how do i create an SEO audit report of my website? what metrics should I include?

An SEO audit report should answer three questions: Can search engines find and understand your site? Is your content meeting search demand? What should you fix first to improve results?

Here’s a practical way to build one, including the metrics worth reporting.

1. Define the scope and goals

Start your report with:

• Website and scope: Entire domain, a subdomain, or a specific section.
• Business goals: Leads, sales, bookings, subscriptions, or another measurable outcome.
• Target audience: Relevant countries, languages, and customer segments.
• Reporting period: Usually the last 90 days, compared with the previous period and the same period last year, where available.
• Context: Recent migrations, redesigns, or major content changes.

This helps you distinguish SEO issues from seasonality or changes elsewhere in the business.

2. Collect your data

You can do a useful audit with these tools:

Use Search Console and analytics as your primary performance sources. Third-party traffic, difficulty, and authority scores are estimates—not Google metrics.

3. Audit these areas and include the right metrics

A. Organic performance and business outcomes

This section shows whether SEO is delivering useful results.

Include:

• Organic search sessions.
• Google organic clicks and impressions.
• Search click-through rate: clicks ÷ impressions.
• Average search position, segmented by page or query.
• Organic conversions or key events.
• Organic conversion rate.
• Organic revenue, if applicable.
• Top landing pages by traffic and conversions.
• Branded versus non-branded search performance, where practical.

Look for: Pages losing clicks, pages with growing impressions but weak CTR, and high-traffic pages that generate few meaningful actions.

Important: Search Console clicks and analytics sessions measure different things, so they will not match exactly. Sitewide average position can also be misleading; focus on relevant query and page groups.

B. Crawling and indexing

Check whether your important pages are accessible and eligible to appear in search.

Include:

• Number of important URLs intended for indexing versus actually indexed.
• Indexing exclusions affecting pages that should be indexed.
• Broken internal links and linked 404 pages.
• Server errors, including 5xx responses.
• Redirect chains and loops.
• Unintended robots.txt blocks or noindex directives.
• Incorrect or conflicting canonical tags.
• XML sitemap issues, such as redirected or non-indexable URLs.

Look for: Revenue-driving pages that are blocked, missing from the index, or canonicalized to the wrong URL.

Not every excluded URL is a problem. Filters, duplicate URLs, and intentionally private pages often should not be indexed.

C. Page experience and speed

Prioritize real-user data over a single lab-test score.

Include:

• Percentage of measured URLs passing Core Web Vitals.
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Good at 2.5 seconds or less.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): Good at 200 milliseconds or less.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Good at 0.1 or less.
• Mobile usability issues.
• Main performance bottlenecks by page template.

Core Web Vitals thresholds are evaluated at the 75th percentile of visits, with mobile and desktop assessed separately. PageSpeed Insights lab diagnostics can help troubleshoot, but they are not the same as real-user results.

Look for: Slow or unstable templates affecting many important pages. Speed improvements support usability, but do not guarantee higher rankings.

D. On-page SEO and content quality

Check whether each important page serves a clear purpose and matches what searchers want.

Include:

• Missing or duplicate title tags.
• Missing or unhelpful meta descriptions.
• Unclear page headings and structure.
• Important pages with outdated, inaccurate, or insufficient content.
• Pages competing for the same search intent.
• Relevant topics or questions your site does not cover.
• Pages losing organic clicks or conversions over time.
• Structured-data errors on eligible page types.

Look for: High-impression pages with weak titles, content that does not answer the query, and overlapping pages that would benefit from clearer differentiation or consolidation.

Avoid treating word count as a quality score. A short page can fully satisfy a search, and a long page can still be unhelpful. Meta descriptions can influence click-through, but are not a direct Google ranking factor.

E. Site structure and internal linking

Check whether visitors and crawlers can easily reach your most valuable pages.

Include:

• Orphan pages: important URLs with no discoverable internal links.
• Click depth of priority pages.
• Number and relevance of internal links to important pages.
• Broken internal links.
• Descriptive versus vague anchor text.
• Navigation and breadcrumb issues.

Look for: Valuable pages buried deep in the site or receiving few relevant internal links.

F. Backlinks and authority

Assess the relevance and quality of links rather than chasing a raw count.

Include:

• Unique referring domains.
• Relevant, credible referring domains.
• New and lost links over time.
• Broken destination URLs with valuable backlinks.
• Link gaps compared with relevant search competitors.

Look for: Lost editorial links, linked pages returning errors, and opportunities to earn useful industry coverage.

Do not treat a third-party “toxic link” score as proof that links need removing or disavowing. Most sites do not need routine disavow work.

G. Local or international SEO, if relevant

For local businesses:

• Google Business Profile completeness and accuracy.
• Profile calls, website clicks, and direction requests.
• Review volume, recency, and responses.
• Business name, address, and phone consistency.
• Local landing-page performance.

For international sites:

• hreflang validity and reciprocal annotations.
• Correct indexation and canonicals for language or country versions.
• Performance by country and language.
• Content localization quality.

4. Turn findings into a prioritized action plan

The action plan is the most important part of the report. For every issue, show evidence, affected pages, the recommended fix, and who should handle it.

Prioritize using:

• Impact: Does this affect discovery, revenue, or many important pages?
• Confidence: How strong is the evidence that the change will help?
• Effort: How much work will implementation require?

Avoid giving every issue “high priority” or promising specific traffic gains without evidence.

5. Use a clear report structure

A practical report can follow this outline:

1. Executive summary: Overall situation and top three to five priorities.
2. Scope and methodology: Dates, tools, access limitations, and pages reviewed.
3. Performance baseline: Traffic, visibility, conversions, and trends.
4. Findings: Technical, content, internal linking, backlinks, and relevant specialist checks.
5. Action plan: Priorities, owners, effort, and deadlines.
6. Measurement plan: What you will monitor after implementation.
7. Appendix: Full URL lists and supporting exports.

Minimum dashboard to include

If you want to keep the report lean, track these:

• Organic clicks and sessions.
• Organic conversions and revenue, where applicable.
• Non-branded search visibility and clicks.
• Top gaining and declining landing pages.
• Indexing coverage of priority pages.
• Critical crawl and indexability issues.
• Core Web Vitals status.
• Progress on high-priority fixes.

Record implementation dates and review results over the following weeks and months. Separate “the fix was successfully implemented” from “performance improved”—they are different measures, and SEO changes do not produce immediate or guaranteed gains.