Something that comes up often in my discussion with others in our industry regarding audit work is how many people who do SEO audits spend dozens, possibly even hundreds, of hours on an audit, and then deliver an 80-page or 100-page (or more) document to their clients.
In these discussions (and in an occasional Twitter rant), I’ll mention that the typical audit I produce is between 15 and 20 pages with extreme situations resulting in, at most, 30 pages. Some people have said that’s about where they’re at, so I know I’m not alone in how much I put into an audit from a written perspective. Yet what exactly is it that goes into those couple dozen pages?
Note: I wrote a somewhat similar article more than a year ago. This time, however, I want to build on those concepts covered and go even further in explaining the key differences between strategic and tactical audits and discuss more of why this is important.
Strategic Vs. Tactical
Something I emphasize when I’m training others in SEO implementation or the audit process is the importance and value of grasping the concept of and differences between strategic audits and tactical audits.
Taking the time as you’re performing an audit and then as you’re doing the write-up of your findings and recommendations to see where something might be strategic and something else might be tactical offers many benefits. It really is well worth the effort to learn this process and make use of it. Everybody wins when you do.
Not Everyone’s Audit Cup of Tea
Before I go into sharing with you why I believe there is value in splitting out strategic and tactical into two separate audit processes, I do need to say that there may be reasons why you wouldn’t want to do that. Perhaps you enjoy doing it all in one audit. Maybe that’s the business model that you find works best for you. Maybe you believe it’s not right to do it the way I’m going to discuss here.
Whatever the reason, if you do feel that way, especially after at least reading through my reasoning, then by all means, continue to do so. You do what works for you, I’ll do what works for me, and we’ll all be happy. 🙂
Sound Business Benefits
When you separate out strategic vs. tactical concepts during an audit process, it allows you to achieve a number of valuable objectives. These include (but may not be limited to):
- Reduction in the Review Process
- Reduction in Shiny Object Syndrome
- Reduction in Rabbit Hole Economics
- Increase in Focus Quality
- Increase in Clarity of Priorities
- Improvement in Client Adaption
- Improvement in Client Understanding
- Improvement in Client Appreciation
- Increased Upsell Opportunity
As you can see, that’s a lot of benefits I’m claiming can come from this one realization about the work we do. Well, let me see if I can help validate why each of those is a true benefit and on enough of a scale that you’ll at least take a serious look at how you go about the audit process yourselves.
Reduction in the Review Process
The more you understand what is strategic and what is tactical, then when you are performing a strategic audit, you’ll be able to completely bypass having to spend any time on many other aspects of the SEO evaluation, decision making, and recommendation process. You’ll see that what you might have previously been focused on is really tactical and doesn’t belong in a strategic audit.
Reduction in Shiny Object Syndrome
By focusing only on strategic factors, you’re less likely to find yourself being enamored by things that aren’t necessary or paying attention to considerations you may not even need to be looking at for various other reasons, as well.
Reduction in Rabbit Hole Economics
Building on the shiny object concept, one of the biggest benefits to splitting out strategic from tactical SEO thinking is you’ll be much less prone to rabbit hole economics, which is the notion that the more you dig into something, the more likely you’re going to dig much further than you anticipated when you bid the contract. Now that’s still possible in my model, but it’s much less likely because strategic concepts, factors, and considerations during an SEO audit are much more resilient as far as only needing to examine a sub-set of data.
And believe me, it’s quite expensive, in the end, to go down most rabbit holes in our analysis work because every hour expended digging deeper into things you ultimately don’t need causes you to end up working many more hours on a single audit than you should be getting paid for at this stage.
Imagine, from the initial page volume I mentioned at the opening of this article, how many more hours it would take to produce a 70, 80, or 100-page audit than it does to produce 15 or 20 pages. That’s huge! Crazy huge!
Increase in Focus Quality
The more you focus on lesser considerations, the greater decrease you will find in the quality of your focus. Spending too many hours looking over reams of data or examining and then recommending things that belong in a tactical audit will, quite often, result in blurry vision, lost enthusiasm, confusion, distractions…and the list goes on.
Believe me. I know. Because I used to be a “do it all in one audit” person. So I know from direct, painful experience.
Increase in Clarity of Priorities
Since you gain quality when you have the ability to focus on your audit work, you naturally then have a clearer mind during the process, and that, in turn, means you’re most likely going to have a much better understanding about what issues need to be considered priorities. That’s a very big deal in the audit process because as I’ve discussed in my audit articles in the past, and really showed where it was put to use in the Panda One Year Case Study I posted at the beginning of the month, prioritization is crucial to helping clients get the best possible results.
Improvement in Client Adaption
When I present a document that is laser focused on strategic factors and considerations, clients are much less likely to be overwhelmed by the volume of information. Sure, you may initially wow them with how thorough you appear to have been, or you may impress them with the belief they’re getting so much value for their buck, but, ultimately, what I’ve found countless times from clients who previously got 90-page audits from others is they communicated appreciation on the surface.
Then they left and ignored the majority of the recommendations because they were overwhelmed by it. They thought, “There’s no way we have time to put all of this to use,” or “We can’t afford to spend all that time,” which then turns into, “Let’s just do what we can and hope for the best.”
STOP THE PRESSES OMG
Let me stop you dead in your tracks right now. One of the biggest tragedies I’ve seen in the audit consulting I do is a prospective client coming to me after their site got hammered by Panda or Penguin and hearing them tell me, “We need an audit. Here’s the 90-page audit so-and-so did last year. Maybe you can make use of it.”
Really. That happens a lot. And that’s how I know, for a fact, that so many site owners end up NOT doing the work you’ve spent countless hours producing. It’s not that they don’t like you or that they don’t care. It’s because they get overwhelmed by it, and their capacity to take action becomes short-circuited from information overload.
And a year later, they come to me to help them fix the problems. Now that doesn’t automatically mean they’re wasting their time paying me for what you already did. Maybe what you put in that document really was the best answer to their needs. Maybe not. I’ve seen both on the very few times I’ve even scanned one of those SEO War and Peace books.
Yet all I know (and care about) is these site owners have come to me because whatever they DID implement from recommendations someone previously provided them “sort of” worked or worked for a while until one of the many Google updates caught up with them.
Of course, I’ve seen many more cases where a client got NO advice, no guidance, or a rip-off, boiler-plate audit. In those cases it’s more obvious why their site tanked. Yet people really need to understand this problem and stop churning out 90-page audits unless you can say, for the record, that the overwhelming majority of your clients really did implement everything in them, which is unlikely, because if they did and if you knew what you were talking about, they should NOT have come to me afterward.
Back to Benefits
Sorry about that rant. Okay, I’m not sorry. It needed to be said. Anyway, the point of that rant was to show how clients really will be more likely to adapt more, if not actually all, of your recommendations. (Yeah, even a 15-page document can sometimes become fodder for the recycle bin #facepalm).
Improvement in Client Understanding
When you swamp a client with a 90-page audit, you fail miserably at the bigger picture concept of what I personally believe is a very important concept, client understanding and education. The more I can help a client understand the issues and understand why each recommendation I make is important, the much more likely they are to appreciate me. It’s something they tell me all the time, every time I do an audit.
And the more you educate them, the more empowered they feel because they actually do become much more empowered and confident that they don’t need to endlessly pay someone else for what they should ultimately be able to take on themselves or have their team take on.
Improvement in Client Appreciation
That building of client understanding and education fosters an invaluable trust, and that sets them up to succeed at an even higher level. This means when they do need to call on my services for something in the future, they know they won’t be overwhelmed or have to pay me for something they can now be take on themselves. So everybody wins.
Increased Upsell Opportunity
Every aspect of an audit that is truly tactical in nature, and thus not included in a strategic audit, is a candidate opportunity for you to offer those clients additional services. Don’t mistake that for, “You should have provided that in the audit, and now you’re just looking to rip off your clients,” because it’s not about that. It’s about breaking it down into manageable chunks, and as you read below, it goes even further than that.
Strategic Vs. Tactical SEO Audit Scalability
Giving away the farm is not scalable. Okay, it may be if you’re charging a high enough rate that you’re running a very profitable business doing it, but only if clients are implementing all your recommendations. Because if they’re not, you’re cheating them more than you are making a profit.
So if you don’t care about ethics on this topic (which you have a right not to), then fine, but if you care about not cheating your clients and you want them to actually implement all that you recommend, respect the concept and stick with strategic focus in that first audit. Then, IF they need your services for tactical, they’ll be more likely to come to you for the tactical and maintain a relationship with you for even longer.
The end result is that you have more time to do more work under more contracts.
You May Be Wasting Time or Ripping Off the Client!
If you churn out a 90-page audit, you could be wasting your time in so many ways, and that’s crazy.
Let’s say you perform an audit, and in that audit you discover, as just one example, that page titles need vast improvement. If you don’t just call out a few examples in your audit document and offer one or two “possible alternative better titles,” you could be throwing way too much energy into something you really don’t need to do.
Maybe that’s because the client really does have someone on their staff who, with just a little guidance, could be doing that work themselves. Maybe for pennies on the dollar compared to what you charge to do the same work.
Maybe it turns out after you present the audit to the client that they have the ability to automate the generation of at least some of those titles with reasonable quality improvement and that they could have done so for pennies on the dollar compared to your rate. That’s a great consideration because if a client implements every recommendation I provide, quite often many of the tasks can be automated, at least to a certain degree.
And I’m talking about client-side, not by some proprietary software you invented. I’m talking about directly within their CMS where that automation belongs so that they don’t have to come to you every time they create a new page or section of their site.
Like I said, there are countless ways you could be wasting your time if you go that far, and you may be charging the client for something they should ultimately be taking on themselves. Or alternatively, you may be able to offer to do the implementation aspect as a next-phase project.
Or they may not be able to put what you provided to use for countless business or technical reasons. Wow, imagine how much time you might be wasting. Seriously. Think about it.
What Is Strategic and What Is Tactical
Just writing an article on what is and what is not strategic vs. tactical in an audit could take a book to detail. Let me just give you a few examples here to hopefully start you thinking more on your own about it.
If I review a handful of page titles on important pages and see that there’s consistent patterns to the lack of quality of those titles, then I include that discovery in my audit. I explain why more refined titles are important, and I give a few examples of what I consider to be better titles. That’s strategic.
Taking the time (potentially many hours) to consider all that you should be considering when coming up with actual new titles like the keyword research cycle, the evaluation of topical focus cycle, all of that work. That’s tactical.
If I’ve determined that a section of the site has way too many sub-category links that aren’t related closely enough, I explain that issue and why it’s important, and I give one or two examples of sub-categories that would be better placed elsewhere on the site. That’s strategic.
If I need to take the time to evaluate every major category and every sub-category within those categories and then figure out what the relationships should be or how they should be grouped, that’s tactical.
If I discover URLs are poorly written, I explain that in the strategic audit. I explain why better crafted URLs are important, and I give a couple of examples of bad URLs and how they MIGHT be better optimized. Then I inform the client that when they do rework the URLs, they need to have a proper plan in place for error checking and 301 redirect implementation. I then also explain that it has to be done carefully and with serious focus. As for the 301 implementation issue and the reason for the need for serious focus, I explain those considerations as well.
To actually take the time to re-work hundreds or thousands of URLs, that’s tactical.
As you can see from the examples above, there’s a pattern to the differentiation between strategic and tactical.
The Pattern of Strategic SEO Audits
- Discovering a problem
- Understanding why it’s a problem
- Explaining how it needs to be fixed
- Providing examples of how it might be fixed
The Pattern of a Tactical SEO Audit
- Taking the examination down to a granular level
- Taking the answers down to a granular level
- Providing a page-by-page spreadsheet with specific change requirements
As you can see, there’s a very clear distinction between what is strategic and what is tactical. To me, there’s no question as to what fits in either category for the overwhelming majority of topics, issues, or considerations.
Data Considerations
I also need to clarify, in case you were wondering, the issue of providing data to a client. When I’m doing an audit, I do run data, gather analytics, pull in keyword rankings on the top x phrases, export error reports on server status, review site speed on a few pages, review the inbound link profile, check the social footprint, etc., and I do provide all of that data to the client. Most does NOT go into the audit document.
For one thing, I HATE pasting a spreadsheet into a Word Doc, then having to reformat it all over again. However, I do include the most important aspects of the data right in the doc, such as the top phrase rankings (10 – 20 max), the competitive landscape sweet-spot chart, a screen capture of the page speed of the top 10 most visited pages (when speed is an issue for a site), and sometimes a few other things.
Yet it’s always a sampling of the full-on data I’ve gathered. The rest belongs in that separate spreadsheet. Again, that helps ensure I don’t overwhelm the client when they’re reviewing the audit document.
I do NOT, however, either generate or provide the client with a full-page report spreadsheet, such as the ones that show URL, title, meta description, H1 tags, H2 tags, and all the rest of that granular individual page info, because that is neither necessary (since I provide a couple of examples on aspects of the data that is high priority) nor beneficial during a strategic audit. It’s a shiny object.
In Conclusion
Some people go even further. They’ll list all the problems in their audit, but they won’t even offer possible solutions. They’ll actually leave THOSE for a follow-up contract. Wow. Yeah.
Personally I think that’s nuts because clients come to us for guidance and for help. They don’t want us to just point fingers; they want solutions. So I give them solutions. It’s just that I do so in a way that they can digest it, be more comfortable with the digesting, be more willing to take the next step to actually implement solutions at a pace they can handle, and be more appreciative of my effort on their behalf.
Way too many people are giving away the farm, which is NOT helpful to your business efficiency or the client’s capacity to understand the information and process it, except in rare situations. So STOP DOING IT ALREADY!
