if it needs to be improved and how.
  
• URL structure: Similarly to above, provide concise comments on existing URL structures and whether they could use improvements.
  
• Canonicalization: Comment on where canonical tags exist and provide a list of URLs which are canonicalized. 
  
• Server response codes: Here you should provide comments on which server response codes were found and how many.
  

For additional reading, you may find our complete guide to conducting a technical SEO assessment here.

6. Website structure

There are four main areas you should look into when auditing your website’s structure. They are as follows:

• Website architecture
• Click depth
• Internal linking
• Content organisation
  

Website architecture

Describe the current website architecture (including the number of pages), the current website structure and the recommended website structure (if changes are required). 

For example, you could write:

“Approximately 30 URLs have been discovered. Generally speaking, all URLs are organised under one of the following categories:

– /: most URLs are an offshoot of the root domain

– /blog: some blog posts are child categories of the “blog” category”

We should continue to use the same website structure i.e., all articles should use the /blog URL and all remaining content pieces should have the root domain as their parent URL.

Click Depth

When you speak on click depth, make note of any URL paths that have excessive click depth. In addition, suggest how the situation can be improved.

For example you can write:

“All articles have an excessive click depth. Usually their URL follows this path: https://yourwebsite.com/blog/category/sub-category/article-url. Going forward, all articles should follow this URL structure: https://yourwebsite.com/blog/article-url”.

Internal Linking

In this section, comment on the general distribution of internal links across your website. 

It will be normal to find that most internal links point to the homepage, however, you want to take note of if a significant number of internal links point to other pages as well.

Here you can make a general comment on the percentage of internal links pointing to the homepage vs other pages. In addition, you can make note of pages with no internal links.

Content Organisation

Finally, discuss if content is organized and categorized across your site in a logical manner. For example, if you have multiple blog posts on a similar topic, perhaps they can be grouped in a content cluster. 

In this section, make note of any content which is not in the right place and of any content clusters that can be made.

7. On-page analysis

This section can be organised into table format and should be addressed on a page-by-page basis rather than site wide. 

Your comments for each item you address as part of your on-page analysis should be concise. Dedicate one column to stating the current situation and another for what the improved element should be. 

Below, we’ve left an example table and the items you should address for each are as follows:

8. Backlink profile analysis

This will be a site-wide analysis of your website’s link profile. 

Begin by stating how many backlinks the website has in total and from how many domains. 

Then state how many of those links are “do-follow” links and make comments on the typical authority score e.g., whether it’s low or high and what kind of anchor text is typically used. 

To wrap up the introduction, provide a link to the complete backlink profile, which you should have saved somewhere.

You could write something like this: 

A total of 865 backlinks from 247 individual referring domains have been found.

Of those, 336 links are do-follow. Most websites have a low authority score and the anchor text they use in their backlinks is commonly a naked link or is simply “OP Innovate”. Many others are quite random anchor texts.

A complete list of backlinks can be found via this link. They have been filtered to include English-language in-content-only links.

Once you complete the introductory section, you may focus on the following areas:

• Relevance: Talk about whether backlinks are coming from relevant websites or not. Whether there are a lot or not, list some relevant backlinks here, so that team members who use this report will know what kind of links to be acquired going forward.
  
• Authority score: You can tackle this section in one of two ways. Firstly, you can make a general comment about the general authority score of most backlinks. Or you can make a table and provide stats as follows:
  

• Anchor text: You would have made general comments about anchor text earlier on. Here, provide some more concrete comments and include examples of the most commonly used anchor texts. In addition, provide examples of well utilised anchor texts and state why they are good examples.
  
• Link placement: Finally, speak on where links are most commonly placed on linking websites. This could be the header, footer, within the content itself etc.

9. Analytics and data assessment

To wrap up your SEO report, provide stats on the basis of website data from Google Analytics ad Google Search Console (or similar tools). Usually, we present this section in table format. 

This section of the SEO audit should provide baseline statistics including:

• URL clicks
• Sitewide average engagement time
• Events data e.g., scroll, form fill start, watch video 30 seconds
• Key events data e.g., form submit, demo request, file download
  

This data can be present for a variety of date ranges such as:

• For month vs month data
• For quarterly data
• For yearly data
  

In addition, you can decide to compare your data against the previous period or against the same period the previous year. 

For example, your table could look as follows:

Please note: The above are just not real stats and are meant just as an example

And there you have it, a completed SEO audit!