How to build a client-ready site audit report

"How is our site doing in terms of SEO?" — can you answer that with numbers in front of a client? This post covers what to put in a site audit report and how to produce one efficiently.

Six sections to include

1. Summary: A/B/C grade, top 3 issues, recommended actions
2. Structure: page count, depth, orphan pages, internal link counts
3. SEO basics: duplicate titles, missing meta descriptions, canonical issues, H1
4. Broken links & redirects: 404s, redirect chains, mixed content
5. Page performance: LCP / INP / CLS (Core Web Vitals)
6. Competitors: structural and SEO-quality diff against the top three peers

The first version doesn't need all six — sections 1–4 are already more than most teams have on hand.

Workflow

1. Crawl to gather raw material (~10 min)

Run a single automated crawl. You get the URL list, title / meta / canonical, HTTP statuses, and internal link counts. This step should be fully automated.

2. Export to sheet → summarise (~30 min)

Drop the crawl into Google Sheets and use pivot tables to produce counts: "duplicate titles: 23", "canonical mismatches: 12". These numbers feed the summary section directly.

3. Add commentary (~60 min)

A numbers-only report never gets read. Add one or two lines per section — include a hypothesis for the root cause. "23 duplicate titles → likely shared category-index template" is far more useful than "23 duplicate titles".

4. Rank recommendations (~30 min)

"50 things to fix" paralyses the client. "5 quick wins + 3 medium-term items" actually gets shipped. Sort by impact × implementation cost.

• High impact / low cost → do it now (Quick Win)
• High impact / high cost → propose for next dev cycle
• Low impact → explicitly mark as "won't do"

Common mistakes

• Too much jargon → inline one-line explanations on first use
• Findings without recommendations → always answer "so what?"
• Walls of numbers → add trend lines or competitor comparisons for context
• Too long → keep the core under 8 pages and push details to an appendix

Build a template once, save time forever

Don't start from scratch every engagement. A reusable template (summary deck + data sheet + recommendation checklist) gets the second audit to 80% done before you've written a word of commentary.

How sitemora fits

On Pro and up, sitemora exports crawl results directly into Google Sheets. The template export produces the summary, page list, and SEO check views automatically — you just add commentary and recommendations. Combine with the Business plan's scheduling to automate recurring monthly reports.