SEO Audits & Recommendations

"Score your recommendations on impact (1-5) and effort (5-1). Average both scores and that's a neat way to prioritise your audit!"

By Lidia Infante

"Copy/pasting generic advice from SEO tools and handing in a 30+ page audit won't make developers love you more. Break down issues into smaller tasks and present them in the context of the website you're auditing. Then prioritise them by least effort/maximum ROI before submitting."

By Roxana Stingu

"Explain the SEO performance effect of the issues mentioned. This will help them realise the importance. After delivering the audit, meet with your client and ask for business priorities and resources. Select together the important items to start working on, setting deadlines."

By Silvia Martin

"Don't assume you understand difficulty/complexity around a recommendation until you have spoken to the developers. Do your best to understand the platform and the limitations and then rethink your audit recommendations based on impact against effort."

By Chris Green

"Don’t just rely on tools. Crawlers can be great at finding issues but the human touch is important. Plus, Google is becoming user-first. Run through the site as if you were a user and find those sticking points - if you’re having issues, other users are likely to as well."

By Sophie Brannon

"Always ask what are their preferred style of communication. Some devs team just want a list of the issues and will come up with the solutions. Some others want super detailed information on what should be done to solve errors. Make sure you do that before sending your findings."

By Nathalia Menéndez

"While sharing the audit and recommendations, it's good to mention WHY for recommendations. For example: Recommendation: Use 'alt' tag with images. WHY: So that search engines can better understand what this image is about, this will help it better understand your content."

By Praveen Sharma

"The purpose of an SEO audit is not to recommend solutions, it’s to get those solutions implemented. An importing distinction. From is this the right thing to do? To what are the high-output activities that can realistically be implemented. And...how can you sell it to them?"

By Andrew Charlton

"Prioritise according to potential impact and difficulty. Avoid recommendations that are low impact and high difficulty. Don’t be afraid to leave out recommendations that won’t really make much difference"

By Barry Adams

"Your prioritisation based on your audit findings will probably not match the business priorities so before you start talk to them and understand how they get development time booked and how long that can take to get changes."

By Simon Cox

"Weight up actions and priorities based on their SEO impact, business importance, and ease to resolve to win buy in from stakeholders and plan your roadmap more effectively and in a more meaningful manner"

By Nikki Halliwell

"Make sure your recommendations are aligned with both the business goals and the objectives of the project. It's right that clients don't always know what they need, especially when tech/seo elements are involved, but finding the balance is your (difficult) job."

By Francesco Baldini

"Calculate a forecast overall, group your recommendations in a few key pillars for SEO success (~5), prioritize the pillars based on SEO impact to your forecast this year, define projects linked to these pillars, get buy-in and resources, report on operational progress and results"

By Eduard Blacquière

"Be prepared to explain the why behind your recommendations along with possible impact. Be open to feedback & push back on timelines based on resources such as internal dev teams. Always remember it’s about doing what’s best for the client to meet their business goals."

By Dayna

"Before diving in to an audit first take a step back and understand what goals of the page/site are. With that in mind look at the site through the eyes of the ideal visitor before firing up your crawling tool. An audit is more than just running through a series of technical tests"

By Simon Kensinton-Fellows