SEO Audit Report Template
A structured template for writing an SEO audit report a client will actually read and act on. Twelve sections, each with guidance on what belongs there and an example you can borrow. Fill it in below and take away a finished report. Your work saves in this browser as you go.
Most SEO audit reports fail for the same reason: they are a tool export with a cover page. Two hundred flagged issues, sorted by colour, no sense of which four actually matter. The client reads the first page, sees a wall of red, and files it. Nothing changes, and six months later somebody buys another audit.
A report is a decision document. Its job is to get specific work approved and started. That means the findings need an order, the order needs a reason, and the whole thing needs to be legible to someone who does not know what a canonical tag is. This template is built around that job rather than around the shape of a crawler export.
How to use this: work through the sections in order, but write section two last. The executive summary is easier to write once you know what you found, and it is the only part some readers will get to.
Every section is optional. Leave out what you did not review rather than padding it, and say in the scope section that you left it out. An honest gap reads as competence. A vague paragraph reads as filler.
What goes into an SEO audit report
The sections below are the ones that survive contact with a real client. Report details and scope protect you when the site changes. The executive summary and priority list are what actually get read. The findings sections carry the evidence. The action plan turns all of it into work someone can be assigned. Skip the action plan and you have written a diagnosis with no prescription.
Report details
Who the report is for, which site it covers, who wrote it, and when. This looks like paperwork until someone opens the file eight months later and cannot tell whether it is still current. Date every audit and name the period the data covers.
Executive summary
Three or four sentences someone can read on a phone between meetings. What state the site is in, what it is costing them, and what you want approved. No acronyms. Write this section last.
See an example
The site is technically sound in most respects, but two problems are holding back everything else. Around a third of the service pages cannot currently be indexed because of a rule left over from the site’s rebuild in March, which means they cannot rank at all. Separately, the mobile experience on the booking page is slow enough that a meaningful share of visitors are likely leaving before it loads. Both are fixable within a fortnight. Fixing them first is worth more than any content work we could start this quarter.
Scope and method
What you reviewed, which tools you used, when the crawl ran, and what you deliberately left out. This is the section that protects you when the site changes next month and someone asks why a new problem was not in your report.
See an example
Reviewed: all indexable pages on the main domain, crawled 14 August 2026. Search Console data covers 1 May to 31 July. Tools used: a full site crawl, Search Console, PageSpeed Insights field data, and manual review of the twenty pages carrying the most organic traffic. Not reviewed: the separate booking subdomain, paid search, and content quality on the blog archive. The subdomain is worth a separate pass once the main site is fixed.
Crawling and indexing
Whether search engines can reach the pages that matter and are allowed to keep them. Put this first among the findings, because an indexing problem makes every other finding academic. Quote the actual directive or the exact Search Console status rather than describing it.
See an example
Finding: 34 of 96 pages return a noindex directive, including six of the nine service pages. Search Console reports these under “Excluded by noindex tag”, first seen 12 March, which matches the rebuild date. Impact: those pages cannot appear in search at any position. This alone accounts for most of the traffic drop since March. Recommendation: remove the directive from the six service pages and re-submit them for indexing. Leave it on the tag archives, where it is correct.
Site architecture and internal linking
How authority and crawlers move through the site. Orphaned pages, click depth, redirect chains, and whether the pages that earn money are linked like they matter. This is the section clients understand fastest if you describe it as a building rather than a graph.
See an example
Finding: the four highest-value service pages sit four clicks from the homepage and are linked only from the footer. Eleven blog posts are orphaned entirely, reachable only through the sitemap. Impact: the pages you most want to rank receive the least internal support, and the orphaned posts are effectively invisible. Recommendation: link every service page from the main navigation and from the relevant blog posts in body copy. Retire or redirect the orphaned posts rather than leaving them stranded.
On-page and content
Whether each page targets something real, says so clearly, and is the best answer available. Resist listing every missing meta description. Group findings by pattern, name the pages that matter, and say what the page should be about instead.
See an example
Finding: five service pages compete for the same phrase, and none of them ranks. Titles are near-identical, and the content differs by about two sentences each. Impact: the pages split the signals between them, so a competitor with one page beats all five. Recommendation: keep the strongest page, expand it properly, and redirect the other four into it. Give the remaining services their own distinct pages targeting the phrases people actually search.
Speed, Core Web Vitals and mobile
Report field data from real users, not a lab score. A green lab result on a fast connection tells the client nothing about the person loading their booking page on a phone in a car park. Name the template that is slow, not the individual URLs.
See an example
Finding: the booking template fails Largest Contentful Paint for mobile users in field data, at 4.1 seconds against a 2.5 second threshold. The cause is a 1.8MB uncompressed hero image loaded before anything else renders. Impact: this is the page every enquiry passes through, and the slowest one on the site. Recommendation: compress and correctly size the hero image, and preload it. Expect the metric to pass within one month of the fix reaching real users.
Structured data and rich results
What machines can read about the business, which now matters twice: once for rich results in search, and again for the AI answer engines summarising the page. Report what is missing and what it would earn, rather than listing every validator warning.
See an example
Finding: no LocalBusiness markup anywhere on the site, and the review snippets on the homepage are plain text with no markup behind them. Impact: the business is not eligible for review stars in search results, and answer engines have no structured source for opening hours, service area or contact details. Recommendation: add LocalBusiness and Review markup, and keep it consistent with the Google Business Profile. This is a half-day job with a visible return in click-through rate.
Backlinks and authority
Where the site’s credibility comes from and whether any of it is a liability. Be careful here: most sites do not need a disavow file, and telling a nervous client they have a spam problem when they do not is how audits lose trust.
See an example
Finding: 41 referring domains, of which roughly nine are genuine, local and relevant. The rest are automated directory listings that arrived without anyone asking for them. Impact: the genuine links are doing the work. The automated ones are being ignored rather than penalised, so no action is needed on them. Recommendation: leave them alone and concentrate on earning five to ten real local links over the next two quarters. Suppliers, trade bodies and local press are the realistic sources.
Competitor comparison
Two or three competitors who actually outrank them for the searches that matter, and the specific reason why. This is the section that turns an audit into a business case, because it converts your findings into a gap someone can be motivated to close.
See an example
Finding: the two firms ranking above them for the main service phrase each have a dedicated page per service and per area they cover. The client has one page covering everything. Impact: the competitors match far more searches, and match them more precisely, from roughly the same authority base. Recommendation: this is a structure gap rather than an authority gap, which is good news. It is fixable with pages rather than with links.
Prioritised action plan
The section that turns a diagnosis into work. One line per action, highest impact first. Use the format below so the client can see effort against return without reading the whole report again.
See an example
Remove noindex from six service pages | High impact | 1 hour | Developer Compress and preload the booking hero image | High impact | 2 hours | Developer Consolidate five competing service pages into one | High impact | 2 days | Me Add LocalBusiness and Review markup | Medium impact | Half a day | Me Link service pages from main navigation | Medium impact | 1 hour | Developer Begin local link outreach | Medium impact | Ongoing | Me
Measurement and next review
What you will watch to know whether the work is paying off, and when you will look again. Name four numbers at most. An audit with no measurement plan is a document that can never be proved right or wrong, which is convenient for whoever wrote it and useless for whoever paid.
See an example
Watching from September: indexed page count in Search Console, organic clicks to the six service pages, mobile Largest Contentful Paint on the booking template, and enquiry form submissions from organic traffic. Next review: eight weeks after the fixes ship, which allows time for re-crawling and for field data to refresh. A full re-audit is not needed before next spring unless the site is rebuilt again.
Your report
Fill in a section above and it appears here.
Nothing written yet. Your report builds itself here as you work through the sections above.
Download your report as a PDF
Everything you have written, formatted as a document you can send to a client or keep on file. Add your details and the download unlocks on this page straight away.
Your details stay with me. No mailing list, no follow-up sequence, nothing passed on. What you write in the report never leaves your browser.
Download unlocked
The print dialog should have opened. Choose Save as PDF as the destination. Your report stays here, so you can keep editing and download it again.
The mistake that makes most audit reports useless
An audit report gets ignored when it hands over findings instead of decisions. Two hundred issues sorted by severity colour is not a decision. It is the same problem the client started with, restated in more detail and now apparently their responsibility to solve.
The fix is unglamorous. For every finding, write what is true, what it costs, and what to do about it. Three lines. If you cannot say what a finding costs, it probably does not belong in the report at all, and cutting it makes the rest more credible rather than less thorough. A report with fourteen findings that all matter beats a report with two hundred that might.
How to prioritise what you found
Sort by impact first and effort second, and be honest about both. A one-hour fix that unblocks a third of the site outranks a two-week rebuild that might improve a metric nobody has tied to revenue. Anything that stops pages being indexed goes to the top automatically, because nothing below it can work until it is resolved.
Effort is the number clients use to decide, so guess it out loud rather than leaving it blank. “Two hours, developer” gets approved in a meeting. “Requires development resource” gets deferred to the next one. If a fix genuinely needs scoping, say that, and say what the scoping costs.
Google’s own search documentation is worth citing directly in the report when a recommendation is contested. A link to the source settles arguments that your authority alone will not, particularly when a developer disagrees.
How long should an SEO audit report be?
Long enough to carry the evidence, short enough that the person paying reads the summary and the plan. In practice that is usually eight to fifteen pages for a small site and rather more for a large one, with the length coming from evidence rather than from explanation of what SEO is. Nobody has ever approved a budget because the report explained what a meta description does.
If you find yourself writing background sections to make the document feel substantial, that is a sign the findings are thin. Better to deliver six pages that are entirely findings than thirty that are mostly preamble.
Document, spreadsheet or PDF?
Use a document for the report itself. It is what the reader wants: narrative, in order, readable on a phone. Send it as a PDF when it is final, so the version they forward internally cannot drift from the one you wrote.
A spreadsheet is the right home for the raw data behind the report, not for the report. Crawl exports, URL-level tables, keyword lists and the full issue log all belong in a sheet you link to from the document. Keeping the two separate is what stops the report turning back into the tool export you were trying to avoid. The template above produces the document. Whatever your crawler exports is the appendix.
Would you rather not write it yourself?
This template is the shape of a good audit. Filling it in still needs the judgement about which findings matter for a particular site, in what order, and what each one is worth. That judgement is the part clients are actually buying.
Book a free call →Questions about this template
Is this SEO audit template free?
Yes. Every section, every example and the report it builds are free to use with nothing to sign up for. Your details are only needed if you want the finished report as a PDF download, and even then nothing you have written is sent anywhere.
Can I use this template for client work?
Yes, that is what it is for. Use it for client audits, white-label it, adapt the section names to suit how you work. The one thing worth keeping is the order, because it is arranged so that findings which invalidate other findings come first.
What is the difference between an SEO audit template and a checklist?
A checklist tells you what to inspect. A template tells you how to write up what you found. They are two halves of the same job: work through the technical SEO audit checklist to gather the findings, then use this template to turn them into something a client can act on.
Does the report save if I close the tab?
Yes. Everything you type is stored in your own browser on this device, so you can come back and carry on. It is never sent to a server, which also means it will not follow you to another computer, and clearing your browser data will clear it.
How often should a site be audited?
A full audit once or twice a year for most sites, and always after a migration, redesign or platform change. Between those, watch the four numbers you named in the measurement section rather than re-running the whole thing, which rarely surfaces anything the numbers would not have told you first.
Related reading: the technical SEO audit checklist for gathering the findings, what a technical SEO audit covers, technical SEO services, and how I build an SEO strategy. More articles are on the blog.