Low indexation, blocked crawl paths and messy site architecture quietly cap your ranking potential. This is the exact checklist we run through — step by step — on every client site, now including AI & LLM visibility so you show up in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews too.
How many of your pages Google has actually indexed — low counts signal internal linking or authority issues.
Controls which bots can crawl which paths. One wrong "disallow" can deindex an entire site.
Page-level index/noindex, follow/nofollow instructions. Accidental noindex on key pages tanks rankings fast.
Broken or removed pages still being linked to or indexed. Should 301-redirect to relevant live content.
Tells search engines what to crawl and confirms ownership of indexed pages.
Blog and staging subdomains need their own index/noindex strategy to avoid duplicate-content penalties.
"Book a Free Audit" and "Let's Talk" CTAs placed on every local landing page lift conversion rate and dwell time — both signals Google weighs when ranking you above competitors chasing the same local terms.
A clear trail (e.g. Fulham → Chelsea → Service) reinforces local page hierarchy, giving search engines a stronger relevance signal than flat competitor sites often provide.
Structured data marking NAP, service area and reviews strengthens your local pack presence — a direct edge over rivals running with no schema at all.
Confirm GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended aren't unintentionally blocked in robots.txt — invisible to AI crawlers means invisible in AI-generated answers.
An emerging standard that gives AI models a clean, curated summary of your key pages and services to reference accurately.
Schema markup helps LLMs correctly extract entities, services and FAQs when generating answers that mention your business.
Track whether your brand actually appears in Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT search and Perplexity answers for your target queries.
Clear, concise definitions and Q&A formatting near the top of a page make it easy for LLMs to lift accurate summaries.
Consistent name, address, phone and business description across the web help AI models associate the right facts with your brand.
Your highest-value pages should be reachable from the main menu, coded in HTML — not JS.
Passes equity to non-sales pages search engines use to judge legitimacy — FAQs, policies, locations.
Important content should sit within ~4 clicks of the homepage.
rel=prev/next avoids duplicate-content flags; a custom 404 keeps lost visitors on-site.
Hyphens read as spaces to search engines. Underscores and commas confuse crawlers.
Clean, short, readable URLs drive higher SERP click-through than parameter-heavy strings.
Signals which language/region a page targets so the right version is served to searchers.
Attributes content to an author or company; publisher markup can surface brand info in search.
Under 156 characters, unique per page — no direct ranking impact, but drives CTR.
Under 65 characters, unique, keyword-led — one of the strongest on-page ranking factors.
One per page, carrying the primary keyword; supporting H2/H3 hold related terms.
Topically relevant content should appear near the top — engines read top to bottom.
Well-written, original, appropriately-optimised content indexes faster and ranks better.
Pages under ~300 words (excluding trivial pages) create poor UX and rarely rank.
Duplicate titles or descriptions dilute relevance signals across pages.
Self-hosted images keep control of the traffic they generate through image search.
Large files slow load time and hurt UX — keep under ~100kb where possible.
Describes images to crawlers (which can't "see") and improves accessibility.
302s don't pass link equity and can stop new URLs from indexing properly.
Each hop bleeds "link juice" and risks Googlebot giving up on the chain.
Redirects landing on error pages hurt UX and quality score.
Controls which outbound/internal links pass authority — overuse bleeds equity.
Combines performance data with indexing/ranking data for full visibility.
Distribute authority across the site and establish topical hierarchy.
Manual spam penalties directly suppress rankings until resolved.
Accidentally blocked pages are an instant, easy traffic win once fixed.
Confirms which URLs are indexed and whether Google is offering rich sitelinks.
Helps Google understand the relevance of the page being linked to.
Internal 404s and a non-linked logo both create dead ends for users and crawlers.
Quality outbound links add relevance; spammy inbound links can trigger penalties.
Essential for ranking in local search and Maps — verified profiles also unlock reviews.
The same free and paid toolkits our team uses on every Fulham & Chelsea client site.
