SEO Checklists

Step-by-step checklists to ensure you don't miss any critical SEO tasks.

Available Checklists

The Essential Technical SEO Audit Checklist

**Verify Google Search Console Setup:** Ensure the website is properly verified in Google Search Console (GSC). All versions (http, https, www, non-www) should be included.

**Check for Manual Actions:** In GSC, go to "Security & Manual Actions" > "Manual Actions" to ensure there are no penalties.

**Review Index Coverage Report:** In GSC, go to "Indexing" > "Pages" to identify and address any errors, warnings, or exclusions affecting your pages.

**Submit XML Sitemap:** Ensure a comprehensive XML sitemap is submitted in GSC under "Indexing" > "Sitemaps". The sitemap should be free of errors.

**Analyze robots.txt:** Locate your `robots.txt` file (yourdomain.com/robots.txt) and ensure it is not blocking any important content or scripts. Check that it correctly links to your XML sitemap.

**Perform a `site:` search:** Use the `site:yourdomain.com` search operator in Google to get a rough estimate of indexed pages. Investigate any major discrepancies with the number of pages on your site.

**Run a Full Site Crawl:** Use a tool like **Screaming Frog** or **SE Ranking's Site Audit** to crawl the entire website. This will be the source for many of the following checks.

**Confirm HTTPS Usage:** Ensure the entire site uses HTTPS. All HTTP URLs should 301 redirect to their HTTPS equivalent.

**Check for Duplicate Content:** Use your crawl data to find duplicate or near-duplicate page titles, meta descriptions, and H1 tags. Address these using canonical tags (`rel="canonical"`) or 301 redirects.

**Audit URL Structure:** URLs should be clean, logical, and use lowercase letters. Avoid long, cryptic URLs with unnecessary parameters.

**Identify and Fix Broken Links (404s):** Use your crawl report to find all internal and external broken links. Update or remove them.

**Identify and Fix Redirect Chains:** Your crawl report should highlight redirect chains (e.g., Page A -> Page B -> Page C). Fix these so the first page redirects directly to the final destination (Page A -> Page C).

**Review Internal Linking:** Ensure important pages have a sufficient number of internal links pointing to them. Use descriptive anchor text for internal links.

**Check for a Clear Breadcrumb Navigation:** Ensure breadcrumbs are implemented on product, content, and service pages to improve user navigation and site structure.

**Test Mobile-Friendliness:** Use Google’s [Mobile-Friendly Test](https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly) to ensure all pages are fully responsive and provide a good user experience on mobile.

**Analyze Core Web Vitals:** Use the "Core Web Vitals" report in GSC or Google's PageSpeed Insights tool to check your LCP, FID (or INP), and CLS scores. Address any "Poor" or "Needs Improvement" URLs.

**Review Page Load Speed:** Beyond Core Web Vitals, check the overall load time of key pages. Optimize images, leverage browser caching, and minify CSS/JavaScript to improve speed.

**Check for Intrusive Interstitials:** Ensure that pop-ups or other interstitials do not block content, especially on mobile, which can lead to a poor user experience and potential penalties.

**Test Existing Structured Data:** Use the [Rich Results Test](https://search.google.com/test/rich-results) to validate any existing schema markup on your key pages (e.g., Article, Product, FAQ, LocalBusiness).

**Identify Opportunities for New Schema:** Determine if you can add new, relevant schema to your pages. For example, add `FAQPage` schema to FAQ sections or `HowTo` schema for tutorials.

**Ensure Schema is Error-Free:** Fix any errors or warnings identified by the testing tool to ensure your pages are eligible for rich results.