The competition level has definitely risen in the SEO world and you might find your site (or your client's site) not performing strong enough. If you are optimizing your site using a checklist from 10 years ago then you are probably going to get results that are 10 years too late. It is time to check your ego at the door and remind yourself that no one knows everything. SEO has evolved to such a complex situation that it is too easy to overlook some fundamentals.
Let's share our tips on how to review a website to make sure it is maximizing its SEO potential.
I'll start with a few tips...
1) Regularly revisit old sites. Just because a site was perfectly optimized a year ago doesn't mean it still meets SEO best practices. For example in just the last year HTTPs and mobile optimization have become more important. Every year there are changes so you should regularly review all of your websites (or at least the sites that are important to you)
2) Crawl your own site. It is easy to complain about googlebot doing a poor job crawling your site but until you try to crawl your own site you won't realize the obstacles you have created for googlebot. This is a good way to make sure your site is easily accessible by googlebot, identify redirect loops that can waste link power, find broken links, and give you a good view of your overall site architecture plus a bunch of other useful stuff.
3) Start but don't stop with checklists. Yes, SEO checklists can be helpful to remind us of important things like title tags, anchor text, robots.txt, and the many, many other factors Google wants. But blindly following the checklist can help you ignore big problems leak weak content that could invite a panda like penalty. Make sure to manually inspect a proper sample of your pages. SEO is becoming more holistic and interconnected. Make sure you look at your pages with a wide lens.
4) Sites that only maintain their status will fall. If your site stays still it will eventually be overtaken by other sites. The internet is constantly evolving and you better keep up with the pace or you get run over. There are many different ways search has changed. One simple example is search keywords. When was the last time you looked at Google's autocomplete to see what new search queries are being promoted to users? You need to constantly add new valuable content to address the needs & wants of users. Make sure to monitor & regularly visit your competition to inspire you towards fresh ideas.
What is your tip to make sure a website is maximizing its SEO potential?
