SEO/GEO Audit Sample Report: What We Review

TL;DR #

This is a redacted sample SEO/GEO audit report we ship to overseas-facing clients. The client is a mid-sized industrial valve exporter whose English site has been live for two years. Organic traffic plateaued around 800 monthly visits and inquiries started slipping in late 2024. We ran a five-business-day audit and shipped 31 findings: 8 quick wins fixable inside the first sprint, 11 medium-effort items for the next quarter, and 12 long-term content tasks across the next two seasons. The report doesn't promise "page one in two months." It promises a clear list of what's blocking traffic and conversion, prioritized so the client can decide what gets fixed first. The summary below preserves the structure and pacing of the actual deliverable. Industry, URLs, and brand have been redacted. You can use it to spot-check your own site, or to judge whether our audit depth fits your team.

We publish the sample because too many prospects ask "what does an audit actually contain?" Searching for "SEO report sample" turns up screenshots of Screaming Frog exports. Those don't drive decisions. The judgments a person writes do.

1. Scope #

Before any audit kicks off, we agree in writing what's in and out. For this engagement, the kickoff email locked in:

• Technical SEO: crawl, indexing, performance, structured data, mobile usability.
• Content and service pages: information architecture, service-page readability, case-study depth, the relationship between blog and hub articles.
• Internal linking: links between service pages, between services and case studies, and from blog posts back into the funnel.
• Entity signals: whether About, Team, Contact, and Case Studies make Google and AI models recognize the brand as a real company.
• GEO / AI search: searching target queries in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews to see whether the brand is cited and whether the context is accurate.

Out of scope: paid ad performance, social content quality, CRM workflow, email marketing. We can audit those separately, but they weren't in this budget. Writing the exclusions down up front avoids disappointment at delivery.

2. Technical findings #

The technical pass uses Screaming Frog for a full crawl, PageSpeed Insights on ten high-value pages, and 16 months of Search Console data. Twelve of the 31 findings sit in this category. Here's how five of them are written:

Every finding in the report carries two short paragraphs: "why this is a problem" and "how you'll know it's fixed." We refuse to ship a one-line bullet like "duplicate H1" because the client's next meeting then has to ask "so what do we do about it?" The standard technical baseline lives in Technical SEO Baseline for a New or Rebuilt Website.

3. Content and service pages #

Industrial valve service pages are usually spec-stuffed. 1,500 words per page, 1,200 of them a parameter table, the last 300 a vague "why choose us." But overseas buyers aren't searching specs. Specs are already in the PDF datasheet they downloaded last week. What they're actually searching for is closer to "has this supplier shipped to North American energy projects?"

We look at four things in this pass:

• Whether the service page answers a buyer's qualifying questions: industries served, customer scale, typical project length, price range or customization scope.
• Case-study depth: real client name (with permission), industry, problem, action, outcome. Of this client's six case pages, only one mentioned an outcome.
• Semantic relationship between blog and service pages: does the blog reinforce the service-page queries, or is it chasing peripheral long-tail?
• AI summary readability: clear subheads, question-shaped H2s, quotable numbers per section.

The sample report includes a rewrite example. Original copy: "We provide high-quality industrial valve solutions for global clients." Rewrite: "We supply ANSI 150# through 2500# industrial valves to natural-gas, chemical, and desalination projects in North America and Europe. In 2023 we delivered 47 projects on a 14-week average lead time." That isn't copywriting polish. It's swapping vague claims for facts a search engine or an AI summary can quote directly.

4. Internal linking #

The internal-link problem isn't volume. It's structure. We exported inlinks from Screaming Frog, classified them manually, and drew a graph. Three patterns emerged:

• 80% of internal links sit in the footer or main navigation. Almost none are semantic links inside body copy.
• Case pages rarely link back to the service they belong to. They say "we did project X" but never "X is part of our X service."
• Blog posts don't link to each other. There's no functioning hub.

The recommended fix is concrete. Pick three hub topics across eight priority blog posts. Every hub article links to at least two service pages and two related blog posts in body copy. Every service page gets a "related case studies" footer module that filters by industry. The structural pattern lives in Internal Linking Strategy for Service Businesses, and once that post ships we'll backfill the link.

5. Entity signals and GEO #

Most clients don't realize this section exists until they read it. Google and large language models judge whether a company is real and authoritative differently from how they rank a single page. They look at:

• Whether About explains founding year, product lines, and core team.
• Whether Team has named people with titles and LinkedIn links.
• Whether Contact carries a real address (not a PO box), phone, and business hours.
• Whether case studies have verifiable client names or anonymous-but-specific descriptions.
• Whether sameAs in schema ties the website, LinkedIn, X, and YouTube into one entity.

For this audit we ran 12 target queries through ChatGPT and Perplexity, including "industrial valve suppliers for desalination projects." The client's brand didn't appear in any answer. The seven companies that did get cited each met at least four of the five criteria above. That observation went straight into the GEO section of the report. The follow-up reading is What Is GEO and How Is It Different from SEO? and How to Monitor Brand Visibility in AI Search.

6. Priority matrix #

The 31 findings get sorted into four quadrants by impact and effort. Redacted distribution:

Findings rated "low impact" don't make it into the report at all. If something isn't important and is also expensive to fix, it shouldn't be wasting the client's decision time.

7. 30/60/90-day roadmap #

The last chapter of the report is a roadmap. Every action references a specific finding ID, so the reader never has to flip back to ask "which problem does this fix?"

Days 1–30 (foundations):

• Ship the eight quick wins: unique H1s, sitemap cleanup, Organization schema, hero LCP fix, hreflang correction, key service-page title/description rewrites, Search Console error triage, GA4 event completion.
• Verification: Core Web Vitals all green, Search Console errors at zero, CTR up on 12 target queries.

Days 31–60 (service-page rewrites + case-study depth):

• Rewrite six core service pages along industry and application axes.
• Complete four case pages with outcome data and a quotable client testimonial.
• Add Service and FAQ schema.
• Verification: average service-page time-on-page up 30%, AI Overviews appearance lifts from zero to at least two queries.

Days 61–90 (hub content + entity expansion):

• Ship the first hub topic (valve selection for North American energy projects) with three supporting articles.
• Rewrite About, Team, and Contact; add sameAs.
• Earn at least five high-relevance backlinks from industry directories, association pages, and partner sites.
• Verification: organic traffic up 25% month-over-month; inquiry-form submissions doubled from baseline.

The roadmap isn't a guarantee. It's a checklist. We review with the client at the end of each month and adjust based on what Search Console and GA4 actually show.

8. What we don't put in the report #

To make our trade-offs visible, the last section of every audit is "out of scope / not promised." For this client we wrote four:

• We don't promise specific keyword rankings. There's no rank-guarantee mechanism in SEO; anyone selling one is suspect.
• We don't grade paid ad ROI; that wasn't in scope.
• We don't audit whether the client's ERP or CRM can absorb a rise in inquiries.
• We don't write content for the client. We provide rewrite examples and an editorial guide.

Saying this clearly is more useful than eight pages of contractual disclaimers.

FAQ #

How long does an audit take, and what does it cost? #

Our standard SEO/GEO audit is five business days and covers technical, content, internal linking, entity signals, and AI search. Pricing flexes by site size (under 100 pages / 100–500 / 500+) and language count (English only or multilingual). Send us a domain and we'll come back with a firm number.

Can our team execute on the report ourselves? #

Yes. Every finding includes a recommended action and a verification check, so an in-house technical team can drop them straight into a sprint. We also offer a monthly retainer to walk the 30/60/90 with you, but it isn't required.

Will you guarantee rankings? #

No. There's no rank-guarantee mechanism in SEO, and anyone offering one is either inexperienced or selling something you don't need. We commit to a clear problem list, prioritized, with verifiable outcomes per action.

Can we share this sample with our team? #

Yes. That's why we publish it. Both the decision-maker and the implementation team should be able to predict the audit's depth before signing anything. If you'd like the full version (around 40 pages) from a different industry, email us and we'll send a redacted copy.

Book an audit #

If you're trying to read where your overseas site stands in both classic search and AI search, bring your domain, your target markets, and the last six months of Search Console data. We'll run a free initial review under our overseas website build and SEO/GEO support service using the same method that produced this report, surface your P0 issues, and tell you whether a full five-day audit is worth booking. If any of the terms above are unfamiliar, the overseas website glossary defines them in plain language.

References worth checking against: Google Search Central — SEO Starter Guide, Helpful content guidance, and structured data and rich result documentation.