There are two options of saying things in an audit:
- A: “You do X, and this is wrong! You should do Y!” (alternative: “You do X, X does this huge problem – A, and this is wrong!”)
- B: “You do X, and this has the following consequences: A, B, C. If you do Y, this has the following consequences. P, Q, R. For this reason, my personal advice would do to pick Y.”
What solution is best?
- I don’t like the first solution, since the client already has a reason for doing X. He knows why he does it. If you don’t give a reason, or you only give one reason, the client might as well give his own reasoning (one or two reasons on his own). The first solution is useful only when the client trusts you 100% to know better and, also, doesn’t want to understand the system behind things.
- The second solution puts more emphasis on letting the client pick. Also, it shows you understand the issue more thoroughly. It takes more time to write it, but it may yield better results.
Real example:
- A: Problem:Â http://www.pcgarage.ro/Â does it wrong! They have a lot of links on the homepage (590, via http://linkcounter.submitexpress.com/), which is a poor SEO practice. Solution: remove those links!
- B: Problem: http://www.pcgarage.ro/ has 590 links on the homepage (via http://linkcounter.submitexpress.com/). There are two options on this:
- Keep the current number of links. This has poor implications on SEO, and perhaps, some users don’t like to see almost 600 links on one page (usability). On another hand, the homepage of PC Garage, due to the high number of links towards it (377 different domains), is probably indexed and followed entirely (no real SEO problem here) and, also, some people actually prefer, for usability purposes, to use scrolling, rather than clicking (another example of a scrollable homepage).
- Reduce the number of links to around 100. This is certainly better for SEO purposes. For usability purposes, the result is mixed, and should be prior tested via A/B testing.