SEO audits: what to get right first

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. If you only fix one thing about SEO audits this quarter, make it the first item below.

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Start here

An audit is only useful if it ends in a prioritised list. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

Then this

Fix crawlability before chasing keywords. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Eventually

Most sites have a handful of issues doing most of the damage. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

What this looks like day to day

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Three things worth confirming about SEO audits before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Most sites have a handful of issues doing most of the damage — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.