What I Actually Look For in a Website Before I Start Any SEO Work

Before I touch a single keyword or write a single recommendation, I spend time just reading a new client's website. Not running tools yet, not pulling reports. Just reading it the way a potential customer would.

What I find in that first pass almost always surprises the client. Not because the problems are exotic or unusual, but because most business owners are too close to their own site to see it clearly. They know what they meant to communicate. They've stopped seeing what's actually there.

Here's what I'm actually looking at, and why it matters before anything else starts.

On-Page Quality: Where I Always Start

The first thing I do is read the content. Actually read it, the way someone who just found the site through Google would.

Within a few minutes, certain things become clear. Does the homepage tell me immediately what this business does, who it's for, and why I should care? Or does it open with something vague like "your trusted partner for excellence" that tells me nothing? Are the service descriptions specific enough to be convincing, or do they sound like they could belong to any company in any industry?

I'm looking at whether the writing sounds like a real, knowledgeable person or like someone who wrote what they thought a professional-sounding website should say. Those two things produce very different results in search and in conversions.

I'm also looking at whether key pages have a clear, singular purpose. A page that tries to cover three services at once, or that mixes informational content with a sales pitch without committing to either, is a page that's confusing both the reader and the search engine. Google needs to understand what a page is specifically about before it can rank it for anything useful.

The most common thing I find at this stage: service pages that describe the service in broad terms, mention a few benefits, and then ask for a consultation, without ever giving a visitor a real reason to choose this business over the competition.

Whether the Content Targets Real Searches

Once I've read the content, I'm asking a different question: is this what people are actually searching for?

This is where a lot of well-written content falls apart. A business writes about their services in the language they use internally, "holistic wellness solutions" or "integrated digital strategy," and nobody is searching for those phrases. The page exists, it's polished, and it gets almost no organic traffic because the gap between how the business describes itself and how customers look for it has never been closed.

I'm looking at whether the page titles, H1s, and subheadings reflect genuine search demand. I'm checking whether the language in the body copy matches how a real person with a real problem would describe what they're looking for, which is exactly what keyword research is built around. And I'm noticing whether the business has tried to target keywords at all, or whether the content was written purely for an imagined reader rather than for how actual searches work.

In many cases, the fix isn't rewriting the content entirely. It's understanding what people are actually searching for and adjusting the framing, the headlines, and the structure of existing content around those real terms.

Site Structure and Internal Linking

After the content, I look at how the site is organized and how pages connect to each other.

A few things I look for specifically: are the most important pages reachable within one or two clicks from the homepage, or are they buried three levels deep in a navigation nobody looks at? Are there pages that exist but have no other pages linking to them, what we call orphaned pages, effectively invisible to both users and search engines? Does the navigation reflect the business's actual priorities, or does it reflect whatever seemed logical when someone set it up a few years ago, and nobody has touched it since?

Internal linking is one of the most consistently underused levers in SEO, and the gaps are usually obvious once you're looking for them. A site might have a strong, well-written case study sitting with zero internal links pointing to it. Or a service page that would benefit enormously from being linked to across the blog but isn't. Google reads your internal link structure as a signal of what you consider important. If you're not pointing to something, you're quietly telling Google it doesn't matter.

Technical Issues: The Deeper Dive

Page speed I notice immediately, because I experience it as a visitor. A site that takes more than a few seconds to load on mobile is already working against itself before I've opened a single tool.

Everything else on the technical side requires going deeper. Crawlability, indexing status, duplicate content from URL parameters or tag pages, broken redirect chains left over from a site migration, missing or incorrectly implemented schema markup, these things don't reveal themselves by looking at the site. You need a proper technical audit to surface them.

And they're almost always there. A site that's been live for more than two years without a technical audit has almost certainly accumulated issues it doesn't know about. Not because something went dramatically wrong, but because websites are living things and small problems compound quietly over time.

What I Almost Always Find

In almost every audit, there's something significant the client had no idea about.

Sometimes it's an indexing issue that's been quietly preventing entire sections of the site from appearing in search results, often for months. Sometimes it's thin or near-duplicate content across multiple pages that's dragging down quality signals for the whole domain.

Sometimes it's a redirect chain from an old domain migration that nobody cleaned up, and that's bleeding link equity every time something points to it. Sometimes it's simply the most important service page targeting a keyword with almost no search volume, while leaving a high-value term completely uncovered.

The specifics vary. The fact that something significant is being missed almost never does.

This isn't a criticism of the businesses I work with. Running a business is a full-time job, and SEO is genuinely complex. Most of what surfaces in a proper audit isn't obvious without knowing specifically where to look and what to look for. But it does explain why a fresh, expert look at a website almost always changes the picture.

What This Process Leads To

The first pass gives me a qualitative sense of the site. The deeper technical audit gives me the data. Together, they form the basis of an honest assessment of where the site stands and what it would actually take to improve it.

I don't build a strategy until I have both. And I don't start either until I understand what the business genuinely wants to achieve, because more traffic is rarely the real goal. More qualified leads, more bookings, more revenue from organic search, those are the real goals. The strategy follows from those.

If you're curious what a proper first look at your site would reveal, that's exactly what a free consultation is for.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does an SEO expert look for when reviewing a website?

A thorough first pass covers on-page content quality and clarity, whether content targets real search demand or internal business language, site structure and internal linking gaps, and visible technical signals like page speed. A deeper technical audit then surfaces indexing issues, duplicate content, broken redirects, and structured data problems that aren't visible without diagnostic tools.

Why does on-page content quality matter before technical SEO?

Technical SEO gets your pages found. Content quality determines whether those pages are worth finding and whether visitors take action once they arrive. A technically sound site with vague, generic, or mistargeted content will underperform regardless of how clean the backend is. Getting the content right is the foundation everything else builds on.

How do I know if my website content is targeting the right keywords?

The clearest signal is whether your page titles, headings, and body copy reflect the language your customers actually use when searching, not the language you use internally to describe your services. A keyword research review comparing your current content against actual search data surfaces this gap quickly and usually reveals significant missed opportunities.

What are the most common things SEO experts find that clients didn't know about?

Indexing issues preventing pages from appearing in search, thin or near-duplicate content affecting overall site quality, broken redirect chains from old migrations, orphaned pages with no internal links pointing to them, and service pages targeting keywords with no real search volume are among the most consistently significant findings that clients genuinely had no idea about.