SEO in order: the checklist
The nine parts of the series folded into a dated sequence of steps: what to do on day one, in the first month, then every month. Beginners' SEO series, final part.
This series has followed the search chain link by link. This final part folds it back into a checklist: what to do, in what order, and when. Each step points to the part that details it.
On launch day
Open Search Console and prove ownership of the domain. Every week without the console is a week of measurements lost; it is the move to make first precisely because it pays nothing right away. Part three explains what to look at there.
Check that no construction lock is still in place. A robots.txt that forbids everything, a forgotten noindex tag: the dumbest causes of invisibility are also the most frequent, and the site may very well have been built with those locks on, rightly so, as long as it was not ready. Part two gives the four checks.
Declare the sitemap in the console, if there is one. And make sure it lists only pages you want indexed, with honest dates. That is part four.
The first month
Review the internal linking. Who points to what, in how many clicks from the homepage, where the orphans are. An hour of work, the least technical fixes in the whole series, detailed in part five.
Give every page its title and its description. One page, one specific title, one honest description. And if the site speaks several languages, those two lines get translated like everything else: that is the classic defect flagged in part eight.
For a local clientele: launch the business profile. Claim or create, fix the exact spelling of the name, address and phone, start verification without waiting to need it, because it takes days. Part seven walks through the steps.
Then every month, without end
Write what is genuinely useful. The pages that answer the questions your clientele actually asks, the prices you stand behind, the explanation of what you do. The FAQ is its most direct form, on the condition laid down in part nine: start from the questions received, not the questions dreamed up. It is the only project that never ends and it is the one that weighs the most, as part six shows from Google’s guide.
Read the console’s reports. Indexing coverage to catch accidents, Performance to discover which queries the site appears on. And judge changes on the scale of a few weeks, never the next day: the delay is part of the system, as part one laid out.
What this list does not contain
No link buying, no miracle tag, no tool subscription. Not out of purism: because none of that appears in the documentation this series is drawn from, and everything that does appear there is free. Organic search rewards, slowly, sites that are reachable, clear and useful. The slowness is not negotiable; the other three qualities depend only on you.
Two series to continue with
Once this list is in place, two series extend the work. The series on the tools tours the free instruments, from Google Trends to the Performance report, and assembles them into a one-hour-a-month routine. The series on punished practices draws up the opposite list: what Google sanctions, why it is unfair play, and how to recognise these practices when they are being sold to you.
And if you would rather someone took care of it, entrusting these monthly tasks to the workshop’s maintenance is exactly what the subscription covers: the list above is the one we apply.
Who writes these notes
This journal is kept by the workshop that designs and maintains the house’s websites. Everything described here, the Search Console, internal links, the business profile, is part of the work delivered with a site: if you would rather someone took care of it, that is precisely the trade.