Key takeaways
- An SEO audit report lists what is wrong with a site, how much each issue matters, and what to fix first. It is a plan, not a data dump.
- The template has nine sections. The summary and the prioritized fix list do most of the work. The rest is evidence.
- Score every issue on impact and effort. A high impact, low effort fix goes to the top no matter how small it looks.
- Most of the data comes from three places: a site crawler, Google Search Console, and a Core Web Vitals check.
- Word, Excel, and PDF all work. A live report that updates after each crawl is better, because the fix list stays current.
An SEO audit report template gives you a fixed structure for writing up what you found on a website and what should change. Without one, audits turn into 60 page exports that nobody reads. With one, a developer, a client, or your boss can open the report and know what to do by page two.
This guide is for anyone who has to deliver an SEO audit report: freelancers, agency staff, and in-house marketers. You get the template section by section, a filled-in seo audit report sample, a checklist of what to test, and a simple way to rank the fixes. You can build it in Word, Google Docs, a spreadsheet, or a live dashboard. The structure is the same.
What is an SEO audit report?
An SEO audit report is a document that records the problems holding a website back in search, ranked by how much they matter, with a recommended fix for each. It covers technical health, on-page content, and links. A good report ends with a short, ordered list of actions and who owns each one.
An SEO audit is the work of finding those problems. The report is how you hand the findings to someone else. That distinction matters, because a great audit with a bad report gets nothing fixed. The template below is built around the reader, usually a client or a developer, and what they need to act.
An audit report is different from a monthly SEO report. The audit is a one-time or quarterly health check with a fix list. The monthly report tracks results over time. If you need the second kind, see our SEO report template.
The SEO audit report template, section by section
Here are the nine sections in the order the reader should meet them. Copy the headings as they are. The right-hand column tells you where the data comes from.
| Section | What goes in it | Data source |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Summary | Site health in three sentences, the top 5 fixes, and the expected result of doing them | Written last, from everything below |
| 2. Scope and method | Which URLs were crawled, when, with what tools, and what was left out | Your crawl settings |
| 3. Health score and issue counts | One score or grade, plus counts of errors, warnings, and notices | Site crawler |
| 4. Crawling and indexing | Pages blocked by robots.txt, noindex tags, sitemap gaps, indexed vs crawled counts, orphan pages | Crawler and Search Console Page indexing report |
| 5. Technical health | Broken links, redirect chains, duplicate or missing canonicals, HTTPS issues, Core Web Vitals | Crawler and PageSpeed Insights |
| 6. On-page | Missing or duplicate titles and meta descriptions, H1 problems, thin pages, image alt text | Crawler |
| 7. Content and keywords | Pages competing for the same keyword, pages with no target, top pages losing clicks | Search Console Performance report |
| 8. Backlinks | Referring domain count, lost links, obvious spam patterns | Backlink tool |
| 9. Prioritized fix list | Every issue with impact, effort, owner, and status | Built from sections 4 to 8 |
If you serve local businesses, add a short local section after backlinks: Google Business Profile status, name and address consistency, and local pack rankings. If the site has no local angle, leave it out. Empty sections make a report look padded.
How to prepare an SEO audit report in 8 steps
The steps below fill the template from top to bottom. On a site under 1,000 pages, plan on a day for the audit and half a day for the write-up.
- 1
Agree on the scope
Decide which domain, subdomains, and languages are in the audit. Note the date and the tools you will use. Write this down in section 2 before you start, so nobody later asks why the blog was skipped.
- 2
Crawl the site
Run a site crawler over the whole site, or over the sections in scope. The crawler finds broken links, redirect chains, duplicate titles, missing metadata, and canonical problems in one pass. Export the issue list. Our site audit tool does this and groups issues by severity.
- 3
Compare the crawl with Google's index
Open the Page indexing report in Google Search Console. Compare the number of indexed pages with the number your crawler found. A big gap in either direction is a finding. Note the reasons Google gives for pages it did not index, such as "Crawled, currently not indexed" or "Duplicate without user-selected canonical".
- 4
Check Core Web Vitals
Use the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console for real-user data and PageSpeed Insights for page-level detail. Record the share of URLs rated Good, Needs improvement, and Poor, on mobile and desktop. Pick the two or three page templates that cause most of the Poor URLs.
- 5
Review on-page elements
From the crawl, list pages with missing or duplicate titles, missing meta descriptions, multiple H1s, and very thin content. Do not list every page. Group them by template, such as "all 340 product pages share one meta description".
- 6
Look at content performance
In the Search Console Performance report, find pages that lost clicks over the last 6 months, and queries where two of your pages both rank. Those are your content fixes. Check what currently ranks for a lost query with a free SERP checker to see what changed.
- 7
Check the backlink profile
Pull referring domains and recently lost links from a backlink tool. Note any clear spam patterns, but keep this section short. Link building is a separate project. The audit only needs to flag risks and lost links worth recovering.
- 8
Score, sort, and write
Give every issue an impact score and an effort score, then sort. Write the fix list, then the sections, then the summary. Send the report with a 30 minute call to walk through the top five fixes.
SEO audit report sample: what a finished report looks like
People ask for an SEO audit example more than for any other part of the template. Here is what the summary and one row of the fix list look like when filled in for a made-up online store.
The fix list uses one row per issue, not per page. A sample row from the same fictional store looks like this.
| Issue | Pages affected | Impact | Effort | Fix | Owner |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Filter URLs indexed | ~1,700 | High | Low | Add noindex to URLs with ?color= and ?size= parameters | Developer |
| Broken internal links | 412 | Medium | Low | Update links to the 38 target URLs that now 404, or redirect them | Content team |
| Shared meta description on products | 340 | Medium | Medium | Write a template that pulls product name, brand, and price | SEO |
| Poor LCP on product template | ~1,200 | High | Medium | Compress hero images and lazy-load below the fold | Developer |
Notice how each fix names the cause and the action, not just the symptom. "Broken links: 412" tells a developer nothing. "38 target URLs now 404, here they are" gives them a morning of work. Our guide on how to fix broken links covers that specific job in detail.
How to prioritize the fixes
Every crawler reports hundreds of issues. The report is only useful if it says which ten to fix first. Use two scores for each issue.
- Impact. How many pages does it touch, and do those pages matter? An issue on 2,000 product pages beats an issue on the privacy policy. Does it block indexing or ranking outright, or only polish? Score High, Medium, or Low.
- Effort. Can one person fix it in an hour, a day, or a sprint? Does it need a developer, a designer, or just the CMS? Score Low, Medium, or High.
High impact plus low effort goes first, always. High impact plus high effort goes second and gets a timeline. Low impact plus low effort is a good "while you are in there" list. Low impact plus high effort can be dropped from the report. Clients notice that kind of judgment.
- +Group issues by template or cause, with page counts
- +Give every issue an owner and an impact and effort score
- +Lead with the five fixes that matter most
- +Explain each issue in one plain sentence before the technical detail
- +Date the report and state the crawl scope
- xPaste the raw crawler export into an appendix and call it a report
- xList 400 pages with the same issue as 400 separate rows
- xReport a health score without saying what would move it
- xUse severity labels from the tool without checking them against the site
- xRecommend everything. Dropping low value fixes is part of the job
The SEO audit checklist behind the template
This is the list of checks that feed sections 4 to 8. Run through it during the audit and tick each one off. For the technical items in more depth, see our technical SEO checklist.
- robots.txt does not block pages you want indexed, and the XML sitemap lists only live, indexable URLs
- Indexed page count in Search Console is close to the count of pages you want indexed
- No important pages are orphaned, meaning they have zero internal links pointing to them
- All pages load over HTTPS and HTTP versions redirect once, not through a chain
- Every page has one canonical tag that points to the version you want ranked
- Broken internal links and 404 pages with backlinks are listed with a fix
- Core Web Vitals show mostly Good URLs on mobile in the Search Console report
- Titles and meta descriptions are unique, present, and roughly the right length
- Each page has exactly one H1 that matches the page topic
- No two pages target the same main keyword
- Pages that lost clicks in the last 6 months are identified and reviewed
- Referring domains, lost links, and any spam link patterns are noted
Orphan pages deserve a special mention, because crawlers only find them if you feed in a sitemap or log file. Our guide on orphan pages shows how to find them and what to do with each one.
Can ChatGPT do an SEO audit?
Not on its own. ChatGPT cannot crawl your site, read your Search Console account, or measure Core Web Vitals across thousands of URLs. If you paste in a URL and ask for an audit, you get general advice dressed up as findings. That is not an audit.
AI is useful once you have the data. Paste in a crawler export and ask it to group issues by template. Give it your fix list and ask for a plain-language client summary. It is a fast writing and sorting assistant, with your numbers as the input.
The gap is closing where AI assistants can call real tools. Zutrix exposes a get_site_audit tool through its MCP server, so an assistant that supports MCP can pull actual crawl results into the conversation. The assistant then writes from real findings instead of guessing.
Word, Excel, PDF, or a live report?
People search for this template in Word, Excel, and PDF form, and all three work. A doc suits the narrative sections. A spreadsheet suits the fix list, because the reader can sort by owner or status. A PDF is the format clients keep.
The weakness of all three is that they go stale the day you send them. A fix list from March is wrong by May. A live report that updates after each crawl solves that, and it lets the developer mark issues as fixed instead of emailing you. For a look at the tools that produce these, see our roundup of the best SEO audit tools.
FAQ
Common questions
Written by the Zutrix team
Last reviewed September 12, 2026
Zutrix has built rank tracking and SEO software for more than eight years. Our guides come from the same team that runs the product, and every how-to is checked against what we see in real ranking data across the keywords our customers track. We write them for people who are new to SEO and for agencies who want a clear answer fast.
Search volume and difficulty figures come from live Google results and third-party keyword data.