An SEO audit report can list dozens of checks at once, so the real skill is knowing which ones deserve your attention this week.
Running an SEO audit is easy. You enter a URL into Smart SEO Scanner, wait a few seconds and get a report full of green, orange and red checks. The hard part is knowing what to do with it. This guide explains how to read the report and, more importantly, how to decide what to fix first.
Speed-related checks deserve attention because pages keep getting heavier. The HTTP Archive Web Almanac 2024 found that the median page weighs about 2,652 KB on desktop and 2,311 KB on mobile, and that the median mobile page grew by 357% over ten years. If your report flags large pages or uncompressed files, those are often worth fixing early.
At the top of each report you'll see a score. It's a summary of how many checks the page passed, weighted roughly by importance. It's useful for two things:
What the score isn't: a prediction of your Google ranking. Search engines use many signals that no outside tool can see, such as how people interact with your site, how many trustworthy sites link to you and how well your content answers the search. A page with a perfect audit score can still rank poorly if the content isn't helpful, and a page with a few warnings can rank very well. Treat the score as a checklist summary, not a grade from Google.
Each check in the report is marked:
Every check includes a short explanation of what it tests and why it matters. Read these before changing anything. Some warnings are perfectly reasonable for your situation, and the explanation will help you decide.
Reports are grouped into sections. The exact checks may vary, but the main areas are:
Meta information. Your title tag, meta description and other tags in the page's head. These shape how your page appears in search results. See our guide to writing title tags and meta descriptions.
Content structure. Headings (H1, H2 and so on), images and their alt text, and the balance of text to code. These help search engines understand the page and help visitors scan it. Our on-page structure checklist goes deeper.
Links. Internal and external links on the page, and whether any are broken.
Technical items. Things like whether the site redirects consistently between www and non-www, whether a robots.txt file and XML sitemap exist, and whether there's a favicon.
Speed and mobile. How quickly the page loads, how big it is, and whether it's set up to display well on phones.
Not every issue deserves the same attention. A simple way to prioritize:
These come first, because nothing else matters if search engines can't reach or index the page:
For your most important pages (homepage, main service or product pages, top articles):
These are quick to fix and affect how your page appears in search results.
Slow pages and pages that don't work well on phones frustrate visitors. Large images are the most common cause of slow pages, and they're usually easy to fix by resizing and compressing them.
Warnings about things like text-to-code ratio, social sharing tags or missing extras can come last. They're worth doing, but they rarely make a big difference on their own.
A report covers the specific URL you entered. Your homepage might pass every check while an important product page fails several. Audit your most important pages individually, starting with the ones that bring in the most visitors or matter most to your business.
After fixing issues, run the report again. You'll see your score change and confirm the fixes are visible from outside your site. If a fix doesn't show up, the cause is usually caching: clear your site's cache or CDN cache and try again.
Sometimes the most useful context comes from comparing your page with a competitor's. The competitor comparison runs both sites side by side so you can see where each one is stronger. We explain how to use it in How to Use a Competitor SEO Comparison.
Automated checks look at the structure of a page. They can't judge whether your content is genuinely useful, whether it's the best answer to a searcher's question, or whether your business is trustworthy. Those are the things that matter most for long-term search success. Use the audit to clear technical obstacles, then put most of your energy into content that helps people.
Ready to see where your site stands? Run a free scan now, or browse recent reports for examples. If you'd like help with the results, contact us. For hands-on SEO and website services, you can also visit justinzwick.com.
Higher is better, but don't chase 100. Focus on fixing issues that affect your important pages and visitors.
After major site changes, and periodically, such as once a month, to catch new problems.
No. Audits check technical and on-page basics. Rankings also depend on content quality, relevance and many other factors.
Errors that stop pages from being crawled or understood, such as missing titles, then issues on your highest-traffic pages.
Yes, you can run an analysis from the homepage by entering a URL.
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