Many SEO professionals find it challenging to develop technical audits that bring about meaningful enhancements for their clients' websites.

Unproductive audits squander time and resources, neglect vital issues, and can harm client relations. This leads to missed chances for improved search rankings and higher organic traffic.

Based on five years of experience conducting audits for major U.S. brands, I’ve compiled seven essential tips for producing impactful technical SEO audits.

These guidelines will assist you in prioritizing high-impact modifications, offering actionable guidance, and utilizing AI tools to refine your audits.

Discover how to formulate recommendations that clients are eager to execute, resulting in tangible advancements in search performance and bottom-line results.

1. Less is usually more: Concentrate on influence rather than quantity

After observing audits produced by numerous SEO agencies over the years, I’ve noticed a common oversight: many fail to account for the restricted resources—time and energy—available to businesses.

Our team has also erred by including every best practice and minor detail, unaware that this detracts from focus and hinders the implementation of truly impactful changes.

There’s a natural inclination to think that more is better, assuming clients will favor a 40-page audit over a five-page one.

However, while length can sometimes signal low effort, a truly excellent audit zeroes in on the highest-impact items without getting sidetracked by minor adjustments.

Applying the theory of constraints

In systems engineering, a few key constraints often create the largest bottlenecks. Resolving one or two major issues generally yields the most substantial results.

This concept, known as the Pareto Principle or 80-20 rule, implies that 80% of outcomes stem from just 20% of the causes.

In SEO, this frequently shows as a few issues causing the majority of problems.

For instance, in a large ecommerce site, 80% of organic traffic might be driven by just 20% of the product pages.

Optimizing these high-performing pages could yield much greater results than enhancing every page on the site.

This principle can be effectively applied to SEO audits. You can achieve significant improvements by concentrating on identifying and tackling key constraints.

To ensure you’re considering the Pareto Principle:

• Understand the distribution of traffic on the site and the nature of keywords in the client’s space. Are there a few pivotal keywords driving most of the traffic or only a few pages currently receiving significant traffic?
• Analyze the potential impact of different changes. Some changes may affect specific high-value keywords, while others might have a broader but less intense effect across the site.

Accurately pinpointing core impactful issues is a skill that necessitates a mental model of what kinds of changes create the largest impact and why.

At our firm, we classify audit items by their type of impact. This enables us to weigh the impact against all suggested changes and construct a prioritized table for clients.

Impactful audit items can have the following types of impact:

• Large impact changes: Often site-wide issues or changes affecting crucial pages or keywords.
• Changes that impact specific keywords: Highly valuable if targeting important, high-traffic keywords.
• Pattern-based changes: While individual instances might be minor, when summed up across the site, they can have a large impact. This includes template-based changes affecting multiple pages.
• Correcting overall site quality issues: Important, but be cautious not to go overboard. Focus on critical quality issues that could be holding the site back.

Consider prioritizing recommendations using the ICE framework

To ensure your team considers factors like impact and effort level, integrate the ICE framework within the audit.

This straightforward methodology forces consideration of key characteristics that make a good audit item:

• Impact: How much difference will this change make? Consider the type of impact from the list above.
• Confidence: How sure are you that this change will have the predicted effect?
• Ease of execution: How difficult or time-consuming will it be to implement this change?

By scoring each recommendation on these three factors, you can create a prioritized list that balances potential gains with practical considerations.

At our agency, we typically weigh these factors accordingly.

• Score = 2 (Impact) Confidence Execution

It’s worth noting that SEO professionals may occasionally struggle to accurately gauge the ease of execution, especially when a client’s website is on a less common platform.

In such cases, we suggest that the auditor consults with a web developer to align execution scores before presenting to the client.

Dig deeper: How to prioritize technical SEO tasks

2. Prescriptions over descriptions

Envision you visited the doctor and they simply told you, “Your blood pressure is 140/90.” Without context or guidance, this information is essentially useless.

You’d be left wondering: Is this good or bad? What does it mean for my health? What should I do about it?

Similarly, in SEO, presenting raw data without interpretation or actionable advice is a disservice to clients.

How many times have you encountered audits that are merely lists of issues? “20 broken backlinks, 5 missing headers,” and so on.

While this information is helpful, it lacks the crucial layer of analysis needed to determine which items truly merit attention.

This disregards a fundamental truth: not all pages on a website serve SEO purposes.

The danger here, as discussed earlier, is forgetting that each item on this list demands time and resources to address.

In SEO audits, it’s insufficient to merely describe the current state of a website.

Clients require clear, actionable advice on resolving issues and enhancing their site’s performance.

Rather than merely pointing out problems, provide specific solutions and steps to implement them.

A good rule of thumb is never to identify an issue without proposing a solution.

For instance, when an audit notes 20 broken backlinks, go the extra mile:

• Rank-order the links by value.
• Highlight the recommended redirect path for each.
• Prioritize which links should be addressed first based on their potential impact.

Similarly, for missing headers:

• Propose new, search-optimized headers.
• Explain why these headers are important and how they can improve the page’s performance.

With the advent of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, this additional step of providing solutions can be streamlined, saving time and reducing headaches.

All audits that uncover an issue should include a “Key takeaways” section that is prescriptive about next steps.

This ensures clients understand the problems and have a clear path to resolve them. For instance:

Key takeaways:

• Prioritize fixing the top 5 broken backlinks, which account for 80% of lost link equity.
• Implement proposed headers on the homepage and top 3 product category pages to improve keyword targeting.
• Schedule a follow-up meeting to discuss the implementation strategy and timeline.

Everyone involved will have clear, actionable takeaways by taking this extra step.

This transforms the audit from a mere list of problems into a strategic roadmap for improvement.

It demonstrates your expertise in identifying issues and solving them, providing greater value to your clients.

Dig deeper: Top 5 SEO data pitfalls to avoid for accurate analysis and reporting

3. Begin with keyword changes before automated technical audits

Although automated tools can be valuable for gathering initial data, relying solely on a list of issues generated by these tools presents significant drawbacks.

Automated audits lack the nuanced understanding of a website’s specific context and end goals; they simply run through a set of predefined checks.

The audit process should be exploratory in nature. Many start with automated tools, but I find it’s more effective to begin by analyzing keywords and traffic patterns over time.

Focusing on keyword rankings reveals deeper insights and bigger issues.

Take website speed as an example. Automated tools might provide a laundry list of issues, suggesting you offload certain scripts or improve the largest contentful paint.

However, start by examining the client’s most important keywords and comparing your site’s performance to outranking competitors.

You might discover that your website’s speed is already within the range of top-ranking sites. This insight suggests that while speed improvements could enhance overall user experience, they may only marginally improve traffic.

Conversely, if you find a significant disparity, it could indicate a need to prioritize speed optimization efforts.

The severity of each issue needs to be interpreted in the context of the website and the keyword ranking goals.

For instance, if an automated report flags 10 pages with missing H1 headers, it’s crucial to determine whether these are actually important SEO pages.

When you start with the keywords that matter, you’ll often notice disparities and technical issues. These organically discovered technical issues will likely be far more impactful than blindly following automated tool recommendations.

Automated tools are useful, but they should support—not replace—human insight in SEO audits.

An effective audit combines automated data with expert analysis, focusing on key keywords and user experience to drive real improvements in SEO performance.

Dig deeper: Keyword difficulty in SEO guide: Everything you need to know

4. Educate the client

A good consulting relationship extends beyond simply providing recommendations; it helps the client better understand the underlying principles of SEO.

Use the auditing process as an opportunity to educate the client, turning it into a valuable learning experience that will pay dividends long after the audit is complete.

When presenting your findings and recommendations, always provide the “why” behind each change.

Explain the underlying SEO principles, the potential impact of implementing the changes, and how these align with the client’s business goals.

This offers several benefits:

• Increased buy-in: Clients who understand the reasoning behind recommendations are far more likely to be committed to the effort required to implement changes. They’ll see the value in the work, not just a list of

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