Most website owners know something is wrong when traffic flatlines, but few know where to look. The good news is that checking your website's SEO is a systematic process, not a mystery. If you work through the same layers in the same order every time — can it be found, can it be crawled, is it optimised, is the content good enough, does anyone link to it, and is it fast — you will find the real bottleneck instead of guessing. This guide gives you that workflow, in the order that produces the fastest wins.

How We Help You Audit and Improve Your Website at AAMAX.CO

At AAMAX.CO, we are a full service digital marketing company offering web development, digital marketing and SEO services worldwide, and full website audits are one of our most requested engagements. We crawl your site, review every layer below, prioritise the issues by impact rather than by count, and then implement the fixes rather than just handing over a PDF. If you want a clear answer to what is holding your site back, our SEO services deliver the audit and the execution together.

Step 1: Check Whether Your Site Is Indexed

Nothing else matters if your pages are not in the index. Run a site: search for your domain and compare the rough number of results to the number of pages you expect to be indexable. A large gap in either direction is a problem: too few means pages are blocked or ignored, too many means you are indexing junk like filtered listings, tag archives or staging pages.

Then open your search console property and review the page indexing report. It tells you exactly which URLs are excluded and why — noindex tags, canonical conflicts, crawl anomalies, redirects, soft 404s or blocked resources. This single report resolves more mystery traffic drops than any other tool.

Step 2: Check Crawlability and Site Structure

Next, make sure search engines can move through your site efficiently. Check your robots file for accidental blanket disallow rules, especially on CSS and JavaScript, which search engines need in order to render pages properly. Confirm your XML sitemap exists, contains only canonical indexable URLs, returns a valid response and is submitted.

Crawl your site with an auditing tool and look at click depth. Any important page more than three clicks from the homepage is under-served. Check for orphan pages with no internal links, redirect chains and loops, and large clusters of broken internal links. Then review your internal linking: are your most valuable commercial pages receiving links from your best content, or are they isolated?

Step 3: Check On-Page Optimisation

Now review page-level signals across your site. Every indexable page needs a unique, descriptive title tag that leads with its primary topic, and a compelling meta description that earns clicks even though it is not a direct ranking factor. Each page needs exactly one H1 that reflects the page's purpose, with a logical H2 and H3 hierarchy beneath it.

Look for duplicate titles and descriptions, which usually indicate template problems or genuine content duplication. Check that URLs are short, lowercase, hyphenated and readable. Confirm images have descriptive alt text and sensible filenames. Verify canonical tags point where you intend, and that structured data is present and valid for the page types that support it — articles, products, FAQs, local business, breadcrumbs.

Step 4: Check Content Quality and Coverage

Technical health gets you into the race; content decides whether you place. Go through your top pages and ask whether each one genuinely satisfies the query it targets better than the pages currently outranking you. Depth without substance does not count — a focused 700-word answer often beats a padded 3,000-word article.

Look for keyword cannibalisation, where several pages target the same term and split their own authority. Consolidate them into one strong page and redirect the rest. Identify thin pages with almost no content and either expand or remove them. Find content gaps by comparing the keywords your competitors rank for against your own coverage, then plan pages to fill the obvious holes.

Also check freshness. Pages containing outdated advice, dead links or old data lose trust with both users and search engines. Updating existing near-ranking pages is almost always faster than writing new ones.

Step 5: Check Your Backlink Profile

Pull your backlink data and assess quality rather than volume. Are the links from relevant, reputable sites? Is the anchor text profile dominated by natural brand and URL mentions, or by exact-match commercial keywords? Are there sudden spikes that suggest someone bought links, perhaps a previous agency?

Compare your link profile to the sites outranking you. If they have significantly more high-quality referring domains, no amount of on-page tweaking will close the gap on its own. Also find your best-linked pages and make sure they link internally to your commercial targets, so that authority actually flows where it can earn revenue.

Step 6: Check Performance and Core Web Vitals

Test your key page templates — homepage, category, product or service, blog post — on mobile, and look at real-world field data rather than only lab scores. Focus on the metrics that measure loading, interaction responsiveness and layout stability.

The usual culprits are oversized uncompressed images, heavy third-party scripts, render-blocking resources, missing dimensions on images causing layout jumps, and slow server response times. Fixing images and third-party scripts alone resolves most performance problems on most sites. Speed is both a ranking factor and a conversion factor, so it pays twice.

Step 7: Check Mobile and Accessibility Basics

Indexing is mobile-first, so your mobile experience is your real website. Check that content is identical across devices, that tap targets are large enough, that text is readable without zooming, and that nothing important hides behind interstitials or aggressive popups.

Accessibility overlaps heavily with SEO. Semantic headings, descriptive link text, proper contrast, keyboard navigation and alt text all make your site easier for assistive technology and for crawlers. Replace vague links like “click here” with descriptive anchor text that explains the destination.

Step 8: Check Local and Entity Signals

If you serve a specific area, verify your business profile is complete, categorised correctly and consistent with your website. Confirm your name, address and phone number match exactly everywhere they appear. Check that your key citations are accurate and that you are actively collecting reviews.

More broadly, check whether your site clearly explains who you are, who is behind the content, and how to contact you. These entity and trust signals increasingly influence whether AI-driven answer engines cite you at all, which is the focus of GEO services and an important complement to traditional optimisation.

Final Thoughts

Checking your website SEO properly means working through indexation, crawlability, on-page signals, content quality, links, performance, mobile experience and entity trust in a repeatable order, then prioritising fixes by revenue impact rather than by how easy they are.

If you would rather have experts run that audit and implement the fixes as part of a broader digital marketing plan, hire AAMAX.CO for SEO services. We will show you exactly what is broken, what it is costing you, and how to fix it in the right order.