Strategic:
Before delving directly into the technical audit, consider the following framework shared by Aleyda Solis:
|
Business Type |
Project |
Website size |
SEO Maturity |
Goals |
|
International e-commerce |
SEO Roadmap for Quarterly Growth |
Over 5,000 pages/Large |
High |
Achieve 5% organic revenue growth compared to last quarter. |
|
Investment platform |
SEO support for website migration |
Over 10,000 pages/Large |
High |
Cohesive website replatform within seven months. |
|
Recently started private gynecology practitioner |
SEO processes for a newly launched website |
500 pages/small |
Bass |
Improve brand awareness by X% in the UK market |
The above framework helps to get into a solutions-focused state of mind, allowing the customer or stakeholders to not be overwhelmed by too much data.
This dashboard will vary depending on the company and website you are working on.
A structure like this will allow customers/stakeholders to understand the problem, the project (the activities involved) and how it relates to their goals. Providing a clear summary of the audit scope will eliminate ambiguity and you can implement your recommendations more quickly.
In the example above, by understanding the type of business and its goals, both long and short term, it is easier to make 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.
Therefore, the first step in performing the technical audit is to reduce the excess of data and have a clear picture for the business, related to the type of company you are working with.
Revenue focused:
Instead of checklists, providing a revenue breakdown for each activity is more likely to spur action from stakeholders.
Consider our e-commerce business for example. 404 errors are a common problem you will encounter when working on a website. However, instead of simply indicating the number of 404 errors, to ensure that the problem is resolved, I would like to:
1. Show the stakeholder all internal links pointing to the respective page.
2. Find out how many backlinks 404 pages have. Backlinks to a 404 page do not count towards page ranking. Prioritize their action using backlink data based on the number of 404 page backlinks and their Domain Authority (DA).
3. Provide revenue generated by those pages over 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 scan your website to find out which pages may have critical errors.