SEO audit report: reading a real result
An SEO audit report should tell you what to fix, where the evidence is, and how much of your site it actually checked. Here is a real report from our own site, with its good score and its limits left in view.
Read the score beside the crawl coverage before you start work. Then follow the action plan to the pages and styles that need attention.
The report we are reading
Check Engine 1.3.161 audited checkengineseo.com on 11 November 2026, 13:31 to 13:33 UTC, capped at 60 pages.
What the score means here
The report shows Score: 99/100
, with grade A.
Its warning is just as much a part of the result as the grade:
The pages this audit could reach are in good technical shape, but most of this site was never seen. This is not yet a verdict on the whole of it.
The report's crawl finding gives the size of that gap: This audit found 436 URLs on this site and reached 60 of them.
The score describes the pages reached. Finish the crawl before judging the whole site.
The scores by area
This table shows which parts of the audit raised problems. Local business SEO is marked not applicable.
| Area | Score | Issues |
|---|---|---|
| Crawlability & indexing | 100 | 1 |
| On-page SEO | 98 | 1 |
| Content quality | 100 | 0 |
| Speed & Core Web Vitals | 100 | 0 |
| Structured data | 100 | 0 |
| Links | 100 | 0 |
| Security & trust | 97 | 1 |
| Social & sharing | 100 | 0 |
| Local business SEO | n/a | not applicable |
| AI search visibility | 98 | 1 |
| Conversion & landing pages | 98 | 1 |
| Tracking & campaign readiness | 100 | 0 |
| Brand consistency | 97 | 1 |
The action plan starts with Build, then Polish
The action plan places the colour work under Build. The rest sits under Polish, in the order shown below. This is the report's order, including notices that ask for a check rather than a repair. Read each explanation before treating the list as a set of changes to make.
| Order | Stage | Finding, in the report's words |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Build | 3 groups of near-identical colours in your CSS |
| 2 | Polish | Only 1 recognised profile in sameAs |
| 3 | Polish | No HSTS header |
| 4 | Polish | 1 page promises one thing in search and another on the page |
| 5 | Polish | Missing 1 baseline security header |
| 6 | Polish | Only part of the site was crawled |
| 7 | Polish | 1 meta description is very short |
| 8 | Polish | Orphan pages could not be checked on this crawl |
| 9 | Polish | 1 marketing and analytics tool detected |
| 10 | Polish | 3 outbound links could not be checked |
| 11 | Polish | One AI visibility control cannot be checked from outside, including by this audit |
Read the finding, not only its heading
These findings include the report's full detail and fix text. The colour finding is useful because it asks you to check intent. Similar colours can be deliberate. The headline finding gives the actual search title and page headline, so you can decide whether a visitor would find the change of wording confusing.
3 groups of near-identical colours in your CSS
Report detail: These are colours close enough that no visitor could tell them apart, defined separately. That is what brand drift looks like in a stylesheet: a value gets copied and nudged rather than referenced, and a year later the brand blue has four spellings. Palette size is not the problem. A design system legitimately defines hundreds of values. Two of them being the same colour is.
Report fix: Check whether each value in a group is doing a different job. If they are steps in an elevation or shade ramp (a surface and the surface above it) or the same colour tuned for a different theme, such as dark mode or high contrast, that is deliberate and there is nothing to fix; this audit cannot tell that apart from the same colour written twice. If they are two spellings of one colour, keep the one already referenced most often and point the others at it, so the next change moves all of them together.
Affected: Site stylesheet
Only 1 recognised profile in sameAs
Report detail: More corroborating profiles make the entity easier for a model to resolve confidently. Currently linked: github.com.
Report fix: Add the remaining official profiles. LinkedIn and Google Business Profile carry the most weight for local businesses.
Affected: https://checkengineseo.com/
1 page promises one thing in search and another on the page
Report detail: The title tag and the H1 share almost no words, so a visitor who clicks expecting one thing lands on something that reads as different. Example. Title: "Check Engine: SEO audit for Mac and Windows" vs headline: "Everything that's wrong. In the order to fix it."
Report fix: Make the on-page headline restate the promise from the title. They do not have to match word for word, but they must clearly be about the same thing.
Affected: https://checkengineseo.com/
The report recommends adding an official profile, with no guarantee of a search position. The title example also needs a person's judgement. Shared words can help make a promise clear, but the wording still has to describe what the page offers.
What this audit could not measure
The report separates these limits from work that could recover score points. Its explanation is:
4 findings are excluded from that: they describe something this audit could not measure rather than anything you did wrong, so there are no points to recover.
Only part of the site was crawled
Orphan pages could not be checked on this crawl
3 outbound links could not be checked
One AI visibility control cannot be checked from outside, including by this audit
The orphan check needs the pages that might contain incoming links. With much of the crawl missing, it cannot say a page has no links to it. The outbound-link notice says some requests were refused. Those links were not proved broken, and they were not counted as working.
The AI control notice asks the owner to check the account setting inside Search Console.
PageSpeed Insights did not run because its quota was exceeded. The speed area's clean score therefore includes no PageSpeed measurement.
From the Check Engine release of 11 November 2026, a report marks this area 'Not measured: PageSpeed Insights did not run' instead of scoring it.
What to ask of any good audit report
Ask for ranked fixes because you need a place to start when the list is long. Ask for evidence per finding because someone must be able to find the page, inspect the problem and check the repair. Ask what could not be checked because a blank result can otherwise look like a clean bill of health.
Save the report before you edit the site. After the repairs, compare the affected pages and the crawl coverage. A changed score is easier to trust when you can trace it to work you did. If you need the meaning of the audit itself, read what an SEO audit is.
Source note
We read the report and full audit results. Quotes, area scores, the action plan and finding details come from that run.
Common questions
Should I send a client only the audit score?
Send the coverage note and the fixes with it. A client needs to know which part of their site the result describes before agreeing to the work.
Why keep an audit notice that has no repair?
It can record a question for the owner to answer. Keep it separate from a defect so nobody bills for a change the evidence does not call for.
Can I compare this capped report with a later full crawl?
Use the affected URLs to check repairs first. Then read the new coverage note before comparing grades, since the later crawl may have inspected pages missing from this report.