SEO Checklist for a New Website: 36 Checks for Small Business Sites

SEO gets treated like a dark art, but most of what actually moves rankings for a small business site is a short list of fundamentals done properly and consistently. Nothing here requires a specialist or a monthly retainer.

This is the checklist we work through on every new website we build. It is ordered the way you should actually do it: the things that make everything else possible come first, and the things people usually start with come last.

1. Can Google actually see the site?

Everything else is pointless until this is true. On a brand new site this is also where the expensive mistakes hide, because a site is usually built hidden and then launched.

1. Confirm noindex is off. View source on the live site and search for noindex. Sites are built with search engines blocked and the switch gets forgotten. On WordPress it lives at Settings → Reading.

2. Check robots.txt at yourdomain.com/robots.txt. A stray Disallow: / copied from staging blocks the entire site.

3. Verify the site in Google Search Console. Free, and it is the only place you find out what Google actually thinks of your site rather than what a third-party tool guesses.

4. Submit an XML sitemap and check it lists the pages you want indexed - not tag archives, author pages or the thank-you page.

5. Run a site:yourdomain.com search. If nothing comes back after a week or two, you have an indexing problem, not a ranking problem, and they are fixed completely differently. We wrote up how to tell the difference.

6. Request indexing for your most important pages rather than waiting to be discovered.

2. Technical foundations

7. HTTPS on every page. Table stakes, and a ranking signal. Check there are no mixed-content warnings from a stray http:// image.

8. One canonical version of the site. Pick https:// and either www or non-www, redirect everything else in a single hop. Four reachable versions splits your signals four ways.

9. Pass Core Web Vitals on mobile. Test the mobile tab of PageSpeed Insights, on a real content page rather than just the homepage. See why a fast website wins more business for the actual thresholds.

10. Mobile-first, genuinely. Google indexes the mobile version of your site. If the mobile version has less content than desktop, the missing content effectively does not exist.

11. Clean, readable URLs. /services/web-design/ beats /index.php?page=2&id=91 for people and search engines alike.

12. A logical site structure. Nothing important more than three clicks from the homepage.

13. Fix broken internal links. They waste crawl budget and signal neglect.

14. Redirect old URLs one-to-one if you are replacing a site. Map each old URL to its closest new equivalent - not everything to the homepage, which loses the relevance you are trying to keep.

3. The on-page SEO checklist

This is what most people mean by “doing SEO”, and it is genuinely straightforward.

15. A unique title on every page, roughly 50 to 60 characters, main term near the front. Not “Home”, and not three pages all called “Services”.

16. A unique meta description under about 160 characters, written as a sentence. It does not affect ranking directly, but it decides whether anyone clicks.

17. One H1 per page that states plainly what the page is about.

18. A real heading hierarchy. H2s for sections, H3s beneath them. Headings are structure, not font sizes.

19. Descriptive alt text on images, written for someone using a screen reader rather than stuffed with keywords.

20. Compress and correctly size images. The single most common cause of a slow small business site.

21. Internal links between related pages, with anchor text that describes the destination. “Our web design service” beats “click here”.

22. One page per intent. Two pages targeting the same thing compete with each other and neither wins. This is the most common structural mistake we see.

23. Give each service its own page. A single combined services page asks Google to rank one URL for five different searches. It will do badly at all five.

Keyword stuffing has not worked in over a decade. Write for the person reading, and put the words they would actually search into the title, the H1 and the first paragraph.

4. Content that answers real questions

24. Write for questions your customers actually ask you. The ones you answer on the phone every week are the ones being typed into Google.

25. Cover the whole question on one page rather than splitting it across three thin ones.

26. Put a real person’s name on it. An author with a bio and credentials is worth more than an anonymous company byline, particularly in areas where advice can cost someone money.

27. Update rather than duplicate. Revising a page that already earns impressions beats publishing a new one that starts from nothing.

28. Link new content back to the pages that sell. A blog that links nowhere commercial is a dead end.

5. Local SEO, if you serve a specific area

For a business trading in one city or region, this section usually outperforms everything above it.

29. Claim and fully complete your Google Business Profile - categories, hours, services, products, photos, all of it. For most local businesses it produces enquiries faster than the website does. Our Google Business Profile guide walks through it.

30. Set a realistic service area. An over-broad area dilutes relevance everywhere instead of concentrating it where you actually work.

31. Keep your name, address and phone identical everywhere - website, profile, every directory. “Street” versus “St” is enough to weaken the match.

32. Name your city and region in the page copy, not only in a meta tag.

33. Collect genuine reviews, steadily. Count and recency are direct local ranking factors. Never offer anything in exchange - it is against Google’s policy and the reviews can be removed.

34. Get listed in local directories that real people use. In South Africa that means the likes of Brabys and Snupit alongside the international ones.

6. If you sell online

35. Product schema on every product page so price, availability and reviews can appear directly in search results.

36. Unique descriptions on every product. Manufacturer copy appears on a hundred other sites, and duplicate content is why most small stores never rank for their own products. Category pages need real copy too, not just a grid.

What to actually expect

A new site does not rank quickly, and anyone promising otherwise is selling something.

• Weeks 1 to 2: indexing. Pages appear in site: searches.
• Weeks 3 to 8: impressions start in Search Console, usually on long, specific searches before anything competitive.
• Months 2 to 4: positions settle. This is the earliest point at which the data means anything.
• Beyond: movement on competitive terms depends mostly on links and authority, which are slow by design.

Watch impressions, not rankings. Impressions tell you Google is showing you for something. Rankings bounce daily and will drive you mad.

The short version

If you do five things and nothing else:

1. Confirm the site is indexable and verified in Search Console
2. Give every page a unique title and one clear H1
3. Split combined service pages into one page per service
4. Complete your Google Business Profile and collect reviews
5. Make it fast on a mid-range phone

That covers most of the gap between a site that ranks and one that does not.

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Not sure how your current site measures up? Get in touch for a free, honest assessment - we will tell you if the answer is “it is fine, spend the money elsewhere”.