How to do an SEO audit for a client

A client SEO audit has two jobs. It has to find the real problems, and it has to convince a non-specialist to fix them. Most audits get the first part right and fail at the second. This process covers both.

1. Agree on scope before you touch the site

Ask three questions on the first call:

• What does the business want from search? Leads, sales, bookings, local foot traffic. This decides which pages matter.
• What changed recently? Redesigns, migrations, new CMS or plugins, and traffic drops are the usual triggers for an audit, and they tell you where to look first.
• Who will make the fixes? An in-house developer, a freelancer, or the owner in a website builder. Your recommendations should fit what that person can actually do.

Write the scope down: number of pages or templates reviewed, what's included (technical, on-page, content, links, local), what's excluded, and the deliverable.

2. Get access

Ask for:

• Google Search Console access (a full or restricted user is enough)
• Analytics access, read-only
• CMS access only if you're also doing the fixes

If the client doesn't have Search Console set up, setting it up is often your first finding. Note that historical data won't be there yet.

3. Run the checks, most serious first

Indexing and crawling

• robots.txt isn't blocking important sections
• No stray noindex tags on key pages
• The sitemap exists, is submitted in Search Console, and lists live URLs
• Search Console's Pages report: why pages aren't indexed

Technical

• Crawl the site with a crawler such as Screaming Frog SEO Spider and list broken links, redirect chains and server errors
• Check that all versions of the domain redirect to one version, and that canonical tags are correct
• Test key templates in PageSpeed Insights and on a real phone

On-page and content

• Titles, meta descriptions and H1s on the top pages
• Search intent: does each key page match what Google currently ranks for its main phrase?
• Cannibalization: several pages competing for the same phrase
• Thin, outdated or duplicate pages

Links

• Search Console's Links report: top linking sites and most-linked pages
• Backlinks pointing to pages that now return a 404 (quick wins with a redirect)
• Internal links to the pages that make money

Local (if relevant)

• The Google Business Profile is complete and accurate
• Name, address and phone are the same across the site and major listings

4. Use Search Console data to set priorities

In the Performance report, filter to the last few months and sort pages and queries by impressions. Look for:

• Pages with high impressions but a low click-through rate. Better titles and descriptions often help here.
• Queries where the site sits just off page one. These are often the fastest wins.
• Pages that lost clicks compared with the previous period. Line those dates up with the client's change history.

This is what turns a generic checklist into an audit about *this* business.

5. Write the report for the person who pays

Structure that works:

1. One-page summary: the three to five things that matter most, in plain language, each tied to a business outcome.

2. Prioritized fix list: a table with columns for *Issue*, *Where (URL)*, *Why it matters*, *Fix*, *Effort (S/M/L)* and *Owner*.

3. Appendix: full crawl exports and secondary warnings, for the developer.

Example row:

| Issue | Where | Why it matters | Fix | Effort |

|---|---|---|---|---|

| Service pages share one title | /services/* | Google can't tell them apart; low CTR | Write a unique title per service | S |

6. Walk the client through it

Book a 30-minute call to go over the summary. Clients act on audits they understand. Agree on who fixes what, and set a date to re-check, typically a few weeks after the fixes go live, since search engines need time to recrawl.

Pitfalls to avoid

• Pasting tool output as the report. Hundreds of warnings with no priorities read as noise.
• Promising rankings. Promise fixes and a clear method, not positions. No one controls Google's results.
• Ignoring the business goal. A perfect technical score on pages that don't sell anything doesn't help.
• Under-scoping. Big sites need template-level sampling, not page-by-page review. Say so in the scope.
• No baseline. Save Search Console and analytics numbers on day one so you can show results later.

Speeding up the first pass

The slowest part is often the first look: opening a prospect's site and quickly seeing what's wrong before a sales call. We're building Auditfold, a browser extension for small agencies and solo consultants that will check a site's SEO, content and links from the browser and list fixes you can act on. It's one option among several. The process above works with free tools alone.