Seventy pages. A slick presentation. Everyone round the table nodding along, agreeing the findings are spot on. Then three weeks go by, and every single issue is still sitting on the website, exactly where the report said it was.
The audit worked as a document. As a handover, it flopped, and that’s an awkward thing to notice once the invoice has been paid.
A decent SEO audit report tool will crawl the site, sort the problems into neat groups, and produce something that looks great in a PDF. It won’t tell your developer, your copywriter and your boss what each of them should actually do on Monday. That part’s still yours, and it’s where most audits go to die.
Meet Leah. She’s invented, but anyone who’s worked at an SEO agency has sat next to her. She’s just audited an online homeware shop and found the lot: internal links going nowhere, half a dozen near-identical category pages competing with each other, and, the one that made her wince, a checkout page someone had accidentally blocked from search. Her last few audits had gathered dust. This time she wanted something that would actually get done.
First, figure out who’s reading
The shop’s owner and its developer want completely different things from the same report. The owner wants the big risks and how much time and money they’ll take. The developer wants proof they can check and a clear picture of what “fixed” looks like. Hand them both one endless list of technical findings and neither of them gets what they need.
So Leah split hers. A couple of pages up front for decisions, then a detailed section for the people doing the work. She didn’t copy every explanation into both halves. The goal was a report people could use, not one that proved how hard she’d worked by making everyone wade through the same giant appendix.
Tell them why it matters, and don’t make things up
A finding needs more than a technical description. Say which pages or customer journeys it hits and why anyone should care. “Checkout page blocked from search” is just jargon to a shop owner. Add “so people searching for your delivery times or returns policy can’t find it” and suddenly they’re paying attention. A red “High” label never does that on its own.
What you shouldn’t do is invent a revenue figure to make something sound scary. If you don’t know the commercial impact, say so, and explain what you’re worried about. Keeping what you’ve seen apart from what you think will happen is what makes an audit trustworthy. It lets the team prioritise properly instead of being bullied by numbers nobody can stand behind.
Show your working
Give example URLs, screenshots where they help, and a plain description of what happened. Say when it happens, too. Maybe it only breaks on mobile, only on one template, or only when someone’s logged in. Every time a developer has to ping the auditor asking “what did you mean here?”, the fix slides back another day.
Be choosy with examples. A simple problem might need one URL. A sitewide template issue might need five or six to show how far it spreads. Either way, keep the main report readable and stick the full 900-row export in an appendix where nobody has to scroll through it.
The problem isn’t the same as the fix
A finding and a recommendation are two different things, and the report should keep them apart. That way the people building the site can judge whether your suggested fix actually works with their setup. That matters, because there’s often more than one sensible way to solve the same problem.
So describe the result you need, not the exact code. Say which page each internal link should point to and how it should behave, then let the developer decide how to build it. They’re still on the hook for getting it right, and you avoid a pointless argument about a CMS you’ve never logged into.
If it’s all urgent, none of it is
Leah’s crawler flagged 412 issues. If she’d marked them all critical, the developer would have closed the file and gone for a coffee.
Instead, she weighed each one: how important the affected pages were, how big the likely impact was, how sure she was about the cause, and how much work the fix would take. That gave the team a far more sensible order than whatever sequence the tool happened to produce. The blocked checkout page went straight to the top. A missing alt tag on a 2019 blog post did not.
Then she explained the order. If something blocks a key customer journey or touches hundreds of important pages, say so. A good roadmap helps people decide where to spend a stretched developer’s time. It shouldn’t leave them guessing which of forty red warnings deserves the next free sprint.
About those AI-written audits
A lot of audits these days are drafted by AI, or by tools that bolt an AI summary onto the crawl data. That can genuinely save hours. AI is good at grouping similar issues, writing a first-pass explanation, and turning a messy spreadsheet into readable sentences.
It’s also brilliant at the exact mistakes this article is warning you about. AI-drafted audits love to sound certain about things nobody’s checked. They bump up severity, conjure impact figures out of thin air, and pad every finding with advice so generic it could apply to any website on earth. If AI wrote the first draft, someone with real knowledge needs to go through it with a red pen, checking each claim against the actual crawl and cutting anything that isn’t about this site. It’s worth knowing how to check AI-generated content before your name goes on the cover.
AI has also added a new chapter to most audits. Plenty of buyers now ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or Google’s AI answers for recommendations before they click anything. So a modern audit should check whether the brand actually shows up in those answers, and if it doesn’t, why not. That’s especially true for B2B, where buyers are asking AI first. Handle it like any other finding: evidence, likely cause, specific next steps.
Somebody has to own it
Every recommendation needs a name next to it, or at least a clear path to one. Maybe it’s a developer. Maybe it’s whoever signs off on content, someone in analytics, or the owner making a call. Without an owner, even a beautifully explained finding will sit in the report forever.
Write the dependencies down too. The developer can’t restructure those duplicate category pages until someone decides which ones to keep. The copywriter can’t fix a product claim until the product team confirms the facts. Spelling that out saves everyone from chasing a task that’s stuck for a reason nobody mentioned.
Agree what “done” looks like
“I changed the setting” isn’t the same as done. Agree upfront how each fix will be checked and who’ll check it, so the person doing the work and the person reviewing it are aiming at the same thing.
Make the checks something you can actually see. The link goes to the right page. The form gets all the way through. The fixed template behaves itself across a sample of real pages. Clear checks mean fewer arguments, and they make it easy to reopen a task when the problem sneaks back.
Don’t erase the evidence
Keep the original finding and log progress alongside it. Then anyone can see what was recommended, what changed, and what was confirmed. Replacing the whole thing with a cheerful “done” throws away context you’ll badly want six months from now, when something similar breaks again.
Use statuses that mean something. Proposed, approved, implemented, and validated are four different stages. Track them separately, and you’ll spot exactly where things stall, whether it’s waiting for a decision, waiting for a developer, or waiting for someone to check.
Use the next meeting to decide things
Follow-up meetings should be for settling questions, handing out jobs, and confirming priorities. They’re not for reading the findings out loud a second time. Everyone should walk out knowing what’s happening next, who’s doing it, and what still needs a closer look.
Keep the active list short and update it as you learn more. An audit earns its fee by kicking off a steady run of fixes, not by sitting in a shared drive as a monument to everything that could be better. Leah’s best audit wasn’t her longest. It was the one the shop’s developer opened on a Monday morning and just started working through, top to bottom, without sending her a single “what did you mean?” email.
Related: International SEO Mistakes That Can Ruin Your Global Expansion
