How do you report SEO audit findings?

[AndyKubrin]

Hello, Mozzers!

I'm curious to know how you report SEO audit findings. Do you use a spreadsheet? A presentation? A formal report? Or maybe something else.

If you have a favourite audit template, I'd love to see it.

A second question: what things do you report in an audit? I currently report crawl findings, authority and trust, link profiles, and competitive analysis. I also investigate a site's security—that's not usually part of an audit, but site owners need to know about it.

What do you report to your audit customers?

Thanks for sharing your auditing wisdom!

[AndyKubrin]

@martijn_scheijbeler Thank you for this response. It makes a lot of sense. Highlight actionable findings and value-adding actions.
As for security, I'm not an expert, but I still point out obvious gaps when I see them. Some sites have no backups and no provisions for login security and firewalling, for example. So I mention these things. If I don't tell my customers, who will?
Bedankt, Martijn.
Andy

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Andy,

This is a great question, let me flip this on its head and give you an insight into what I want to see as somebody who's requested but also delivered themselves on multiple audits.

• Show where the value is, I want to know based on keyword research and a little bit of competitive insight what the areas are that we should explore.
• Technical findings, speed is more important at the moment combined with structured data. Security in my opinion is an overrated piece in the mind of SEOs, we're not experts at that by a stretch.
• Crawl findings, especially for big sites tell me what types of pages are missing in XML or HTML sitemaps and how to improve the internal link structure.

Preferred formats, a presentation combined with a spreadsheet so that we have a list to work off but also a deck that can be presented internally to explain what's going on.

Martijn - hope this helps!