How to Tell Whether SEO Advice Is Worth Acting On

Advice about your website arrives long before you hire anyone. A free audit, a tool that scores your pages, a paragraph from a chatbot, a friend who did this at their last job. Most of it is not wrong. The problem is that almost none of it tells you whether it is worth your Tuesday afternoon, and that is the only thing you actually need to know.

The six questions

Run any piece of advice through these before you act on it. They take about a minute and they are ordered so that the cheapest disqualifier comes first.

Does it name a page, or a topic?

Advice that names a page can be acted on today. Advice that names a topic cannot. There is a large practical difference between improve your internal linking and add a link from this page to that one. If nobody can tell you which page, nobody has looked at your site.

Would I be able to tell if it had worked?

Ask what you would look at afterwards, and when. If the honest answer is that nothing observable would change, the advice may still be correct and it is not actionable, and you should file it rather than do it. A surprising amount of well-meaning advice fails this question.

Is it about the page, or about the search result?

These get confused constantly. Rewriting a paragraph changes what a visitor reads. Rewriting a title changes what a stranger sees before deciding whether to visit at all. Both are worth doing, and if your problem is that nobody is clicking, only one of them addresses it.

Who benefits if I follow it?

Not a cynical question, a clarifying one. A tool that scores your site and recommends fixing the things it can measure is being honest and is also bounded by what it can measure. An audit that ends in a proposal is advice with a direction. Neither is disqualifying. It just tells you which parts to check hardest.

What is the cost if it is wrong?

Writing a better title is cheap and reversible. Changing your page addresses is neither. Advice should be weighted by what it costs to undo, not by how confidently it was delivered, and the two are usually unrelated.

Does it survive being asked why twice?

Ask why once and most advice gives a reason. Ask why again and you find out whether there is a mechanism underneath or a convention being repeated. Good advice gets more specific under the second question. Repeated advice gets vaguer, and that is the tell.

Advice that comes from a tool

A tool that scores your site is checking a fixed list against your pages and reporting what it found. That is genuinely useful and it has a specific blind spot: it can only raise things that are on its list, so a clean score means you passed the checks it runs, not that the site is fine. The most common real problem this estate sees, a page that nobody clicks because its search result reads badly, is not on most of those lists at all.

Advice that comes from an AI assistant

It is worth being specific here rather than dismissive, because this is now where a lot of advice comes from. Ask it the same six questions you would ask a person. In practice the answers tend to be strong on general mechanism and weak on your site, because it has not seen your pages, your search data, or what your competitors are doing. That makes it a good way to understand why something matters and a poor way to decide what to do first. If the answer names no page of yours, question one already told you what to do with it.

The one piece of advice worth acting on without checking

If a page of yours has no title of its own, write one. It is reversible, it costs minutes, it changes what a stranger sees before they decide whether to visit, and it is one of the most common gaps we find. That is the whole of it. Everything else earns its place through the six questions.

If you would rather someone did this every week instead of you evaluating advice, what that costs is on our pricing page. It is one number and it does not change with the size of your site.

If you have been handed a list and you want a second opinion on which parts of it matter, book a free SEO consultation. You will speak to the person who does the work.

Written by Spencer Capron at Capron Media, in collaboration with our AI agents. The same way we do the work for clients. Spencer reviews everything published here.