How to Read an SEO Audit: What Each Section Means and What to Ignore
A guided walk through a real SEO audit example: what the score means, how to read a factor verdict and its evidence, and which warnings matter versus which are noise.
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Reading an SEO audit without an SEO background
An SEO audit lands on your desk, from an agency, from Semrush, or from Brainito, and it has a score, a few hundred rows, and words like canonical and LCP. This page explains how to read it. What an SEO audit includes is fairly consistent across tools: a crawl of your pages, a verdict on each check, a severity or priority label, and some form of summary score. What varies is whether the evidence is shown and whether the priority reflects business impact. We walk through an example audit of a fictional Portland furniture store so you can see what each part means and which parts you can safely skip.
The score: useful for trend, useless for triage
Every audit tool opens with a number. Semrush calls it Site Health, Ahrefs calls it Health Score, Brainito shows a score out of 100 with a category breakdown. Our Portland store opens at 58. The number is useful for one thing: watching it move over time. It is useless for deciding what to do today, because a site at 85 can have a noindex on its best-selling category page while a site at 50 has 200 missing alt attributes and nothing seriously wrong. Read the score, note it, then move on to the breakdown. If one category is far below the others, that is where the real problems live. For our store it is Technical SEO at 41.
Verdicts and evidence: the part that makes the audit trustworthy
Each check produces a verdict: pass, warning, or fail, sometimes with a numeric detail. The question to ask of every failed verdict is 'show me'. A good audit shows the exact URL, tag, or measurement. Our Portland store fails Canonical tags, and the evidence is that /collections/sofas and /collections/sofas?sort=price both canonicalize to themselves, so Google sees two pages. It fails Mobile page speed with a measured LCP of 4.3 seconds caused by a 2.8 MB hero image. It passes Indexability on all sampled pages. If an audit gives you a fail with no evidence, treat it as a hypothesis to verify, not an instruction. Agencies charging $2,000 or more for an audit should always show their work.
Severity versus impact: why the longest list is usually the least important
Most tools label issues critical, warning, or notice by technical severity, so 180 images missing alt text can appear as a critical block while one noindexed page is a single row. Impact is the better lens. Ask what each issue costs: an unindexed category page costs every visit it would have earned, while missing alt text on decorative images costs almost nothing. Brainito ranks the list by impact for this reason. When reading any other audit, reorder it yourself: indexability and crawl blockers first, then duplicate titles and canonicals, then speed, then content depth and links, then the long tail of notices. For the Portland store, that puts the canonical fix and the hero image ahead of 140 alt text rows.
What to ignore, and what to do with the rest
Some rows in every audit can be skipped on a first pass: notices about URLs over 100 characters, low text-to-HTML ratios, missing meta keywords (ignored by Google since 2009), and warnings about pages blocked by robots.txt that you blocked on purpose. Spend that attention on the handful of items that affect whether pages are indexed, what their titles say, and how fast they load. Then turn the rest into a sequence, which the what to fix first page lays out, and re-run the audit after each batch. Brainito re-checks weekly so that loop is automatic. If you are working from a one-time PDF, run a free audit alongside it so you have a live baseline to compare against.
Frequently asked questions
What does an SEO audit include?
A crawl of your pages, a verdict on each technical and on-page check, a severity or priority label, and a summary score. Better audits also show the evidence behind each verdict and rank the issues by business impact.
What is a good SEO audit score?
Scores are not comparable across tools, so 'good' is relative. Watch the trend and the category breakdown rather than the absolute number. A rising score after fixes is the useful signal.
Why does my audit list hundreds of issues?
Most tools count every page that trips a rule, so one template problem becomes hundreds of rows. Group by issue type and you usually find five to ten root causes.
Can I read a Semrush or Ahrefs audit with the same approach?
Yes. Both show a health score, an issues list by severity, and affected URLs. Apply the same order: indexability, titles and canonicals, speed, then content and links.
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