SEO checklist at launch
What "SEO included" should mean in any build: titles, structure, canonical URLs, sitemaps, schema, speed and the technical minimum that earns — not promises — rankings.
15 checks · copy it, print it, argue with it.
This is the launch-level technical list — the SEO that belongs in every competent build, no retainer required. It is deliberately honest about its limits: none of this guarantees rankings; all of it removes the reasons a good site would rank badly. Ongoing content and authority work is separate money, and anyone who blurs the two in a proposal is selling fog.
Foundations — every page
- One H1 per page, matching what the page is actually aboutstructure is content strategy made visible
- Unique title tag and meta description on every indexable URLno duplicates, no template filler — this is your search ad copy
- Clean URLs: readable, lowercase, hyphenated, stableURLs are forever-ish; ugly ones are a future of redirects
- Canonical tags present and correctone official URL per page, parameters handled
- Mobile layout real, not tolerateGoogle indexes the phone experience first — so should you
Machinery — the parts users never see
- Sitemap.xml auto-generated and submittedrebuilt on publish, not hand-maintained
- Robots.txt correct and intentionalfive lines worth reading — a wrong line hides the site
- Structured data for the page typeOrganization, Service, Product, FAQ — whatever the page honestly is
- Internal linking: every page reachable in ≤3 clicksorphan pages are invisible to crawlers and visitors alike
- Redirects: zero internal links to 404scrawl your own site before Google does
Speed and the aftercare
- Core Web Vitals green on mobileLCP under 2.5s is the headline; images and hosting do most of the work
- Image alt text present and honestaccessibility first, and it is how image search finds you
- Analytics and Search Console verified at DNS cutoveryou cannot manage what you refused to measure
- Google Business Profile linked if you serve anywhere locallyfor local businesses, the profile is half the game
- A content plan for after launchthe technical list earns you the chance; the content earns the ranking
Every item here ships as standard in builds that take search seriously — including every service page on this site. If a proposal treats this list as an upsell, read that as the finding.
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