Search Visibility
A Checklist Ordered by What's Usually Wrong, Not What's Easy to Measure
Most published SEO checklists are inventories — every check a tool can run, in no order, with no guidance on what to do when one fails. This is the version worth keeping: ordered by what usually turns out to be the problem, with what a bad result actually looks like on each.
Before You Start
Decide what "bad" means before you look
An audit without a threshold is just an opinion. Decide, in advance, what counts as a pass — otherwise you'll grade on a curve. Three rules make the whole thing defensible: compare the site against its own history, not an invented industry average (the site three months ago is a real benchmark); weight everything by traffic, because a fault on a page with forty clicks a month is a note while the same fault on your money page is the whole audit; and write the reason down. "A problem here because a third of your clicked pages fail a core check" is defensible. "It feels off" is not.
The Order
Work top to bottom — the story is usually in the first two sections
1 · Indexing and crawl — is Google seeing the right pages? Start here. Roughly half of "our rankings dropped" turns out to be an indexing problem, not a ranking one — the page didn't lose, it was never in the race. A bad result looks like: an indexed page count wildly higher or lower than the pages you actually want indexed; a growing "crawled, not indexed" bucket full of pages you care about; a stray rule blocking the whole site that survived a launch; a sitemap full of redirects and dead links; or a stray "no-index" on a page that earns clicks.
2 · Search performance — what is the data actually saying? Technical checks tell you what's broken; your own Search Console data tells you what it cost. Bad results here: impressions flat or rising while clicks fall (a click-through problem, not a "do more SEO" problem); a cluster of commercial terms stuck just off page one (your shortlist); pages that lost a third of their clicks year on year without a ranking change; and Google alternating between two of your own URLs for one query, so neither builds authority.
3 · On-page and content. Titles that aren't unique or aren't written for the query; missing descriptions on your top pages by impressions; more than one main heading, or one that doesn't match intent; thin, near-duplicate pages that differ only by a place name; and your highest-value page with three internal links while your privacy policy has two hundred.
4 · Technical health. Real-user speed data failing on a large share of clicked pages; a page that breaks on an actual phone; both the www and bare versions of the site resolving as two separate sites; server errors under load; and structured data that's present but invalid — which is worse than absent, because you're claiming eligibility and failing.
5 · Off-site and local. Referring domains flat or falling while competitors climb; external links pointing at dead pages on your site (a compliment you dropped — recoverable in minutes); and, for a local business, an incomplete Business Profile, which is often worth more than everything in the content section.
What ARIA Shows You
The number under the verdict
The point of a checklist isn't the list — it's applying it the same way every time and being able to show the working when someone asks. That's the whole idea behind how ARIA reports: a verdict is a summary, never the last word, and you should always be able to see the specific number underneath it.
The finding, in plain English: "Search performance looks weaker than it should for a site this size — here's why: a cluster of your commercial terms sits just off page one, two of your best pages have lost a third of their clicks year on year, and your main service page is barely linked from anywhere on your own site. Each of those is a named page you can act on, ranked by what it's likely costing you."
A verdict you can click into is a decision. A grade with no next move attached is just decoration.
If You Only Have An Hour
The short version
- Check that your top pages by impressions aren't accidentally blocked or set to "no-index."
- Pull the last several months of Search Console data and split branded from non-branded searches.
- Find every commercial term sitting just off page one — that's your shortlist.
- Find every page whose clicks dropped more than a third year on year.
- Count the internal links pointing at your top few commercial pages.
That's most of the value of a full audit, and you can do it before lunch. The rest of the checklist is how you make sure you're right.
Related In This Guide
Where to go next
Several checklist items have their own guides: the "just off page one" cluster is your striking-distance keywords, the year-on-year click loss is rank decay, the "shown but not clicked" pattern is the CTR gap, and reading the performance data correctly is covered in Search Console, read like a practitioner. To see how a full audit runs start to finish, read how an SEO audit actually runs.
Everything in the "technical health" section is something to look for here — but the hands-on fixing of speed, crawlability, and structured data lives on Audry's side: Audry's Site Audit turns those findings into a fix list.
Run the checklist against your own site
Having a checklist matters more than which checklist it is. Connect your site and let ARIA apply the search-performance half of it for you — the same way, every time, with the number under every verdict.