Technical audits. The term brings to mind a spreadsheet with over 200 points to analyze, along with its impact and your recommendations. I've conducted over 150 technical audits using checklists like this, but clients have fully acted upon only about five of my suggestions. Why? While technical audit checklists are valuable, they are often overlooked.

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Technical audits based on checklists often contain excessive data, leading to analysis paralysis and a lack of implemented solutions. The decision-makers and stakeholders are not concerned about the impact of your canonical tag recommendation or why a plan for 404 errors is necessary. What they do care about is the bottom line.

Analysis paralysis is the inability to decide due to overthinking a problem; it often happens when there is too much data to decipher.

I once had a client who put it bluntly for me: “Too much data, however great, means we do not have time to look at it or implement it.” This is often the case when a templated checklist with a slide deck explanation is given to the client.

Instead of a checklist-based technical audit, I suggest you create a framework that is strategic, revenue-focused, and solutions-oriented.

To start with your technical audit, create your main report; it could be a Google Slides document or a PowerPoint presentation that lists the main issues — here’s a template to get you started. Support this document with a detailed spreadsheet, which will be useful for developer teams to quickly take action — here’s my suggested template spreadsheet. Make a copy of these and bookmark them; you’ll need them very soon!

The Google slides, or the main document, contain the key information from the audit in a more skimmable format. It uses graphs and numbers to explain an issue and its commercial impact. This document should be shared with the time-poor decision-makers who may not have the technical knowledge to understand each issue. Give concise and impactful headlines that clearly explain the slide's content. Think of user experience when creating slides and grabbing the attention of a time-poor user.

Support the above document with a spreadsheet with a more detailed explanation of the issue and recommendations for how to fix it for development teams to carry out the tasks.

Strategic:

Before delving into the technical audit head-on, consider the following framework shared by Aleyda Solis:

The above framework helps to get into a solutions-focused framework state of mind, allowing the client or stakeholder to not get overwhelmed with too much data.

This audit framework will differ according to the business and website you are working on.

A framework like this will enable clients/stakeholders to understand the problem, project (tasks involved), and how it ties in with their goals. Giving a clear summary of the scope of the audit will remove ambiguities, and you can get your recommendations implemented faster.

In the above example, by understanding the business type and its goals, both in the long-term and short-term, it is easier to give recommendations that would be easier to implement. For example, a technical audit for a small private gynecology practice would be very different from a large international e-commerce site.

So, the first step to get your technical audit executed is to reduce data overwhelm and have a clear framework for the task, relative to the type of business you’re working with.

Revenue-focused:

Instead of checklists, providing a revenue breakdown for each task is more likely to prompt stakeholder action.

For example, let's consider our e-commerce business. 404 errors are a common issue that you’ll encounter when working on a website. However, instead of just stating the number of 404 errors, to ensure this issue gets resolved, I would:

1. Show the stakeholder all of the internal links pointing to the respective page.

2. Find out how many backlinks the 404 pages have. Backlinks to a 404 page don’t count towards page rank. Prioritize actioning them using backlink data based on how many backlinks the 404 pages have and their Domain Authority (DA).

3. Provide the revenue generated from those pages in the last 12 months. You can find this data in Google Analytics or internal systems if you have access.

4. Provide visual support for your data, such as graphs and charts. You can use Moz Pro to crawl your website to find what pages might be experiencing critical errors.

5. Begin by visually showing how many problematic URLs there are per category or vertical. For instance:

This is then followed by the revenue/leads impact of these issues. Example:

Adding revenue impact against each task not only creates urgency but also helps the client and internal teams prioritize tasks. Remember, development teams are hard-pressed for time, and everyone wants a taste of their pie. To ensure SEO tasks are prioritized, give evidence of how the bottom line will be impacted.

Solutions-oriented:

Provide a detailed analysis of each identified problem. This should include how it occurred, the affected URLs, and potential solutions.

Tools like Screaming Frog provide valuable insights that help to understand the complexities quickly.

You can easily check the internal links pointing to a 404 page by looking at

1. Response codes and

2. Client errors, i.e., 404 errors

The “response codes” tab will show you all the 404 links, and by clicking on the individual link, a bottom panel showing “inlinks” will open. This is the section that will show all the pages linking to a 404 page.

This detail is crucial because broken internal links (pages pointing to a 404 page on your site) impact user experience, link equity (ranking power) of webpages, and search engines’ ability to understand your site structure. Hence, a 404 page with many internal links pointing to it should be prioritized.

Read more about internal links and their importance.

Compile all this information in an easy-to-understand spreadsheet to share with the development team. Group each problem into segments to determine if a more site-wide solution can be implemented. For example, suppose all HTTP URLs originate from the collections page. In that case, it’s a more straightforward fix on the page template level than a more time-consuming fix on an individual page level.

Consider your supporting spreadsheet as the devil in the details, while your main report should narrate a visual story of the problems, their impact, and the proposed solutions.

Make a copy of the presentation slides template

Make a copy of the spreadsheet template

Before you start the audit, carefully look at the client’s long-term and short-term goals. Make sure these goals are SMART. You will often need to nudge the client/stakeholder to make the goals SMART.

Here’s an example of a SMART goal:

Make the goal about revenue/lead growth. A goal such as “We want more traffic,” is very vague and most likely will not tie in with the client’s over-arching business goals. So, before you even start your audit, have a clear understanding of the goal and add it to the spreadsheet.

In the above example, the project section describes the outcome of the task. A tech audit helps you to create an SEO roadmap. So, add those details to make it more strategic.

Once your crawl is finished and you have segmented issues according to content type, then you can add graphs relating to the total number of URLs impacted by each issue and the revenue impact of those issues. This data can be easily gathered from Google Analytics 4 or any other analytics tool.

Add it to your spreadsheet (as a summary) and your Google slides for stakeholders to decide. Rinse and repeat this data for all the issues found during the audit.

Automation

For many SEO issues, automated reporting can be set up; this will not only reduce the number of days taken to fix an error but also possibly help to avoid that error in the future. Moz Pro offers weekly or monthly automatic reporting, sent straight to your email. Read more about what you can do with reporting in Moz Pro.

Automation solutions can reduce data overwhelm for dev teams and stakeholders and allow for faster solutions.

Conducting a technical audit is the first step to improving the discoverability of your content on search engines.

It can also be the first step towards your SEO strategy and paves the way to get SEO buy-in faster.

It is easy to get lost in a checklist bubble and get overwhelmed by the information. By tying it with the over-arching goals and making it about revenue, you will be able to move the SEO needle faster and show strategic improvements.