SEO Check: How to Review and Improve Your Website
An SEO check is a review of how well a website is set up to appear in search engine results. It can reveal technical issues, content gaps and opportunities to make pages more useful to visitors. Regular checks help you spot problems early and make informed improvements to your website’s visibility.
SEO is not a one-off task. Search engines update how they assess pages, your website changes over time, and competitors may publish new content. A practical SEO check gives you a clear picture of what is working and what needs attention.
What Does an SEO Check Cover?
A thorough SEO check usually reviews several areas of a website:
- Technical SEO: Whether search engines can access, crawl and index your pages.
- On-page SEO: How clearly each page communicates its subject through headings, page titles and content.
- Content quality: Whether pages are accurate, helpful, original and relevant to their intended audience.
- Website performance: How quickly and reliably pages load, particularly on mobile devices.
- Links: Whether internal links help visitors navigate and external links support the credibility of your content.
- Local SEO: For organisations serving specific areas, how consistently their location and business details appear online.
Check Whether Your Pages Can Be Found
Start by checking that important pages are available to search engines. A page may be missing from search results because it is blocked from crawling, marked as noindex, or not linked from elsewhere on the site.
Review your robots.txt file and XML sitemap, and use Google Search Console to check indexing reports. Look for important pages that are excluded from the index, then investigate the reason before making changes. Not every page needs to be indexed: duplicate, private or low-value pages may appropriately be left out.
Review Page Titles and Descriptions
Each important page should have a clear, descriptive title that reflects its main topic. Page titles help search engines and people understand what a page is about, while meta descriptions can encourage people to choose your result.
Check that titles are unique, accurate and easy to read. Avoid repeating keywords unnaturally or making promises the page does not fulfil. Meta descriptions should briefly explain the page’s value rather than simply listing search terms.
Assess Your Content
Useful content answers the questions visitors are likely to have. During an SEO check, look for pages that are outdated, incomplete, difficult to understand or too similar to other pages on your website.
Make sure each page has a clear purpose and provides information that is relevant to its audience. Add detail where it genuinely helps, remove unnecessary repetition and update facts that may have changed. Avoid creating multiple pages that compete for the same subject without a clear reason.
Check Headings and Page Structure
Headings make content easier to scan and help organise information. Use a clear main heading, followed by subheadings that describe the sections beneath them. A logical structure benefits both readers and search engines.
Headings should describe the content that follows. They are not a place to cram in extra keywords, and they should not be used purely to change the size or appearance of text.
Test Mobile Usability and Page Speed
Visitors should be able to use your website comfortably on phones, tablets and desktop computers. Check that text is readable, buttons are easy to tap and important content is not cut off or hidden.
Page speed also matters to the user experience. Large images, unnecessary scripts and slow hosting can make pages feel sluggish. Tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights can highlight potential performance issues and suggest improvements. Treat recommendations as a guide, and prioritise changes that make a noticeable difference to visitors.
Review Links and Broken Pages
Internal links help visitors discover related information and help search engines understand how pages on your site connect. Check that key pages receive links from relevant sections of the website and use descriptive link text.
Look for broken links and pages that return errors. If a page has moved permanently, a relevant redirect can guide visitors and search engines to its new location. Avoid redirecting every removed page to the homepage; the destination should be a useful and appropriate replacement.
Check Images and Accessibility
Images should be appropriately sized and compressed so they do not slow down the page. Add alternative text to images when it helps explain their meaning or function to people using assistive technology. Decorative images can usually have empty alternative text.
Clear labels, readable contrast and descriptive links all contribute to a better experience. Accessibility is not separate from good website design: improvements that help more people use your site can also make its content clearer for everyone.
Measure Results Over Time
Use tools such as Google Search Console and web analytics software to understand how people find and use your website. You can monitor search impressions, clicks, common search queries, landing pages and user activity.
Look for meaningful trends rather than reacting to every short-term change. If a page loses visibility, check whether its content is still relevant, whether technical problems have appeared and whether search results have changed. Make improvements, then allow time to assess their impact.
How Often Should You Run an SEO Check?
A light review every few weeks or months can help you catch common issues. A more detailed check is useful after a website redesign, a major content update or a change in your services. The right schedule depends on how often your website changes and how important organic search is to your organisation.
Keep a record of issues, planned updates and results. This makes it easier to see what has been done and whether the changes have helped.
Make Your SEO Check Practical
An SEO check does not need to involve changing everything at once. Start with issues that prevent important pages from being accessed, then address problems affecting visitors, such as confusing content, broken links or slow-loading pages. After that, focus on refining page content and improving visibility.
SEO works best as part of an ongoing effort to make your website useful, accessible and easy to navigate. A regular, thoughtful check can help you identify improvements and build a stronger experience for both visitors and search engines.
Essential SEO Checklist: 6 Tips for Optimising Your Website
- Check that each page has a unique title tag.
- Write clear meta descriptions for key pages.
- Use one descriptive H1 heading per page.
- Check for broken links and crawl errors.
- Make sure pages load quickly on mobile.
- Add descriptive alt text to meaningful images.
Check that each page has a unique title tag.
Check that every page on your website has a unique, descriptive title tag. The title tag helps search engines and visitors understand what a page is about, so it should accurately reflect that page’s content rather than repeat a generic title across the site. Keep it concise, put the most important information first and make each title distinct to help pages stand out in search results.
Write clear meta descriptions for key pages.
Write a clear, unique meta description for each key page to help people understand what they’ll find before they visit. Keep it concise, relevant to the page and focused on its main benefit. While meta descriptions don’t directly determine rankings, a useful description can make your search result more appealing and encourage the right visitors to click.
Use one descriptive H1 heading per page.
Use one descriptive H1 heading on each page to clearly communicate its main topic to visitors and search engines. Keep it specific, concise and aligned with the page content, so people can quickly understand what the page is about. Use lower-level headings, such as H2s and H3s, to organise the sections that follow, creating a logical structure that is easy to scan.
Check for broken links and crawl errors.
Check your website regularly for broken links and crawl errors, as they can stop visitors finding useful information and make it harder for search engines to access important pages. Use tools such as Google Search Console or a website crawler to identify links that lead to missing pages, server errors or blocked content. Fix broken links, restore or redirect moved pages where appropriate, and review crawl errors to ensure search engines can reach the pages you want indexed.
Make sure pages load quickly on mobile.
Make sure your pages load quickly on mobile, where slow performance can lead visitors to leave before your content appears. Test key pages on a mobile device and use a speed-checking tool to identify issues such as oversized images, unnecessary scripts or slow server responses. Compress images, remove elements that are not needed and prioritise loading the content visitors see first.
Add descriptive alt text to meaningful images.
Add descriptive alt text to meaningful images so people using screen readers can understand the information they convey. Keep each description concise and specific to the image and its context; for example, describe what is happening rather than starting with “image of”. For purely decorative images, use empty alt text so assistive technology can skip them. Alt text also helps search engines interpret images, but it should be written for people, not filled with keywords.
