An SEO’s Guide to SEO Audits Part 3: SEO Site Audit Approach & Layout
In parts one and two of our series on conducting SEO site audits, we looked at how to price and scope your SEO audit as well as questions to ask, accounts to gain access to, and tools to have at your disposal.
In this section I want to look at the overall approach an SEO takes in putting together an audit, as well as some presentation items like formatting and report layout.
There are some strong arguments to be made that you might want to be somewhat guarded or careful with the information you give away in an SEO audit, but as I pointed out in the last post in this series, my personal approach to executing an SEO audit is to:
be completely sales-agnostic: I want to charge appropriately for the value Im delivering, so that the audit itself is a valuable project that Im not relying on as a lead-gen tool or loss leader. This allows you to make completely unbiased recommendations about what to outsource, what to keep in house, etc. By charging fairly for your services you mitigate the risk of giving away value (youre charging for it, after all) and you also position yourself as an expert who does good work, which is a better sales pitch than under-delivering and offering to bridge the value gap for a price after the fact.
This doesnt mean that you do an unreasonable amount of work and put your business at risk: it just means that you charge a fair price for your time and expertise, and then generate the best, most complete document possible. My suggestions here and in the next section will assume that this is the general approach to the auditing process that youre taking.
First, as a general rule with SEO audits I find it best to assume your reader has a limited knowledge of SEO unless you know otherwise. As I mentioned in section two of the series, if you know for a fact that the only one poring over your audit will be a savvy SEO, you can adjust your audit accordingly and not over-explain or come off as patronizing, but if youre not entirely sure, the document is likely to be read by folks with a range of SEO expertise, etc. I think its valuable to educate throughout your audit dont just make a recommendation, explain why you made the recommendation and how it will help their business.
One positive here is that as you start to do multiple SEO audits, youll have some explanations you can re-use. I like to start various sections of the report with an explanation of what Im trying to accomplish with my recommendations. This doesnt mean I need to explain the history of keyword research or copy/paste a Wikipedia-style synopsis in the keyword research section, but it does mean I want to help he client understand why Im making the recommendations Im making. Heres an example of a summary of the logic behind recommended keyword strategy:
We want to identify the terms that represent the best balance of these three factors, and in some cases exploit inefficiencies in one or multiple areas (ie if competition is low in areas with low volume but high likelihood to convert that may represent an opportunity even though search volume isnt high).
The intent here is to help the client understand the thinking behind the recommendations so they can intelligently implement them.
If youre recommending a site-wide, systemic change its helpful to go beyond simple statements of what youre suggesting and use hard and fast examples. For instance lets say you want to recommend to the client, who sells widgets, that they not just use their company name as the title tag on every page of their site, and rather create title tags that dynamically insert the product name into the title tag. Rather than just writing this out, give them a real-life example:
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An SEO’s Guide to SEO Audits Part 3: SEO Site Audit Approach & Layout