Website Intelligence

A report should survive contact with a finance director

Most website audits are written for the person who commissioned them and read by someone else entirely — usually someone deciding whether to fund the work. That is who the format is designed for.

View a sample report See the deliverables

The typical website audit is a spreadsheet with a thousand rows, or a slide deck with forty charts, or a tool export with a severity column that treats a missing image description as comparable to a site that cannot be indexed.

All three share the same defect: they present detection rather than judgement. Finding problems is the easy part and has been largely automated for a decade. Deciding which four of them are worth your next three months is the part that requires someone to take a position.

Every IXSEO report is built around that decision. The structure below exists to make it as easy as possible to reach.

Structure

Every finding, the same six parts

Consistency of format matters more than it might seem. When every finding has the same shape, a reader learns where to look for the part they care about and can skim the rest without losing the thread. A technical lead reads the direction; a managing director reads why it matters.

It also imposes a useful discipline on us. A finding that cannot fill the “why it matters” section with something commercially meaningful is usually a finding that should not be in the report.

Title. Specific enough to be recognisable in a list of twelve.
Severity. How much it matters, on a scale used consistently across every module.
What we found. The observation, stated plainly, with the evidence behind it.
Why it matters. The commercial consequence. Written for the person approving the budget.
General direction. What resolving it involves and what to be careful of.
How IXSEO can help. The relevant service, stated once and without pressure.

Example finding

The format, applied

This is an illustration of the report format rather than a result from a real assessment.

High

Service Pages Compete With Each Other For The Same Search

What we found: Four pages address closely overlapping subjects with substantially similar wording and near-identical titles. Internal links are distributed evenly between them, and no canonical relationship or hierarchy distinguishes one as primary.
Why it matters: Search engines choosing between four similar pages will usually favour one and largely disregard the others, and the one chosen is often not the one with the strongest commercial case. Meanwhile, the effort that produced four pages has yielded roughly the visibility of one.
General direction: Decide which page should own the subject, consolidate the useful material from the others into it, and redirect the remainder. Then rebuild internal links to point deliberately at the surviving page rather than distributing them evenly.
How IXSEO can help: Content Intelligence, with Technical SEO for the consolidation and redirect work.

Severity

Five levels, used consistently

Severity describes consequence, not effort. A critical finding may take an hour to resolve and a moderate one may take a fortnight; the scale answers what happens if you do nothing.

Critical

Actively preventing something important from working. Pages that cannot be indexed, a site returning errors at scale, email being rejected. Address before anything else.

High

Materially limiting performance without stopping it. The work has a clear return and belongs in the current quarter rather than the current week.

Moderate

A genuine improvement with a real but smaller effect. Frequently cheap to resolve alongside something already scheduled.

Low

Refinement. Worth knowing, worth doing eventually, and not worth reordering a roadmap for.

Working well

Something done well. Recorded so it is not accidentally undone during a redesign, which is a more common failure than it should be.

The hardest editorial decision in any report is what to leave out. It is also the one that determines whether the report gets acted upon.

Sections

What a full report contains

Only the modules that ran appear. A report covering four modules is a shorter document, not a thinner one.

Executive summary

Overall health, the strongest and weakest aspects, the most urgent issue, the highest-value opportunity, an estimate of implementation complexity, and a clear statement of confidence and limitations.

Scores with explanation

An overall score and one per module, each accompanied by what it reflects and what it does not. No score appears without the sentence that makes it interpretable.

Module sections

Findings grouped by module in priority order, each in the standard six-part format. Where modules interact, the relationship is stated rather than left for the reader to notice.

Competitor context

Where the module was selected: how the site compares on coverage, positioning and structure, with each gap categorised by whether it is realistically closable.

Growth opportunities

Where the evidence points to something worth pursuing rather than something worth fixing. Separated deliberately, because opportunity and defect require different conversations.

Ninety-day roadmap

A sequenced view by week and then by month, with the reasoning behind the order. Opens with the line most clients remember: if this were our client, here is what we would do first.

Frequently asked questions

Why do reports contain so few findings?

Because a list of twelve hundred issues is not a report, it is a database export. Findings are consolidated to the level at which a decision gets made — one finding about heading structure across a template rather than four hundred about individual pages. The underlying detail exists and is available on request.

Can I share the report internally?

Yes. Reports are written to be circulated — the executive summary is aimed at people who will not read further, and each finding explains its commercial relevance before its technical detail. Sharing outside your organisation is covered by the report usage terms.

Does the report tell my developer exactly what to change?

The paid report gives clear direction and enough specificity to act on. It stops short of writing your implementation, because the right approach depends on your platform, your codebase and your team's constraints, none of which a report can fully know. Implementation support is a separate engagement where that is wanted.

Is there a PDF?

Reports are built as web documents with a print stylesheet that produces a clean PDF from any browser. That keeps a single source of truth rather than maintaining a document that diverges from the live version.

What is in the roadmap section?

A sequenced view of the first ninety days, arranged by week and then by month, showing what to address in what order and why that order. It is high-level by design; a full implementation plan forms part of a delivery engagement rather than an assessment.

ReportSample reportA complete demonstration report for a fictional business.MethodMethodologyHow the findings behind the report are produced.PolicyReport usageWhat reports may be used for, and how they should be cited.

See the format with your own website in it

The free snapshot uses the same finding structure and the same severity scale as the full report.

Analyse your website View the sample report