I have seen it too many times. An audit is delivered, either externally or internally, followed by a few meetings where everyone agrees that something should be done. And then nothing happens. The findings might be valid, and the team might agree with the recommendations. But there is still a lot of work left before anyone can start implementing them.
Someone has to investigate the findings, decide what matters, explain the changes to developers and get the work prioritised. In my experience, audits often leave too much of this to the person receiving the report.
Take the findings far enough
One of the most fun things in technical SEO is finding problems. The more obscure the problem, the more fun it is to find. A large website serving multiple markets and relying on several backend systems is a great place to look. Run a crawl, add data from your search tools, and there will usually be plenty to investigate. Some of these findings will matter. Others may have perfectly reasonable explanations. A crawl can point you towards a group of noindexed URLs, but you still need to understand whether those pages should be indexed. If the recommendation is simply “fix non-indexable pages”, someone else has to do that investigation before they can even decide whether to act on it.
This is where context matters. Are we talking about a few random pages or a template used by thousands of products? Is the behaviour intentional? What do we expect to improve by changing it? I have seen findings go from critical to relatively unimportant after 30 minutes of investigation because information that was missing at first changed the picture. I think an audit should take that investigation far enough for the receiving team to understand what needs to change and why. You will not always have access to the people or systems needed to answer every question, and that is fine. But then explain what you know, what you suspect and what still needs checking. That gives the next person somewhere useful to start.
Give the team a place to start
A technically correct finding does not automatically deserve a place at the top of the backlog. There are other things competing for the same development time, and the audit needs to explain why a particular change is worth doing.
A classic mistake is passing on a list sorted by the SEO tool’s own priority labels. Tools such as Screaming Frog and Ahrefs are useful for identifying potential issues, but they do not know enough about the business or the platform to decide what to work on first. That assessment is part of our job.
I look at issues from four perspectives: business value, work effort, dependencies and the expected effect on search visibility. A problem affecting every product category page would usually get my attention before one affecting a handful of pages about the brand’s history. But I still need to understand the problem and what fixing it would involve. The number of affected URLs is only part of the picture.
Dependencies matter here too. It is easy to recommend switching a CMS, but considerably harder to understand all the systems connected to it and what replacing it would involve. Even a worthwhile recommendation may have to wait for another project or require more resources than the team currently has available.
The audit should give the team a manageable place to start, with a reason behind the priorities. If the receiving person has to work all of that out again, a large part of the audit is effectively still unfinished.
Turn recommendations into development work
I used to be a web developer, and what I remember from those days is that we worked from a specification. What was not in the specification generally did not get done. Even when something was specified, important details could still be missed or interpreted differently. As a technical SEO specialist, a large part of my job is explaining the issue and specifying how I expect things to work to others. On a large global website, something that looks like a small fix can quickly become complicated. A request to let editors set individual links to nofollow leads to questions about where the functionality belongs, who should have access to it and what the default should be. Changing an H3 to an H2 on one template can turn into a much larger discussion when the component containing that heading is used by 15 different templates.
These are questions that need answers before the change can be implemented properly. A developer needs to understand which pages are affected, what the expected behaviour is and whether the same behaviour should apply everywhere the component is used. The better we can specify that, the easier it is to assess and carry out the work. We also need to be available when the investigation turns up something we had not considered.
This is a difference I have noticed between agency and in-house work. In-house, I am involved in the chain of tasks that follows the finding: discussing the change, clarifying requirements, following up and checking the implementation. An external audit may have a more limited scope, which makes the handover important. Someone needs to own the next step and have enough information to take it. The work continues after the ticket has been implemented. Did the change behave as expected? Did it affect other templates or markets? Then we need to follow up on the original problem and see whether the change helped. Getting something released and getting the intended result are two separate things.
Getting beyond the audit
An audit is a starting point, and its value depends partly on how much it helps the team do the work that follows. Findings need enough investigation to be useful, priorities need an explanation, and recommendations need an owner who can take them into development. These are things we should consider before handing over the report.
Having worked both as a developer and in technical SEO, I think this is where we can make audits much more useful. Give the receiving team a clear place to start and enough detail to move forward. Otherwise, it is very easy to end up in another meeting, agreeing once again that something should be done.