Start with discovery, not a score
An audit is useful when it explains which URLs search engines can discover, render, understand and choose. A single score cannot answer that. Begin with the site’s route patterns, canonical rules, robots directives and sitemap coverage.
Compare what the site intends to publish with what a crawler actually sees. The gap becomes your first implementation queue.
- Map indexable route types
- Check canonicals and redirects
- Review robots and sitemap alignment
- Inspect rendered HTML on representative pages
Turn symptoms into engineering tasks
“Improve LCP” is not a task. “Serve the hero image at the rendered size, preload the selected source and remove the blocking carousel bundle” is. Every finding should name the affected template, evidence, likely cause, expected change and verification method.
Verify the page, not the report
Rerun the same page and device profile after implementation, then spot-check production HTML, keyboard behavior, schema output and network requests. Keep the before artifact. A change is complete only when the outcome is observable.