Content gets the attention, but a site with broken foundations will not rank no matter how good the writing is. Run through this before launch, and again whenever the site changes shape.
Make sure search engines can crawl it
Check that robots.txt is not blocking important pages. It happens more often than you would think, usually because a staging setting made it to production. Look for stray noindex tags for the same reason.
Publish an XML sitemap that lists only the pages you want indexed, and reference it in robots.txt.
Give every page exactly one URL
Pick one version of your domain, with or without www, and redirect the other to it permanently. Be consistent about trailing slashes. Add a canonical tag to each page that points to its preferred address. Duplicate URLs split your ranking signals across copies of the same page.
Write titles and descriptions for the search, not the brand
Each page needs a unique title that says what the page is about in the words a buyer would search. Keep your brand name at the end. Meta descriptions do not directly affect ranking, but they shape whether people click, so write them like a short, specific pitch.
Use headings as structure
One H1 per page that matches the page's topic. H2s and H3s that break the content into sections a reader could skim. Search engines use this structure to understand what each part of the page covers.
Make it fast on a phone
Compress and size images properly, load fonts efficiently, and avoid heavy scripts you do not need. Test on a mid-range phone over mobile data, not just on your laptop. Google measures real-world experience, and so do your visitors.
Add structured data where it fits
Schema markup helps search engines understand your organisation, articles, services and FAQs. Add it where it genuinely describes the page, and validate it with Google's Rich Results Test.
Link your own pages together
Every important page should be reachable within a few clicks from the homepage, and related pages should link to each other with descriptive anchor text. Pages with no internal links are hard for search engines to find and easy for them to ignore.
Set up Search Console on day one
Verify your domain in Google Search Console, submit your sitemap and check the indexing report weekly for the first month. It is free, and it tells you directly what Google sees.
The checklist
- robots.txt allows important pages and links to the sitemap.
- No leftover noindex tags from staging.
- One domain version, one URL per page, canonical tags in place.
- Unique, descriptive title and meta description on every page.
- One H1 per page and a logical heading structure.
- Images compressed and sized, page tested on a phone.
- Structured data added and validated.
- No orphan pages; related pages link to each other.
- Search Console verified and sitemap submitted.
Technical SEO is rarely glamorous, and most of it only needs doing once. If you would like us to run this check on your site, get in touch and we will send back what we find.