3 core flaws of SEO audits (and what to do instead)

Automated SEO audits from tools like Ahrefs or Semrush are a bane of the SEO industry.

While an SEO audit may be useful, it won’t help build your SEO strategies, achieve your KPIs and grow your business.

Your entire SEO strategy might become misdirected.

Why most SEO audits are inherently flawed

There are three big core flaws with SEO audits:

1. Limited value for decisionmakers

An audit is filled with data that’s hard to understand for anyone without an SEO background.

2. It’s often detached from the overall marketing strategy

Most automated suggestions are based on a quasi-scientific SEO score that may mean nothing for your business KPIs.

This is in addition to the typical myopia in the management ranks (e.g., if graphs show growth, we’re doing well).

Traffic growth doesn’t always benefit the business.

For example, a B2B SaaS company could waste thousands on ranking pages with poor conversion potential. Sure, the company would have lots of organic visits, but this effort is largely misplaced if those visitors don’t convert.

3. It’s static by nature

An audit merely reflects the website’s performance at a given point in time.

It’s not embedded in the dynamics of your competitive landscape and offers little value for long-term planning.

What should you do instead?

To address these issues, Crowdo came up with a tangible new format, one based on your business goals and easily digestible for non-SEO people.

Your SEO strategy needs a business foundation – cutting-edge but not overly technical. In other words, a clear and tailor-made roadmap.

Crowdo has had great success with this new format and the feedback from clients has been overwhelmingly positive.

How our SEO roadmap beats a typical SEO audit

1. It’s focused on your business priorities, not SEO metrics.

An average manager brushes off the “Domain Authority” or “organic CTR” of a specific article on your blog, and that’s OK.

Ultimately, SEO is judged based on its ROI, like any other marketing activity.

Based on your company’s maturity, you probably have a North Star metric (e.g., acquiring leads, expanding into new locations).

A clear roadmap locks on business needs and makes SEO directly contribute to your marketing goals.

P.S. This is not to hate on SEO metrics. They play their role, but they shouldn’t motivate you to invest in organic search in the first place.

2. A roadmap is easily digestible for your entire team.

An audit is for SEO gurus living in their own realm, somewhat detached from the marketing team.

So, when you assign tasks to content writers, web designers and performance marketers – they complete them without realizing the value behind them.

Then, C-levels step in and question the effectiveness of SEO altogether.

With an SEO roadmap, all technicalities are tossed aside to give way to a step-by-step plan of action that easily fits in several slides.

Sounds simple, but it makes a world of difference when your colleagues are “in the know.”

3. It helps to focus on what drives the highest impact

Your SEO to-do list can quickly become a never-ending nightmare.

However, these tasks differ a lot when it comes to importance.

For instance, adding “hreflang” attributes versus building authority backlinks. Both of these are time-consuming, but one matters more than the other.

In a roadmap, the core SEO activities are ranked by their impact score, which ranges from 1 (insignificant) to 10 (game-changing). This narrows your focus and helps manage expectations.

It also promotes a forward-looking and dynamic strategy because the impact of some tasks may change dramatically after the next big Google algorithm update.