“We need more content” is one of the most common conclusions in SEO.

Sometimes it is right. Often it arrives too early.

If search engines cannot reliably crawl, understand or index the pages already on a site, another twenty articles just create a larger pile of URLs with the same problem. Before planning content, I run a technical pass in a fixed order.

It is not glamorous, but it stops expensive work being built on a weak base.

1. Check the actual HTTP response