Morsel #25: templates are meant to be flexible

When I started in tech SEO, my audits were in the classic Google Docs checklist format. I remember getting feedback on one of my first ones and I felt awful because I had no idea how I was supposed to do it any differently; reports were written as documents and that was that.

But over time, I learnt that data representation can take on so many different forms and perhaps a Google Doc isn’t the right way all the time. I now present my audit findings in a spreadsheet with a prioritisation framework adapted from CXL’s PXL framework. I list the following things:

• Audit issues
• Issues categorised by type,
• How/why it may affect performance (note: it might not so establishing that it’s a sensible default would go here!)
• How many URLs it affects (or could be a sitewide issue)
• A solution (written as a direct action)
• A list of 10 criteria that should influence the importance of the fix, with scores ranging from 0–2
• A final priority score (adding up the criteria scores)
• A low/medium/high ratiing (for stakeholders how think scores are arbitrary)
• If developers are needed, how long may the work take (a very rough estimate with wide time ranges)
• Who is responsible for the work
• Next steps or notes

I made this to remove a lot of the guesswork out of auditing as our priorities may not be the same as other peoples’ priorities. This idea came after years of doing things in different ways and I may end up changing this or adapting it further (the current format has only recently been changed to include more things).

For web performance audits, I ditched documents for slide decks. I present a basic agenda, what all the metrics mean and what data I’ve looked at, and outline each Core Web Vitals metric and the issues with recommendations. This is a way to meet stakeholders wherever they are in terms of web performance knowledge and ensure developers know what they need to do to investigate and fix issues. It also helps if you can show how these issues affect revenue and conversions!

My point is with anything we present, templates need to be flexible to get everyone on board and to understand what the problem is and how to fix it. A document may do this but maybe a slide deck can, or an organised spreadsheet, or even some cool interactive data visualisations. That fluidity is what will get people engaged and interested in making the Web a better place.

Semi-related:

• Some caveats to SEO and web performance