SEO checklist: everything to verify before and after you publish
Last reviewed and updated
This SEO checklist groups the work into six passes — keywords, on-page tags, content, technical crawlability, speed and monitoring — with the free tool for each item next to it.
Work top to bottom for a new page, or jump to a single section when you already know what needs attention.
Close the loop after the audit
Once the boxes are ticked, track the outcome in the free SEO dashboard — keyword positions, referring domains and a live page score — or read the SEO guide for the reasoning behind each item.
1Keyword and intent checklist
Confirm each page targets one primary keyword with a clear intent, and that no two pages compete for the same phrase. Check the phrase appears naturally in the title, H1, first paragraph and URL.
Verify the difficulty is realistic for your site's authority, and note two or three supporting long-tail variants to work into subheadings.
Tools for this section
Tools marked Live open a working workspace that runs entirely in your browser — start with Keyword Density Checker.
2On-page tag checklist
Title under 60 characters, meta description under 160, exactly one H1, descriptive alt text on every image, and a clean lowercase URL slug with hyphens.
Add a self-referencing canonical tag, plus Open Graph and Twitter Card tags so shared links render a proper preview.
Tools for this section
Tools marked Live open a working workspace that runs entirely in your browser — start with Meta Tag Generator and Open Graph Generator.
3Content quality checklist
The page answers the search question in the first screen, has enough depth to be useful, and contains no duplicated or padded paragraphs. Read it aloud once — anything you'd skip, a visitor will skip too.
Check spelling and grammar, then confirm the copy is original rather than lightly reworded from a competitor.
Tools for this section
Tools marked Live open a working workspace that runs entirely in your browser — start with Word Counter and Text Summarizer.
4Technical crawlability checklist
robots.txt allows the pages you want indexed, an up-to-date XML sitemap is submitted, and there are no redirect chains or broken internal links. HTTPS is valid and every HTTP request redirects to it once.
Crawl the site as a bot and confirm the important pages are reachable within three clicks of the home page.
Tools for this section
Tools marked Live open a working workspace that runs entirely in your browser — start with Robots.txt Generator and XML Sitemap Generator.
Go deeper
- SEO guide — Why crawling and indexing come before every other fix.
- Submit a website to Bing Webmaster Tools — Verification, sitemap submission and IndexNow, step by step.
5Speed and mobile checklist
Images are compressed and correctly sized, the page renders usefully on a mid-range phone, and nothing shifts around while loading.
Test the three pages that get the most traffic first; fixing the heaviest images usually delivers the biggest single improvement.
Tools for this section
Tools marked Live open a working workspace that runs entirely in your browser — start with Image Compressor and HTML Minifier.
6Backlinks, authority, freshness and monitoring checklist
After publishing, confirm the page is indexed, then work the signals that decide page authority: earn links from relevant domains, keep anchor text varied and natural, and point internal links from your strongest existing pages at the new one. Watch for lost links — they are the quietest cause of a ranking drop.
Add a freshness pass to the same routine: review your top pages quarterly, update dated figures or claims substantively, refresh the last-modified date in your sitemap, and verify the updated version has been recrawled. Re-run this checklist monthly for key pages, and whenever you redesign, migrate or change URLs.
Tools for this section
These checks need a data provider connected. For a live measurement right now, run the SEO dashboard audit against the same URL.
Go deeper
- SEO dashboard — Log keyword positions, watch referring domains and score pages live.
- How to use SEO tools effectively — Turn monitoring output into a short, prioritised fix list.
Frequently asked questions
From the blog
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