I have read audits that run to ninety pages and end with four hundred recommendations. They look thorough. They almost never get implemented.
The problem is not the research. It is that nobody on the client’s side can turn four hundred items into Monday morning. The document gets filed, and six months later the site has the same problems it had on page one.
What I put in an audit now
Eight to twelve items. Ordered by the effect I expect them to have, not by the section of the site they sit in. Each one written as a job someone can pick up: what is wrong, where it is, what to change it to, and who needs to do it — a developer, a writer, or me.
Anything that does not make that list goes in an appendix. It is still recorded. It just is not pretending to be a priority.
How I decide the order
Three questions, in this order:
- Is anything stopping Google from seeing or indexing pages that should be earning? Blocked resources, noindex left on a template, a canonical pointing at the wrong URL. Fix these first — everything else is built on top of them.
- Which pages are already close? A page sitting at position 11 with the right intent is worth more attention than a page that does not exist yet. The work is smaller and the payoff comes sooner.
- What will take three months to show? Content and links belong here. Start them early, but do not let them push out the first two.
What this costs you
Honesty about scope. If the audit is eight items, the client can see exactly what they are paying for and exactly what they are not getting. Some prefer the ninety pages. I would rather hand over something that gets done.
If you are commissioning an audit from anyone — me or someone else — ask one question before you sign: what will we be doing differently in the first thirty days? If the answer is “reviewing the findings”, you are buying a document.