4 Ways to Improve Your SEO Site Audit

Editor’s Note: We’ve written an entirely new Technical SEO (& Beyond) Site Audit Checklist – with a free downloadable template.

The preparation of an SEO Site Audit is something that every SEO, whether in-house, agency-side, or independent consultant, has done. They range from a brief assessment of an hour or two followed by a quick email  to a mammoth document of more than 50 pages that can take a month or more to complete. A junior SEO might charge a few hundred dollars for a quick assessment and a well known consultancy can charge in the neighborhood of $40K for a report on the more complete end of the scale. For a process that gets that much time and money allocated it’s way, I’m amazed at the lack of chatter on industry blogs. I suppose what elements we review and how we go about the process are among the things that SEOs hold close to their chest.

In true SEOmoz spirit, I’m cracking open the black box and sharing what I’ve learned along the way. This is the first post of many that you will see from me over the coming months on the topic of optimizing your SEO reviews. Today, I’ll cover a few of the most significant elements that I’ve come up with over the years to include in all large SEO reviews.

1. SEO Scorecard

I’m starting with the single most important element of the SEO Audits I create. The idea was hammered out with the guidance of an executive at my old in-house gig. Woody wanted something to bring to the VCs that would summarize our SEO health across multiple web properties in a clean and concise summary. I told him SEO was too complicated for that, but he pushed me and together we came up with the SEO Scorecard.

The scorecard works on a five point rating scale and assesses the website’s key pages in columns against a hearty list of categorized SEO factors in rows. Don’t go overboard when selecting your key pages. I’ve never had to go over five even on the largest of websites. Once you dig in to a website you will usually find that 90% of the content is represented by a handful of templates. The SEO Scorecard is built and populated in Excel, then pulled into your audit document in screen shots.

I always feature the SEO Scorecard near the beginning of the document. It is an excellent way to anchor the rest of the report and gives you something to reference as you describe enhancements. I’m including a screen shot of the first bit of my current SEO Scorecard so you can visualize what I’m talking about.

2. Internal Linking

I’m not talking about the SEO factor here; I’m referring to how link within your SEO Audit Word document. If your reports are anything like the ones I’ve worked on, they end up huge in terms of length and file size. This is especially true if you are good at including screen shots and other graphic elements. Help your readers navigate the document with a click-able table of contents and plenty of embedded links between related sections and topics. Your readers will get more out of the document and will be able to navigate it in a way that makes the most sense to their learning style. This internal linking process might add an hour to the final editing process, but your clients will thank you. Believe me.

Here is a screen shot from the Most Pressing & Valuable Changes section of an audit.

3. Action Items

One of these days, I’ll share the outline that I use in creating an SEO Review document. For now, you can imagine a series of headings and subheadings along with a whole lot of text and a sprinkling of screen shots. For the average Joe, an SEO Review is a brute of a document to read. The concepts are foreign and as they read they’re mind is spinning with ideas of how they will implement the grand ideas you’ve presented. Don’t burden your readers with the additional task of creating a to-do list as they read. After you’ve elaborated on the details of an issue and how it should be resolved, include a list of action items. These are meant as a brief summary, so keep them short and concise!

Here is a sample of action items that followed the Local Search section of a recent report I created.

4. Repetition

As much as you like to think that your clients will read your entire review document over and over with bated breath, they won’t. More likely, your clients will skim the document looking for the most important issues and action items.

At SEOmoz, we not only covered key issues in the SEO Scorecard and in written detail within a dedicated section. We covered the most important components in one form or another a total of SIX times; Overview, Table of Contents, Scorecard, Most Pressing & Valuable Changes section, the topic section (most complete), the Action Items, and the document’s Closing Summary. I’m not suggesting that you copy and paste your entire assessment six times, but what I am suggesting is that you mention key enhancements often and place internal links to the complete assessment within the document’s dedicated section.

• Tell ’em what your gunna tell ’em (Overview).
• Tell ’em some details about the most important things your gunna tell ’em (Most Pressing & Valuable Changes). 
• Tell ’em where to find the info (Table of Contents, Internal Links).
• Tell ’em just how bad it is on a scale of 1-5 (SEO Scorecard).
• Tell ’em (the topic section).
• Tell ’em what you told ’em (Closing Summary).

I’ve been writing audits for a long time and will say that it has become one of my favorite tasks as an SEO. It wasn’t always that way. In the beginning it takes countless hours to get your groove and find your efficiencies. I hope that I’ve shared a few ideas here today that will improve your experience writing SEO Audits moving forward.

Keep your eyes out for more posts on the topic of SEO audits over the coming months. I plan to publish something every two weeks until I run out of interesting things to say. Topic suggestions are welcome.

Action Items

1. Create your own SEO Scorecard and use it to anchor your SEO Site Audit documents.
2. Link profusely within your audit document to ease navigation for your clients.
3. Summarize each section of your audits with a list of clean and concise action items.
4. Repeat yourself, A LOT.

Happy Auditing!