A 200-item audit spreadsheet is not a strategy — it is a way to make a client feel like they got their money’s worth while giving their team no idea what to actually fix first. Most audit tools flag every deviation from best practice with equal weight. A missing alt tag on a footer icon and a robots.txt line blocking your entire product catalogue show up as the same severity of “issue.” They are not the same problem.

Start with crawlability and indexation, not content

Before anything else, confirm Google can actually reach and index the pages that matter:

• Is robots.txt accidentally blocking sections it shouldn’t?
• Are canonical tags pointing to the right URLs — not accidentally self-referencing a paginated or parameterised variant?
• Is the XML sitemap accurate, and does it match what’s actually indexed in Search Console?
• Are there index bloat problems — thin, duplicate, or faceted-navigation URLs eating crawl budget that should be spent on revenue pages?

If Google can’t crawl and index your money pages correctly, nothing downstream matters yet.

Prioritise by revenue proximity, not issue count

The framework that works: rank every finding by how close it sits to a page that actually makes money. A broken canonical on a category page with high commercial intent outranks a missing meta description on a blog post from three years ago, every time — even though a generic audit tool would flag the meta description issue in the same list.

Ask of every finding: if this is fixed, does it move traffic, rankings, or conversions on a page that matters to the business? If the honest answer is “probably not,” it goes in an appendix, not the top of the report.

The issues that are actually worth fixing first

1. Indexation leaks — pages that shouldn’t be indexed but are, diluting crawl budget and diluting relevance signals.
2. Cannibalisation — multiple pages competing for the same primary keyword, splitting authority instead of compounding it.
3. Broken internal linking to commercial pages — orphaned or weakly-linked category and product pages that Google under-crawls as a result.
4. Structured data errors — schema that’s present but invalid, meaning you’re not eligible for the rich results you think you are.
5. Core Web Vitals failures on high-traffic templates — one template fix here can move the needle across thousands of URLs at once.

An audit’s job is not to produce the longest list. It is to produce the shortest list of things that, if fixed in order, move the metrics the business actually cares about — organic revenue, qualified traffic, and rankings on terms that convert.