00 Reading the report
This guide walks through every element of an audit report, from top to bottom. By the end you'll know what each score, badge, check and tab means — and more importantly, which of them actually deserve your attention.
01 The SEO score
The first thing you see on any audit is a circular score widget with a single number between 0 and 100. This is the overall SEO score — a weighted summary of how the page performed across all 50+ checks.
Technically sound, on-page optimised. Small polish remaining.
Most checks pass, but real issues worth addressing.
Several important issues affecting how search engines process the page.
Fundamental problem — missing title, broken canonical, or indexability block.
The ring colour reflects the score range: green for excellent, blue for good, yellow for fair, red for critical. At a glance, the colour alone tells you whether a page is healthy.
Below the score, a summary sentence reports the raw numbers — for example: "This webpage has received an SEO score of 67 out of 100. We have identified 27 issues, 29 passed tests based on 56 total tests."
A page with three Major issues scores lower than a page with ten Minor issues, even though the second has more total issues. That's by design — Major problems block rankings; Minor ones don't.
02 The global benchmark
Below the summary, a second sentence compares your score to the global average across all audits on the platform:
Green means you're performing above average; red means below. This is useful context — a score of 75 sounds fine in isolation, but knowing the average is 79 tells you there's still headroom.
The benchmark is anonymous and aggregated. Smart SEO Audit never shows who audited what; only the distribution of scores across the platform.
03 The metric tiles
Four small tiles near the top surface the most-quoted technical metrics at a glance. These are the fundamentals — the numbers SEO consultants ask for first when diagnosing performance problems.
| Metric | Good | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Response time | < 200 ms | How fast the server started sending a response after the request |
| TTFB | < 600 ms | Time to first byte — when the browser receives the first byte of usable content |
| Page size | < 1 MB | Total transferred size of the HTML document |
| DOM depth | < 32 levels | How deeply the HTML is nested — affects rendering performance |
04 Severity: Major, Moderate, Minor
Every failed check is classified into one of three severity tiers. The severity dictates what to fix first.
Fix this week
Something essential is missing or broken — no title, broken canonical, noindex on a money page. These actively cost you rankings.
Fix this month
Real quality problems — suboptimal titles, slow response times, missing alt text, incomplete Open Graph. Each one matters; collectively they compound.
Fix this quarter
Polish and cleanup — deprecated HTML tags, unnecessary inline CSS, suboptimal image formats on non-critical images. Individually small.
The coloured bar below the score visualises the distribution: the length of each coloured segment is proportional to the number of issues of that severity. A page with mostly green (passed) and a thin red segment is in much better shape than one with equal-sized yellow and red.
If you only have time for one fix this week, pick the Major issue with the highest traffic potential. Two Major fixes on high-traffic pages usually move the needle more than twenty Minor fixes spread across the site.
05 The AI summary
On audits run with AI insights enabled (Starter plan and above), an AI-generated section appears just below the score. It reads the full audit findings and writes a plain-language summary of what matters, what to ignore, and what to fix first.
Use the AI summary when you want to:
- Get prioritised recommendations without reading every check
- Produce a client-ready summary without manual rewriting
- Understand why a check failed — not just that it did
AI summaries are optional. You can disable them in your account settings; with them off, nothing about your audit is sent to the AI provider. See our privacy policy for technical detail.
06 The six check categories
The main body of the audit is the Checks tab, where every one of the 50+ individual checks is listed with its result. Checks are grouped into six categories. Here's what each category covers and why it matters.
📄1. Basic document setup
The foundational HTML elements every page needs. These aren't glamorous, but missing any of them causes rendering and indexing issues.
Common issues: missing <!DOCTYPE html> on legacy pages, missing lang attribute (hurts accessibility and multilingual SEO), or a broken <meta name="viewport"> (breaks mobile rendering entirely).
🏷️2. On-page SEO
The classic on-page signals Google uses to understand what your page is about. This is the single most important category — get these right and half your ranking problems go away.
Classic Major issues here: missing H1, multiple H1 tags, title too short or too long, description too short, noindex accidentally set. Fix these first — always.
📝3. Content & markup
Signals about the content itself — whether it's substantial enough to rank, and how clean the markup is. Thin content and stuffed keywords both signal low quality.
A low text-to-HTML ratio (< 10%) usually means the page has too much markup and not enough content. Deprecated tags like <center> or <font> signal an old, unmaintained codebase.
🖼️4. Media & image optimization
Images are typically the heaviest assets on any page. Optimising them improves both SEO (via Core Web Vitals) and accessibility (via alt text).
Common fixes: convert JPEGs to WebP (30–50% smaller), add alt to every content image, and add loading="lazy" on images below the fold.
⚡5. Technical & performance
The deep technical signals Google uses to assess site quality. Fixing these also typically improves real-world page speed.
High-impact fixes: enable Brotli/gzip compression if it's off, move to HTTP/2 if you're still on HTTP/1.1, and add defer or async to non-critical scripts.
🔗6. Links & site-wide signals
How the page connects to the rest of the web — internally and externally — plus the site-wide configuration files Google reads.
The most common site-wide misses: sitemap not found, canonical tag missing or wrong, and Open Graph tags incomplete (which hurts social sharing previews).
07 The technical tabs
Above the Checks tab, you'll find additional tabs with raw technical data. You rarely need these for day-to-day auditing — they matter when a check surfaces something surprising and you want to investigate.
| Tab | What it shows | When to check it |
|---|---|---|
| Generated HTML | Final HTML after JavaScript has rendered | Checking what Google actually sees |
| Raw HTML | HTML returned directly by the server, before JS | Debugging SSR vs. CSR differences |
| DNS | A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, TXT records | Debugging email deliverability or DNS changes |
| HTTP Headers | Status code, caching, security, content-type | Investigating caching or security-header issues |
| IP | Resolved IP and approximate location | CDN or geo-routing debugging |
| Whois | Domain registration data (modern RDAP protocol) | Verifying domain ownership / expiry |
| SSL | Certificate details: issuer, expiry, trust chain | Confirming SSL setup and renewal status |
| Redirects | Full redirect chain (up to 10 hops) | Finding redirect loops or unnecessary hops |
| Hosting | Identified hosting provider and server software | Confirming infrastructure |
| Ping | Network latency from our audit server to origin | Validating slow response times |
If your site is React/Vue/Svelte without SSR, the Raw HTML will be nearly empty while Generated HTML contains the real content. Google can still index this, but it's worth verifying — Raw HTML is what bots see without running JavaScript.
08 From findings to fixes
A good audit ends with a prioritised list of things to change, not with the audit itself. Here's the workflow that works:
- Start with the Major issues. Open the Checks tab, scroll to the first red entry. Fix it. Repeat until you have zero Major issues.
- Then move to Moderate. Group similar issues together — if five pages all have the same moderate finding, fix the template once instead of each page individually.
- Re-run the audit. Click Refresh audit (the circular arrow in the header). Compare the new score to the previous version in Archived audits.
- Schedule rechecks for ongoing monitoring. Edit the audit and set an audit check interval — daily is a good default — plus a notification handler for your team's Slack or email.
- Save Minor issues for a cleanup batch. Don't spend individual hours on them. Knock them out in one focused half-day per quarter.
That's the full loop. Audit → prioritise → ship → re-audit → monitor. Run it once, and you'll catch 80% of the SEO problems costing you rankings. Run it every quarter, and you stay ahead of deploy-time regressions.