A real audit explains what is happening, why it matters to this business, what evidence supports the diagnosis and what should be done first. The number of warnings is irrelevant if no one can tell which three are suppressing qualified demand.

The minimum deliverable

Every finding should contain five fields:

Evidence: URL, query, screenshot, crawl record or data extract.
Diagnosis: what is wrong or what opportunity exists.
Impact: visibility, conversion, risk or wasted effort.
Action: an implementable recommendation with an owner.
Priority: expected value, effort, confidence and dependency.

"Missing meta description" is a tool output. "The three service pages producing 62% of non-brand impressions have duplicated snippets and falling CTR; rewrite and test them first" is an audit finding.

1. Business and measurement context

The audit should begin outside the crawler:

priority services and locations;
ideal customer and exclusions;
seasonality and capacity;
current lead and sales process;
customer value where known;
recent domain, CMS, content or tracking changes;
what counts as a conversion;
who can implement changes.

Without that context, the auditor cannot distinguish a high-impression vanity article from a low-volume service page that produces revenue.

2. Search performance baseline

Use Search Console to show clicks, impressions, CTR and position by page, query, device, country and search appearance. Compare meaningful periods and isolate brand from non-brand demand.

Google recommends focusing more on trends in impressions and clicks than on position alone. It also explains that property and page aggregation count results differently. A real audit states the filters and aggregation behind every chart. Google metric definitions and performance data guide

Join this with analytics and, where possible, CRM outcomes. Search Console ends at the click.

3. Crawl and indexation

The technical section should answer:

Can search engines discover important pages?
Are the correct URLs indexable?
Which URLs are indexed, excluded, redirected, canonicalized or broken?
Do sitemaps list canonical, valuable URLs only?
Are robots rules intentional?
Does JavaScript prevent important content or links from rendering?
Are duplicate parameters, filters or location pages consuming crawl attention?

Google's Search Essentials defines the technical requirements for eligibility and separately documents spam policies and key practices. Passing the minimum does not guarantee indexing or ranking. Google Search Essentials

4. Architecture and internal links

The audit should map how important pages are reached from navigation, hubs, articles and related services. It should find orphan pages, dead ends, vague anchor text, duplicate pathways and deep pages that the business expects to rank.

Architecture is not only an XML sitemap. It is the visible route a customer and crawler can follow to understand the business.

5. Page intent and content quality

For priority pages, assess:

the searcher's task;
whether the page satisfies it;
overlap with other pages;
title, H1 and main topic;
firsthand evidence and specificity;
useful comparison, process, price or limitation information;
author and business transparency;
internal and external sources;
the next action for the reader.

Google's published best practices emphasize helpful, reliable, people-first content and the language people actually use in titles, headings, links and alt text. Google Search Essentials

6. Search appearance and structured data

Check canonical tags, titles, descriptions, favicons, breadcrumbs and valid structured data. Schema must match visible content and use types Google supports for the relevant result feature. An audit should not count schema fields as an end in themselves.

7. Page experience and accessibility

Assess real-user Core Web Vitals, representative lab tests, mobile layout, HTTPS, intrusive overlays and task completion. Google says there is no single page-experience signal and warns that perfect tool scores are not the goal. Google page-experience guidance

Accessibility requires more than an automated score. Include keyboard use, focus, labels, contrast, landmarks, alternative text and representative screen-reader checks. W3C recommends WCAG 2.2 as the current standard. W3C WCAG 2.2

8. Local search, when relevant

For a Vancouver service business, include:

Business Profile eligibility and ownership;
name, category, location or service-area compliance;
profile completeness and conflicting data;
duplicate listings;
review quantity, quality, cadence and response process;
priority citations and local mentions;
map visibility across a geographic grid;
profile calls, website clicks and other interactions.

Google confirms relevance, distance and prominence as the main local factors. It does not sell improved ranking. Google local-ranking guide

9. Links, citations and authority

Review which sites link to the business, which pages receive those links and whether the profile looks earned, relevant and safe. For local businesses, include authoritative identity records and name, address and phone conflicts.

The deliverable should not recommend buying a number of links. It should identify the authority gap and realistic ways the business can close it.

10. Conversion and lead handling

An SEO audit that stops at sessions can recommend more traffic into a leak. Test forms, call links, booking, thank-you events, mobile usability and lead routing. Compare analytics conversions with actual enquiries and sales.

If those systems cannot be joined yet, state the measurement limit and make the repair a priority.

11. Competitor and result-page reality

Compare actual search competitors, not only businesses the owner names. Inspect what result types appear, which page formats win, how local results change by location and where competitors hold credible advantages.

Do not turn this into a feature-copying list. The point is to understand the evidence threshold in the result set.

12. Prioritized roadmap

End with a short decision table:

Action	Expected impact	Effort	Confidence	Owner	Dependency

The first 30 days should be executable. The next 60 to 90 can contain experiments and larger dependencies. Separate urgent defects, high-value improvements and speculative ideas.

What the client should receive

written audit in an accessible format;
raw crawl and supporting exports;
annotated findings with URLs;
prioritized roadmap;
redirect or metadata sheets where produced;
measurement definitions;
implementation briefing;
explicit unknowns and access limitations.

If the audit says "fix 1,842 errors" but does not say who, how or why, it is not finished.

Source check

Technical, measurement, local and page-experience requirements were checked against current Google and W3C documentation on August 22, 2026. The audit structure is an editorial synthesis designed to make those requirements implementable; Google does not publish a mandatory commercial SEO-audit template.

Sources

Where this leads

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