Sample SEO audit report: what you actually receive
By Vishal · Published 13 October 2026
A good SEO audit report has five parts: a one-page verdict with the score and the three findings that matter, a fix list ordered by impact and effort with an owner for each item, evidence for every check, a table of your top pages with the action for each, and — in a 2026 audit — an AI visibility panel showing whether the engines cite you. Below is one of ours, anonymised from a real Indian D2C store.
Sample: "Dhaga Home", D2C bedsheets and towels, Shopify, ~1,900 indexable URLs, Pro audit, August 2026. Details altered.
1. Verdict
The site is losing most of the traffic it has earned the right to.
- Category pages — the pages that should rank for "organic bedsheets India" and 40 similar queries — are empty to Google because products load after the page. This is the single biggest problem and a two-hour fix.
- 1,140 filter URLs dilute 86 real pages; Search Console shows 61% of submitted URLs as "crawled – currently not indexed".
- Content is better than the competition's but opens with brand stories instead of answers; AI engines cite a competitor for 7 of 20 buyer prompts and this brand for 1.
Expected after the top five fixes: category pages indexed within 4 weeks; organic clicks +40–70% in 90 days from current 6,200/month, based on current impressions at positions 8–25.
2. Fix list (top 8 of 31)
Ordered by impact, then effort. "Owner" is who can do it without a meeting.
| Impact | Effort | Owner | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| High | 2 h | Developer | Category pages are client-rendered: product grids arrive via JavaScript after load, so Googlebot indexes empty pages. Server-render the first 24 products on /category/* templates. |
| High | 1 h | Developer | 1,140 filter URLs (?color=, ?sort=) are indexable and duplicate 86 category pages. Add rel=canonical to the base category and noindex the sort variants. |
| High | 3 h | Content | Two URLs compete for "organic cotton bedsheets": /collections/organic-bedsheets and /blog/best-organic-bedsheets. Merge the blog post into the collection page with the comparison table, 301 the old URL. |
| High | 4 h | Developer | Mobile LCP 4.1 s (field). Hero image is a 1.8 MB PNG served to all devices. Serve AVIF at three widths and preload it; expected LCP under 2.5 s. |
| Medium | 1 h | Content | 312 product pages share the template title "{Product} – Brand". Add the material and size variant to the title and put the product name first. |
| Medium | 30 m | You | No author or about page; the brand's founders and factory are the story. Add an About page with names, photos and the GOTS certificate, and Organization schema with sameAs. |
| Medium | 2 h | Content | Top 10 blog posts have no answer in the first paragraph; AI Overviews cite a competitor for 7 of the 20 panel prompts. Rewrite openings to 40–60-word direct answers; add a sizing table to the bedsheet guide. |
| Low | 1 h | Developer | CLS 0.18 on product pages from late-loading review widget. Reserve 240 px for the widget container. |
3. Evidence (extract: crawl and indexing)
| Check | Result | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| HTTPS, single host | Pass | http→https and www→root redirect in one hop |
| Content rendered in HTML | Fail | /collections/* return a 1.2 KB product grid container; products arrive from /products.json after load. URL Inspection shows no product links on the rendered page. |
| Parameter URLs controlled | Fail | Crawl found 1,140 URLs with ?color/?sort/?size; none canonicalised; 212 indexed per GSC |
| Sitemap valid | Warn | Sitemap includes 94 discontinued products returning 404; lastmod identical for all URLs |
| Orphan pages | Warn | 37 blog posts reachable only from the sitemap; none from navigation or related posts |
| GSC coverage | Fail | 61% of submitted URLs "crawled – currently not indexed" (1,160 of 1,900) |
The full report has this table for all seven groups — 60 checks — with screenshots.
4. Page table (extract: 5 of 50)
| URL | Target query | Position | Impressions/mo | Action |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| /collections/organic-bedsheets | organic cotton bedsheets | 14 → (not indexed with products) | 9,400 | Server-render; merge blog post; add size/GSM table |
| /collections/bath-towels | best bath towels india | 22 | 5,100 | Rewrite title/H1 to query; add GSM comparison; 4 internal links from guides |
| /blog/thread-count-explained | thread count meaning | 6 | 12,800 | Direct answer in first 50 words; add table; link to collection — snippet opportunity |
| /blog/how-to-wash-linen | how to wash linen sheets | 9 | 3,900 | Answer-first rewrite; HowTo schema; cited by Perplexity already — keep fresh |
| /pages/about | (brand) | — | — | Add founders, factory, GOTS certificate, Organization schema |
5. AI visibility panel (Pro)
Twenty buyer prompts, four engines, India locale, August 2026.
| Engine | Brand mentioned | Brand cited | Most-cited competitor | Top third-party sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google AI Mode | 2 / 20 | 1 / 20 | Competitor A (9) | Amazon.in, a lifestyle publisher, Reddit r/IndianSkincareAddicts-style threads |
| ChatGPT (search) | 1 / 20 | 0 / 20 | Competitor A (11) | Publisher "best of" lists, Amazon.in |
| Perplexity | 3 / 20 | 2 / 20 | Competitor B (7) | Reddit, brand sites, YouTube |
| Gemini | 1 / 20 | 0 / 20 | Competitor A (8) | Publisher lists |
Reading: citation share 4% overall; Competitor A wins on recommendation prompts because two publisher "best bedsheets in India" lists and a dense Reddit presence name it. The fix list for this section: answer-first rewrites of the four buying guides, a published GSM/thread-count test as original evidence, an About page that makes the entity corroborable, and an outreach list of the six publishers and two subreddits the engines actually cite.
Questions people ask
Is this a real audit?
Yes — anonymised from a real seoclock audit of an Indian D2C home-textiles store, with the brand, numbers and URLs altered enough not to identify it. The structure, the kinds of findings and the way the fix list is ordered are exactly what you receive.
How long is a full report?
Twenty to forty pages depending on site size. This page shows the verdict, the top of the fix list, and extracts from the evidence and page table.
See exactly what is holding your site back
A 60-point SEO audit with a prioritised fix list, delivered as a PDF in 48 hours. From ₹2,999.