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The SEO checklist you can actually work through
Seventy-five checks across eight areas of your website. Every single one tells you exactly how to check it, using free tools, and what a pass looks like. Written for the person who owns the business, not for an agency.
- Every check names the screen, file or menu to open.
- Every check states the threshold that counts as a pass.
- Nothing in it needs a subscription to complete.
What is actually inside
Eight sections, sequenced so the checks that stop everything else from working come first. There is no point auditing your headings while Google is being told not to crawl the site.
Before you touch anything
Baseline, access and measurement. Search Console set up properly, a dated record of where you start, and what one enquiry is actually worth.
Technical and crawling
Indexing, robots.txt, sitemaps, canonicals, https and www consistency, redirect chains and the noindex tag someone left on at launch.
Speed and Core Web Vitals
LCP, INP and CLS explained in plain words, image sizing, render-blocking scripts, caching, fonts and what your host contributes.
On-page
One H1 per page, title and description lengths, heading order, internal links, URLs, image alt text, schema, thin pages and cannibalisation.
Content that earns the enquiry
Intent match, a page per service instead of one page for everything, proof instead of claims, and a clear next step on every page.
Local search
Business Profile completeness, categories, service areas, photos, reviews, citation consistency, local pages and map pack position by area.
Links and authority
What you already have, broken inbound links, unlinked mentions, supplier and association listings, and the patterns worth avoiding.
Tracking, reporting and AI search
Conversions that are real enquiries, call tracking, end-to-end form testing, and whether AI answers mention your business at all.
Verify Search Console is set up as a domain property, not one URL version
How In Search Console open the property picker, top left. A domain property reads example.com, with no https or www. If yours reads https://www.example.com, add one and verify by DNS TXT record.
Pass example.com listed as a domain property, the Performance report returning data, and your sitemap showing Success under Sitemaps.
Who this is for, and who it is not
It is a checklist, not a course. It assumes you can log in to your own site and are willing to look at a few settings screens.
It will be useful if
- You own a business with a website and you are not sure whether the SEO work being done is real.
- You are about to hire someone and want to know what to ask them.
- You do your own marketing and want a running order rather than a pile of blog posts.
- You inherited a site from a developer who has since disappeared.
- You want a before-and-after record you can actually compare in ninety days.
It will not be useful if
- You want software to do it for you. This is a list of things a person looks at.
- You are after a score out of a hundred. There is no score, because a score hides which failures cost money.
- You need enterprise-scale auditing across thousands of URLs.
- You are hoping for a shortcut. There is no check in here that ranks a page by itself.
Where should I send it?
Give me a name and an email and the PDF opens straight away. One email, the checklist attached, and that is the end of it unless you write back.
How to work through it
Eight sittings is realistic. Doing it in one evening is not, and rushing it produces a list of ticks that means nothing.
Print it, or open it beside your site
Tick a box only when you have actually looked at the thing. Ticking what sounds right is how sites end up with three H1s on the homepage.
One section per sitting
Eight sittings and you will know more about your own website than most agencies will tell you during a pitch.
Write down every failure
The failures are your plan. Fix them in the order they appear, because the order is the part most lists get wrong.
Run it again in ninety days
Keep the first copy. The difference between the two is progress you can actually point at, rather than a ranking screenshot.
Questions before you hand over an email
Fair enough. Here is exactly what happens.
Will I be added to a mailing list?
No. There is no newsletter to add you to. You get the checklist, and I keep your email in case you reply. If you would rather not give an email at all, the checklist is linked in plain text at the bottom of this page.
Will you sell or share my email address?
No. It is not passed to anyone, and it is not fed into an advertising audience. The only person who sees it is me.
Will I get a sales call?
No, because you are not giving me a phone number. If you want to talk you can message me. If you do not, you will not hear from me again.
Is the checklist actually free, or is it a sample of something paid?
It is the whole thing. There is no paid version of it, no part two behind a wall, and nothing removed. Print it, forward it, hand it to another agency, use it to check my work.
Do I need to buy any tools to complete it?
No. Every check uses something free: Google Search Console, Google Analytics, PageSpeed Insights, your Business Profile, your browser's View Source and developer tools, and one free-tier crawler for sites up to 500 pages.
How technical is it?
You need to be able to log in to your own website and open a settings screen. Where a term like LCP or canonical is used, it is defined in the same sentence. You do not need to write any code.
What if I fail most of the checks?
Most sites fail somewhere between fifteen and forty of them. That is normal and it is not the problem. The problem is knowing which six to fix first, because those six are the ones that change the number of enquiries.
Can I get help working through it?
Yes. Send me your list of failures and I will tell you which ones actually matter for your site and which can wait, including when the honest answer is that you do not need to pay anyone.
Got your list of failures?
Send it over and I will tell you which of them are costing you enquiries and which ones can sit for another quarter. No charge for the answer, and no obligation after it.
Send me your listOr read more of this sort of thing on the blog, see what the work costs on the pricing page, or start with technical SEO.
Prefer no email? Download the checklist directly.