What is the first things you look when taking over a website?

When I was working at the seo company I just need to focus on the some major issues before audit that was manual research for me to do that and get the some ideas would be helpful for me to do that.

Oh like spot the issues? Like content? Or more structure problems with the website?

1. Technique
2. Content
3. Popularity

Some tools/info to start:

• https://gtmetrix.com/ (no speed no glory)
• https://ahrefs.com/blog/seo-silo-structure/ (siloing works good for me however)
• Screaming frog to look for non-indexed links (fix them!)
• Keyword cannibalization

I always prefer to check all the SEO. such as on-page, off-page and technical. Later continue on with content and other technical issues.

We always perform an audit and pay attention to other aspects.

I usually check

• authority of the website and where it comes from
• backlinks and backlinking opportunities
• index status
• speed (prefer tools.pingdom.com as you can choose from various locations)
• all the smaller on-site blocks, from internal linking through rich snippets support, meta tags, open graph, canonicals to markup itself to leverage maximum potential out of the content.

Anyway, always look for issues first, then fix them ASAP, then move on to improvements.

My initial steps goes like this while looking on a webpage with SEO perspective,

• Page title to find the keywords targeted for the webpage
• On-page SEO applied for the targeted keywords
• Backlinks profile
• SEO audit