An audit should end in money, not in a checklist
Eighty findings with the same weight help nobody decide. An audit is useful when it says what each fix is worth per month, as a range and with its method in the open. How we put a website audit in money, and where the estimate stops.
Most website audits end the same way: a long list of findings, each marked high, medium or low. The list is usually correct. It is also hard to act on, because “high” says nothing about whether a fix is worth an afternoon or a month.
The person who has to approve the work needs a different answer: what is this worth, and what do we do first? So the first page of our deep audit is a summary in money.
What the first page says
- One range per month: the estimated opportunity, from conservative to expected.
- The fixes worth the most, each with its value per month, the effort it takes and the area it belongs to.
Everything else in the report is the evidence behind those two things.
Where the numbers come from
From your own data, in three steps.
- Extra visits. For a search where you sit below the top three, the clicks you would get at position three. The click rate for each position comes from your own search data when there is enough of it.
- Extra conversions. Those visits, multiplied by the rate at which your site turned visits into leads or sales over the last 90 days. For pages that get visits but don’t convert, the gap between the page and the rest of your site.
- Money. Conversions multiplied by what one is worth: the revenue your analytics records, or the value of a lead that you tell us.
Why a range, and why it is cautious
Adding up every estimate gives the most a site could gain if everything went perfectly. Nothing goes perfectly. So we count each search once, add everything up, and then report a quarter of that total as the conservative figure and half as the expected one.
The method is written at the end of the report. Each line is labelled as measured or as an estimate, so you can see which numbers are facts about your site and which are projections.
When there is no money to show
If your analytics doesn’t record revenue and you haven’t told us what a lead is worth, the report says the same thing in conversions. If conversions aren’t tracked either, it says it in visits, and the missing tracking becomes one of the first fixes: without it nobody can tell which changes paid.
What it is not
It is not a promise of results. It is an order of work with its reasons. If the estimate says one fix is worth ten times another, you start there, even if the real figure turns out higher or lower.
To put your own site in money, you need
- A lead or a sale recorded as a conversion in your analytics.
- What one is worth: for leads, your close rate multiplied by your average sale.
- Three months of search and analytics data.
- Someone willing to write down the method next to the number.
Written from our engineers’ work on production systems. Want a second opinion on your project? Talk to an engineer.
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