Chapter 38 — Exercises

This chapter is a synthesis, so its exercises are too: they ask you to run the whole toolkit on real and constructed sites and, above all, to prioritize — the skill the chapter argues is the entire product. You will need a browser and, ideally, a site you can inspect and a Search Console account. Every tool named here is free. Items marked with a dagger (†) have full worked solutions in Appendix — Answers to Selected Exercises; odd-numbered items are worked there too. Attempt every item before you look.

The habit to build: never stop at "what's wrong?" Always finish with "…and what would I do first, and what would I leave alone?"

A. Recall and vocabulary

Exercise 38.1 — Name the five lenses of a comprehensive SEO audit, and for each, state the one question it asks and the pipeline stage(s) it interrogates.

Exercise 38.2 — Define SEO audit in your own words, making explicit the two clauses the chapter says do the real work ("comprehensive" and "ends in a prioritized plan").

Exercise 38.3 † — Distinguish a technical audit from a content audit and an authority audit in one sentence each. Which lens does the chapter say you run first, and why?

Exercise 38.4 — Define crawl analysis. Name three specific things a crawl surfaces that you cannot see by browsing the site page by page.

Exercise 38.5 — What are the four quadrants of the impact × effort prioritization matrix? Give the one-word verdict the chapter attaches to each.

Exercise 38.6 — Distinguish the audit report from the remediation roadmap. Why does the chapter say each fails without the other?

B. Applied reasoning

Exercise 38.7 † — The chapter calls an unprioritized 200-item audit a "failed audit even if every finding is correct." Explain the argument in your own words, and name the "hard 10%" a checklist dump skips.

Exercise 38.8 — Explain why the technical lens is audited before the content and authority lenses. Tie your answer to theme 4 and to a page that carries an accidental noindex.

Exercise 38.9 — The chapter says "a finding can correctly end in 'do nothing.'" Give the Rivertown example, and explain why acting on that finding would have been worse than leaving it alone.

Exercise 38.10 † — Impact and effort are described as "honest judgment calls, not measurements." Explain what goes wrong when a practitioner presents a prioritization matrix as if its rankings were precise, and how an honest auditor phrases them instead.

Exercise 38.11 — Why does the chapter insist the highest-return finding on most small sites is a good page just off page one, rather than the site's worst page? Use the language of impact and effort.

Exercise 38.12 — A colleague wants to lead the audit report with the full 40-item findings inventory. Argue for a different structure, and say what belongs on page one instead.

C. Prioritize the findings

For each set of findings, place every item in the impact × effort matrix and give the sequence you would actually work. Say which (if any) you would not do, and why.

Exercise 38.13 † — A local service business audit surfaces: (a) a stray noindex hiding four service pages; (b) 22 blog posts with missing meta descriptions; (c) the homepage's mobile LCP is 4.5s; (d) a plan to add breadcrumb schema sitewide; (e) one high-impression, low-CTR page with a generic title tag. Sequence them.

Exercise 38.14 — An audit finds the site has a Domain Authority of 22, 15 referring domains, and no manual action, while its top competitor has 180 referring domains. Which of these is not an action item, and how should the referring-domain gap be framed in the report — as a problem, a target, or a prospect list?

Exercise 38.15 † — Two findings both look "high impact": (a) rebuilding five thin location pages, and (b) removing an accidental noindex on those same five pages. They are not the same priority. Explain why, using impact and effort, and give the order.

Exercise 38.16 — A tool's automated site audit returns 314 issues and a "health score" of 61/100. Describe, step by step, how you would turn that raw output into a five-item action list for this quarter.

D. Audit your own site (free tools)

Exercise 38.17 † — Crawl your own site with the free Screaming Frog tier (or any free crawler). Sort by status code and by page title. Record: how many non-200 URLs, how many duplicate or missing titles, and the deepest crawl depth of any important page. Write one sentence per finding tagging its likely impact (high / medium / low).

Exercise 38.18 — Open Search Console's Page indexing report. Record how many pages are indexed versus not indexed, and the single largest "not indexed" reason. Does the indexed count roughly match the number of real pages you have — or do you have index bloat? Name the finding and its lens.

Exercise 38.19 — Run your three most important pages through PageSpeed Insights on mobile. Record the field LCP, INP, and CLS for each (or note "insufficient field data"). Which page has the worst Core Web Vitals, and is that a high-impact fix given its traffic?

Exercise 38.20 † — The one-minute alarm check: open Search Console's Manual Actions report for your site. What does it say? Explain, in one sentence, why this single report outranks any third-party tool's "toxicity score" or "health score" as evidence of whether you are penalized.

Exercise 38.21 — In Search Console's Performance report, sort your pages by impressions and find one with high impressions, a low CTR, and an average position between 5 and 15. This is your best on-page opportunity. Name the page and the single cheapest fix you would try first.

E. Read the report

Exercise 38.22 † — Interpret this consolidated finding.

FIGURE E.1 — "One page, two tools"                           [constructed teaching example]
  Crawler says:  /guides/tankless-water-heaters/ — 200 OK, indexable, unique title, 1,900 words, depth 2.
  Search Console says:  8,700 impressions / 95 clicks / 1.1% CTR / avg position 9.4 (last 3 months).

The crawler gives this page a clean bill of health. Search Console tells a different story. What is the opportunity here, which lens surfaces it, and why would a crawl-only audit have missed it entirely?

Exercise 38.23 — An audit report's executive summary reads: "We found 96 issues. Health score: 58/100. Recommend addressing all issues to reach 100." Rewrite the executive summary the way the chapter says a good one should read, inventing three plausible priority items.

Exercise 38.24 † — A finding row reads: "Five near-duplicate location pages, each self-canonical; Google indexes all five." State the lens, the impact, the effort, and the recommended action — and explain why "add a canonical tag" is not the right fix here.

F. Myths, ethics, and judgment

Exercise 38.25 — Spot the myth. An agency's audit proudly reports: "Your SEO health score is 64/100; our remediation package will get you to 100/100 and guarantee first-page rankings." Identify two separate false claims in that sentence and replace each with what the chapter says is true.

Exercise 38.26 † — An audit tool flags 380 backlinks as "toxic" and recommends disavowing all of them. The site has no manual action. Walk through the honest decision the chapter (and Chapter 26) prescribes, and state the likely correct action.

Exercise 38.27 — Is it ethical for a consultant to deliver an audit that recommends fewer changes than the client expected — for instance, "leave your links alone; they're fine"? Argue the professional case for the short, honest recommendation over the padded one.

Exercise 38.28 — An audit can never do two things, per the chapter's conclusion. Name both, and write the single caveat sentence every honest audit report should contain.

G. The Strategy File (Rivertown Home Services)

Exercise 38.29 † — Below are five real Rivertown findings from across the book. Place each in the impact × effort matrix and give the working order: (a) the "Discourage search engines" box is checked on the Millhaven sub-site, hiding real pages; (b) the five location pages are thin and near-duplicate; (c) the water-heater page sits at position ~11 with 12,400 monthly impressions, title and internal links already fixed, nine content subtopics still missing; (d) ~40 inherited footer-spam domains, no manual action; (e) the homepage has no page caching or CDN.

Exercise 38.30 — Assemble a one-page audit deliverable for Rivertown from the Strategy File's Figure 38.4: write a three-line executive summary (the top three actions this week), then list the "no action, on purpose" item with its one-sentence justification. Do not exceed one page.

Exercise 38.31 † — Do Rivertown's Chapter 38 task on your own (or a client's) site, using Appendix C's Worksheet 5 and Appendix G's checklist: run all five lenses, list every finding, score each by impact and effort, sort into the four quadrants plus a "no action" list, and write the three-line executive summary. The deliverable is a one-page prioritized audit — the artifact you carry into the Chapter 40 capstone.

Where these go next. Keep your answers to 38.17–38.21, 38.29, and 38.31 — they are the audit page of your running Strategy File (Appendix C, Worksheet 5), and they feed directly into the business case of Chapter 39 and the complete strategy you assemble in Chapter 40.