SEO Checklist | Review On Page SEO Before Publishing

If you've ever wondered whether your blog post is "SEO-ready" before hitting publish, you're in good company. Most small business owners don't have SEO training. And there's so much advice online that it's hard to know what matters for a single page versus a full site audit.

This post covers the on-page elements that Google's own documentation identifies as helpful for search engines to understand and rank content. I'll explain what each element does, why it matters, and how to check it before you publish. If you need a quick reference, there's a downloadable checklist you can check your posts against each time.

How Search Engines Read Your Page

When Google crawls a page, it looks at specific elements to understand what the page is about and how it relates to other content on your site. According to Google's SEO Starter Guide, these elements include your title tag, headings, meta description, URL structure, and the text you use to describe images.

Getting these elements right doesn't guarantee that a page will rank well. There are many factors outside your control, including competition and domain authority. But getting them wrong can make it harder for search engines to understand your content in the first place, which tends to limit visibility regardless of how good the content itself is.

Page Structure and Headings

Headings create an outline of your page. They help both readers and search engines understand how the content is organized and what topics it covers.

The H1 tag typically serves as the main title of the page. Google's documentation on title links recommends using descriptive, concise titles that clearly communicate what the page is about. Most SEO practitioners suggest having one H1 per page, placed at the top, though Google hasn't stated this as a strict requirement.

H2 tags mark the main sections of your content. Think of them as chapter titles. H3 tags, if you use them, should appear under H2s to break up longer sections.

The hierarchy helps search engines understand how different parts of your content relate to each other. For example, if you have an H3 appearing before any H2, it creates a confusing structure, similar to having a sub-chapter before the chapter it belongs to.

A few things worth checking:

• Some WordPress themes use H1 for the site logo or header, which can mean your page title ends up as an H2. You can usually check this by viewing the page source or using a browser extension like SEO Minion.
• Heading tags are sometimes used for visual styling (to make text bigger) rather than to indicate structure. If you need larger text that isn't actually a heading, CSS is the better approach.

Keyword Targeting

Each page typically works best when it focuses on one primary topic or search phrase. When a page tries to target multiple unrelated keywords, search engines may have difficulty determining which queries it should rank for.

Once you've identified your target keyword, include it in key places where Google looks for topic signals: the H1 (page title), within the first 100-150 words of your content, at least one H2 heading if it fits naturally, the URL slug, and the meta description.

There's no specific number of times a keyword needs to appear. Google's helpful content guidelines emphasize writing primarily for people rather than search engines. If your keyword appears naturally a few times and the content reads well, that's generally sufficient. Repeating it excessively can make content harder to read and may trigger spam filters.

Title Tags

The title tag is the clickable headline that appears in search results. According to Google's documentation, titles should be both descriptive and concise. Google typically displays the first 50-60 characters, so keeping your title under 60 characters helps ensure it doesn't get cut off in search results.

If you're using WordPress, an SEO plugin like Yoast or RankMath gives you a field to set this.

Some things that tend to help:

• Including your primary keyword, ideally toward the beginning where it's more visible
• Making the title specific enough that someone can tell what the page covers
• Writing something that would be worth clicking when it appears alongside other results

Each page on your site should have a unique title tag. Duplicate titles across multiple pages make it harder for search engines to distinguish between them.

Meta Descriptions

The meta description is the snippet of text that can appear below your title in search results. Google doesn't always use the description you provide. Sometimes it pulls text from the page that it thinks better matches the query. But when it does use yours, it's an opportunity to summarize your content and encourage clicks.

Google's guidelines on snippets suggest that meta descriptions should accurately summarize the page content. Descriptions over about 155-160 characters often get truncated.

Including your target keyword can help, since Google bolds matching keywords in the description, which may draw the eye. If you don't write a meta description, Google generates one from your page content, which sometimes works well and sometimes pulls something awkward or incomplete.

URL Structure

The URL slug is the part of your web address that comes after your domain name. For this post, it's /blog/seo-checklist-pdf/.

Google's URL structure guidelines recommend using "simple, descriptive words" in URLs. A few practices that tend to work well:

• Keeping slugs relatively short (around 3-5 words)
• Including your primary keyword
• Using hyphens between words rather than underscores
• Removing filler words like "a," "the," "and," "of"
• Using lowercase letters

Once a page is published and indexed, changing the URL can cause issues. Any existing links pointing to the old URL will break unless you set up a redirect. If you do need to change a URL after publishing, a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one helps preserve any SEO value the page has built up.

Images and Alt Text

Search engines can't interpret images the way humans do. They rely on text signals, primarily the alt attribute, to understand what an image contains.

Alt text serves two purposes: it provides a description for screen readers used by people with visual impairments, and it gives search engines context about the image. Google's image SEO documentation recommends writing alt text that's "useful, information-rich" and uses keywords appropriately. That means when they genuinely describe the image, not forced in for SEO purposes.

A few guidelines:

• Describe what's actually in the image
• Include your keyword if it's genuinely relevant to the image content
• Keep descriptions concise, under 125 characters or so (though there's no hard limit)
• Skip prefixes like "Image of..." or "Picture of..." since screen readers already announce that it's an image

File names also provide a signal, though a weaker one than alt text. Renaming your image from IMG_4582.jpg to something descriptive like seo-checklist-example.jpg before uploading gives search engines additional context.

Internal Linking

Internal links are links from one page on your site to another. They help readers find related content and help search engines understand how your pages relate to each other.

Google's documentation on links notes that internal linking helps search engines discover new pages and understand site structure. When you link to a page, you're signaling that it's relevant and worth crawling.

A few things to keep in mind:

• Link to related pages where it makes sense in context
• Use descriptive anchor text. The words "learn more about pricing your services" give more context than "click here"
• When you publish new content, consider going back to older related posts and adding links to the new page

Content Quality

There's no specific word count that guarantees good rankings. Google's helpful content guidelines focus on whether content provides value to readers, not on hitting a particular length. That said, very short pages (under 200-300 words) sometimes struggle to provide enough depth to be genuinely useful, which can affect how they perform.

Readability also matters. Short paragraphs, clear language, and subheadings that break up long sections make content easier to consume. Tools like Hemingway Editor can help you assess reading level, and most SEO plugins include readability analysis as well.

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A Note on SEO vs. AEO

You may have seen content claiming that SEO is dead and "Answer Engine Optimization" (AEO) has replaced it. That's an oversimplification. SEO and AEO are related but distinct strategies with different goals, and treating them as interchangeable suggests someone hasn't done their homework on either.

SEO focuses on ranking in traditional search results and driving clicks to your website. The goal is visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs) and getting people to your site. AEO focuses on getting your content cited in AI-generated answers, whether that's Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, or voice assistants. The goal is brand visibility and authority, even when users never click through.

Gartner has predicted that 25% of search traffic will shift to AI chatbots and virtual agents by 2026.

The strategies overlap in some ways: both value authoritative content, clear structure, and schema markup. But they diverge in others. SEO often favors long-form, comprehensive content that can rank for multiple related queries. AEO tends to favor concise, directly answerable content formatted in ways that AI systems can easily extract and cite.

You can't fully optimize for both with identical content. A 3,000-word guide optimized for SEO may never get cited in an AI-generated answer because there's no clean, extractable snippet. A page optimized purely for featured snippets and AI citations may lack the depth to rank well in traditional results.

Most businesses should have a strategy for both, but understand they're pursuing different outcomes. This checklist focuses on traditional SEO because that's still where most organic traffic originates for small businesses. AEO is worth understanding and incorporating, but it's a layer on top of SEO fundamentals, not a replacement for them.

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Get the Checklist

I've put together a printable checklist you can use each time you publish. It covers everything in this post in a format you can work through quickly.

Download the SEO Posting Checklist →

If you need to review your entire site rather than just individual pages, the SEO Audit Checklist covers technical foundation, crawlability, and site-wide issues.