What a site audit looks like: a 209-page example

A site audit is often confused with browsing and taking notes: 'the menu is confusing', 'the copy is long', 'the images are heavy'. Those are impressions; they are arguable and they do not turn into a budget. An audit is an inventory counted page by page and re-measurable later.

In a corporate site crawl we completed recently all 209 pages were visited and five items measured one by one. The results: on 167 pages the meta description was a verbatim copy of the title, 135 pages were shorter than 150 words, 43 pages had no H1, 1,318 of 1,965 images had no alt text, and not one of the 209 pages carried structured data.

Those five lines do something a sentence like 'your site is weak on SEO' cannot: they break the work into parts and put it in order. Missing alt text is a bulk job that can be solved across 1,318 images at once; missing H1s are 43 template fixes; meta descriptions are a content job across 167 pages. The three do not belong to the same budget line.

The crawl also surfaced an inconsistency in the content: the homepage put the facility at 5,000 m² while the corporate page said 8,000 m². That is a trust problem rather than a search problem, and it stays invisible without an audit — nobody reads two pages of their own site side by side.

This is the real value of auditing: putting numbers behind the proposal. 'The content needs refreshing' melts in a negotiation. '135 pages are under 150 words' does not.