SEO health check: 4 steps for a quick and efficient check

SEO health check

Perform an SEO health check of any page on your website to uncover common SEO blockers, separated into four essential SEO categories: technical, content, user experience, and mobile.

View your unique page SEO health score
Receive an email detailing your results to share with your team
See an immediate snapshot of your page’s SEO issues – split by category
Read a clear explanation of how each SEO issue affects your users

Your website SEO check is one click away

Scan your site for 42 common SEO issues. Simply click go and you'll receive the results of your SEO page audit in less than 60 seconds.

Your site’s SEO is never static. Search engine algorithm changes, coupled with technical problems, new content being uploaded to your site, site redesigns, and escalating user expectations mean that digital marketers always need to stay on top of their SEO, or else risk falling down the SERP rankings.

Performing regular SEO health checks is a fast and effective way to discover how well your site is doing in terms of organic visibility, detect any potential trouble spots, and locate areas for further optimization so you can outrank your search competition.

What is an SEO health check?

An SEO health check is a holistic look at the state of your SEO. It gives you a sense of how crawlable and indexable your site is as a whole, as well as flagging specific errors and areas for improvement. This is useful in many circumstances, whether you’re just starting out with SEO or want to incorporate a recurring SEO audit into your website maintenance workflows.

What are the four pillars of an SEO health check?

The four main pillars of an SEO health check are:

Technical SEO: How crawlable and indexable is your site from a technical point of view? Are there any broken links, slow-loading pages, inaccessible URLs and so on?
Content: This looks at the quality of your web page copy and other on-page content elements: How useful it is, how easy it is to read and whether it’s unique.
Mobile: Is your site accessible and easy to interact with on a mobile device?
User experience: How well-organised your site is in terms of navigation, visuals and other elements that affect the way users engage with your site.

How to perform a quick and efficient SEO health check in 4 steps:

There’s no single best way to run an SEO health check. You can easily end up spending weeks diving into technical issues and running deep site crawls. But if you need a fast, efficient way to get a current snapshot of your site’s SEO health, here are the four steps you should follow.

Step 1: Get your SEO Score using the Siteimprove SEO health checker

With so many different aspects of SEO on the go, it can be hard to get a top-level view of your site’s overall SEO health status in one place. The Siteimprove SEO checker simplifies this by condensing all the details into a single, easy-to-understand numerical score from 1-100: Your SEO score. It does this by scanning your site for these common SEO issues:

Did you include a meta description and meta title?
Are you linking out to any unsafe domains?
Do you have any broken links?
Is your “robotx.txt” file set up properly to let crawlers access your site?
Do you use “noindex” meta tags appropriately?
Do you have any mixed HTTPS content that may not display properly?
Are you serving HTML content that’s larger than 1MB?
Do you have images above 1MB?
Did you add helpful alt text on images?
What’s your loading speed on mobile?
Is your site optimized for the mobile viewport?
Is your site mobile friendly?

After running the check, you’ll get your SEO Score within minutes. This score helps you understand whether your site is a high-performer when it comes to SEO, or whether it has issues that are limiting the success of your SEO efforts.

Alongside the SEO Score, you’ll also get a breakdown of how well your site or page performs in terms of the four SEO pillars (technical SEO, content, mobile and UX) and how each SEO issue affects your site visitors. This helps you zero in on the most problematic areas and prioritise fixing them for maximum impact.

Step 2: Check your indexability using Google Search Console

Armed with your SEO Score, the next step you’ll take is diving deeper into your SEO. The best way of doing this is by looking at the way Google indexes your site. You can easily get this information directly from Google by using the free Google Search Console tool.

Step 3: Consult your “Crawl stats” in Google Search Console

Staying in the Google Search Console, you can access your “Crawl stats” report by first navigating to the “Settings” tab and clicking on the “Open report” link.

Step 4: Perform a speed check using Google Lighthouse (for both desktop and mobile)

Last but definitely not least, is the speed check. How quickly your pages load is one of the most critical factors affecting your SEO.

By going through the four steps above, you’ll get a thorough understanding of your site’s SEO health and be in a good position to prioritise the most impactful fixes and improvements.