How to Run a Basic SEO Audit

As much as we all like the presentation of a good report, clients don’t invest in SEO audits for reams of data… What they’re really after is clarity, direction, and a confident next step from someone who obviously knows what they’re talking about (i.e. a safe pair of hands). An effective audit isn’t about overwhelming the client with spreadsheets and checklists but about surfacing what matters: visibility issues, technical health, and clear priorities for growth.

Too often, agencies hand over a mountain of findings and expect non-technical stakeholders to draw their own action plans. This results in confusion or, worse, inaction. A truly valuable audit works more like a GP’s health check – you start with the basics, diagnose what’s immediately affecting performance, and signpost what needs deeper investigation if problems arise.

What Constitutes a Practical Audit

A focused SEO audit should help clients understand, in plain English:

1️⃣ Where they stand today in search

2️⃣ Which obstacles block progress

3️⃣ Quick wins to act on right now

For most sites, this boils down to five essential categories:

1. On-Page Technical Health: Is your site crawlable and indexable by search engines? Do things such as a misconfigured robots.txt, broken links, or orphaned pages mean Google isn’t seeing all your best content? Etc…
2. SERP Visibility: Which keywords does your site already rank for (intentionally or not), and where’s the potential for rapid improvement? Benchmarking organic performance and spotting missed opportunities keeps strategy rooted in real results.
3. Site Speed (Core Web Vitals): Is your website fast enough (and does it load in the right way) to keep both users and search engines happy? With over half of users abandoning sites that load slowly, speed is both a conversion factor and a ranking signal.
4. Backlinks: Assess your backlink profile for both authority and toxicity. Growing competitors and Google penalties mean your links are still a core ranking factor.
5. Content Fit: Do you have the right pages and content for the keywords that matter? Mapping current coverage to target search intent is the difference between ranking and languishing unseen.

You can forget everything else… stick to these five pillars for clarity and your clients can act on immediately to move the needle. 💪

Why It Matters 👀

Most clients have never seen their website dissected this simply. They know the site feels slow, or that competitors seem more visible in Google, but rarely are the issues mapped out in actionable terms. The value of an audit isn’t just technical – it’s the foundation for a relationship built on insight, expertise and confidence.

Delivering clarity, not complexity, builds trust – and positions you as the partner to guide them from ‘broken’ to ‘optimized’ and ultimately to make a real difference in their business.

SEOHive Scout Reports

You can certainly run all these checks yourself – whether this is manually (with analytics, crawling tools, and keyword trackers), or using your own toolset.

As time goes by and you get used to reading the data, these reports do start to become more efficient to compile too; but in the first instance assembling actionable insights can be a time drain.

That’s why we created the SEOHive Scout Report: a concise, low-cost ($97) audit covering all five essentials – SEO health, current rankings, site speed (Core Web Vitals), backlink toxicity, and keyword research. It is literally everything you or your client needs to pinpoint the issues, understand the quick wins, and begin fixing what matters. If you’re interested, you can find them on our website (https://seohive.co/seo-scout-reports/)

We also have our Technical Booster Product to help you with a clean up, following these reports, if you need it – so you can demonstrate an improvement to your clients (and an ROI) as swiftly as possible.

The Bottom Line

An audit isn’t about producing a doorstopper document. It’s about clarity, confidence and action. Keep it simple, keep it focused – and if you need a shortcut, that’s exactly what our Scout Reports are built for.