Twelve Checks Before We Touch Someone Else’s Site
When someone hands over their website, the temptation is to start fixing. Change a title,
move a menu, install a plugin. It’s the urge that fights hardest to get out, and it’s almost always a mistake:
without knowing what’s working, any change can break the very thing that was bringing in visitors.
Before touching anything, we run twelve checks. Here is the complete list, in the order
we do them, and at the end, what we do with the results.
Part One: Access and Site Health
1. Access to Search Console and analytics. It’s the first thing we ask for, before
admin access. Without Search Console we’re guessing; with it we see what people search for,
which pages show up, and how many times they get clicked. If the client never verified it,
verifying it is the first task, because data starts accumulating from that day.
2. What Google actually sees. We check the sitemap, the robots
file, and how many pages are indexed versus how many exist. A site with
two hundred pages and thirty indexed has a problem no title can fix. And sometimes
the problem is a single checkbox in the admin panel: “discourage search engines.”
3. One version of the domain. With and without www, with http and https: four
addresses that must resolve to one. If all four respond and none redirect, the signals
get split across four sites that Google treats as separate.
4. How the key pages respond. Home, services, contact. They should
return a clean 200, with no redirect chains and no 404 errors on links in the site’s own
menu. It’s a ten-minute check that turns up more problems than you’d expect.
5. Speed on a phone. Not on the office computer: on a
cell phone with mobile data, which is how most people arrive. If the homepage takes several seconds to
show anything, any content improvement reaches an audience that has already left.
Part Two: What’s Already Working
This is the part most people skip and the one that matters most. Before fixing what’s broken, you have to
know what works, so you don’t touch it. We use our own site as an example, with
Search Console data for the last 90 days, from July 19 to October 17, 2026.
6. Pages that already bring in clicks. On graphemics.net, out of all
pages, 164 had at least one impression in those 90 days, adding up to
17,453 impressions and 72 clicks. Only 17 pages got at least one
click. Those 17 are untouchable until proven otherwise: if any of them gets redesigned
or renamed carelessly, we lose the only thing that already works.
7. Queries between position 11 and 50. These are searches where we already
appear, but on page two or beyond. On our site there are 171 queries
in that range, with 4,065 impressions. It’s confirmed demand sitting one push away from
page one, and it’s almost always the most profitable work in the first few months.
8. Pages with lots of impressions and few clicks. Our homepage is the
uncomfortable example: 10,130 impressions, 4 clicks, with an average position of 4.7.
Showing up in fourth or fifth place and getting almost no clicks isn’t a ranking problem, it’s a
problem with the snippet that’s displayed. It gets fixed in the title and description, not by
rewriting the page.
Part Three: What Stands Between the Visit and the Sale
9. Cannibalization. We look for two or more pages competing for the same
query. When that happens, neither becomes the clear answer, and the fix is usually to merge
one into the other and redirect. Careful: never merge two pages without first checking which of the two
has the clicks.
10. Internal links to the pages that sell. How many links from the site itself
point to the services page, the contact page, the product page. It’s common to
find a huge blog that doesn’t link to a single commercial page.
11. Contact details and business listing. Name, address, and phone number
consistent across the site, Google Business Profile, and directories. For a local business, a different
address in two places costs more visibility than any badly written title.
12. Being able to measure the result. Finally: when someone calls, messages
on WhatsApp, or fills out the form, do we know? If there’s no way to count those contacts,
any improvement we make goes unproven. We set up tracking before touching
anything, so we have a “before” to compare against.
What We Do With the List
The twelve checks take an afternoon, not weeks. When we’re done, they get sorted into three piles:
what’s broken and gets fixed now, what’s working and stays untouched, and what has
potential and gets worked in order of profitability. In that order, always. What goes first is
what costs the least and can do the least damage.
And we’ve set ourselves one rule: one change at a time whenever possible.
If twenty things change on the same day and visits go up, we don’t know which one did it; if they go down,
we don’t know either. Titles and the Google listing usually show effects in two to six weeks; a new
service page takes longer, three to six months to settle in. Anyone who promises first
position in a month is selling something else.
What We Don’t Check First
To be clear about the order: we don’t start with design, or the logo, or how many words
each page has. All of that matters, but it’s better decided once we know what people are
searching for and which page already answers it. A beautiful site nobody finds gets
redecorated; one that already gets visits gets looked after.
We don’t promise numbers before reviewing, either. The figures in this article are from our own
site, and they show how to read the data, not how to predict yours. Every site
has its own, and the list is built precisely to uncover them.
If You’d Like Us to Review Yours
This list is no secret, and you can run it yourself with an afternoon and access to Search
Console. If you’d rather we do it, write to us: we’ll deliver all
twelve checks in writing, with the three piles sorted, before changing a single line
of your site.
Google Search Console figures for graphemics.net, July 19 to October 17,
2026, retrieved on October 19. They change daily; the result timelines mentioned are
estimates and depend on each site.
Versión en español: Las doce cosas que reviso antes de tocar un sitio ajeno
