What to ask your agency about SEO audits
We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on SEO audits, these questions are worth asking early.
Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.
Questions worth asking
- Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
- How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
- What happens if it needs changing in a year?
- What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?
What a good answer sounds like
An audit is only useful if it ends in a prioritised list. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.
Most sites have a handful of issues doing most of the damage. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.
How to tell if yours is fine
Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Three things worth confirming about SEO audits before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Fix crawlability before chasing keywords — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.