Audit an industrial website in five passes: a complete inventory of what exists, the buyer journeys it has to support, technical SEO, accessibility and privacy, and the operating model that keeps it current. Run them in that order, because the inventory changes what the later passes are worth doing on.
The finding that most often justifies the exercise is structural rather than technical: product information a specifying engineer cannot reach, a catalogue search engines cannot read, or properties with no owner. A checklist of code-level issues will identify real defects and will not explain why buyers are calling to ask for a datasheet.
Crawl the site and reconcile the result against analytics, the sitemap, search console coverage and the CMS page list. Add every domain and subdomain the organisation holds, taken from the registrar rather than from memory.
For each URL record traffic, inbound links, last update and owner. Most audits skip this pass and end up assessing quality on pages that should have been retired years ago, while the properties carrying real risk stay outside the scope.
Work through the tasks the site exists to support. Find a product by application rather than by name. Compare two variants on the specifications that matter. Reach a datasheet without a form gate where one should not exist. Identify a local distributor. Submit an enquiry as an engineer with a partial specification.
Do the same in each language version. Journey failures are the findings that change commercial performance, and they are invisible to a crawler.
Check indexability and coverage, canonical and hreflang consistency, internal linking depth to product pages, whether catalogue content renders without client-side execution, structured data validity, page performance on the templates that matter, and redirect chains left from earlier migrations.
On industrial sites the recurring finding is a catalogue that search engines cannot fully reach, whether through faceted navigation, a PDF-only range or a viewer that renders no HTML. That work is described on our technical SEO audit page.
Assess templates and key journeys against WCAG 2.1 AA and EN 301 549 with both automated tooling and manual keyboard and screen-reader testing. Review consent implementation, tag inventory, form data destinations and retention. Check CMS versions, plugin inventory, dormant administrator accounts and backup restore evidence.
Which accessibility and privacy obligations apply to your organisation depends on your markets, sector and size, and that determination should be confirmed with qualified legal counsel rather than assumed from an audit report.
A site degrades at the rate its governance allows. Establish who can publish, who approves technical claims, how product data reaches the site and how often, who applies updates, who holds the hosting and domain accounts, and when anything was last reviewed.
Where those answers are unclear, the technical findings will recur within eighteen months regardless of what gets fixed now. Record the gaps as findings in their own right, with a named owner against each.
A ranked output is what makes an audit usable. Group findings by commercial impact and remediation effort, and lead with the small number that materially change risk or performance. Three high-impact items ahead of a hundred minor ones is the right shape.
Each finding needs the affected URL or template, the evidence, the recommended action, an owner and a retest date, so that someone who was not present can act on it directly.
In five passes: inventory every URL and domain and reconcile it against analytics and the CMS; test the buyer journeys the site exists to support; run technical SEO and product discovery checks; assess accessibility, privacy and security; and review the operating model that keeps the site current. Then rank findings by commercial impact and remediation effort.
Partly. Internal teams are usually best placed to judge content accuracy, product coverage and whether the journeys match how buyers behave in practice. Technical SEO, accessibility and security passes benefit from tooling and experience most in-house teams do not use day to day. A split, with internal content review and specialist technical checks, works well.
At least annually for an active site, and always before a redesign, migration or replatform, since starting a major project without a current picture carries forward problems that were never flagged. An annual cadence also catches gradual drift such as broken links, superseded certifications and outdated product data before it accumulates into a larger remediation job.
On industrial sites it is commonly one of two things: product information that search engines or buyers cannot reach, or forgotten domains and microsites with no owner and unpatched software. Both are structural, both carry real cost or risk, and both are missed by an audit that starts from page-level quality rather than from a complete inventory.
Findings prioritised by commercial impact and remediation effort rather than an undifferentiated list. Each entry needs the affected URL or template, the evidence, the recommended action, an estimate of effort, a named owner and a retest date. Someone who was not involved in the audit should be able to act on any entry without further explanation.
For a single-language corporate site with a modest product section, two to three weeks is typical. A large multilingual catalogue with a portal and several legacy domains extends that, mostly because the inventory and journey passes grow rather than the technical checks. Access to analytics, search console and the CMS at the start shortens it noticeably.
Tell us what you have and we will set out what a proper audit would cover.