The Foundational SEO Checklist for a New Website

Foundations before campaigns

Most underperforming SEO budgets are spent on content and links for a site that cannot yet support them. Publishing into a site with duplicate canonicals, a blocked robots rule or four indexable versions of every page is pouring water into a leaking bucket.

The sequence below is deliberate. Each step assumes the one above it is done, and the early items cost hours rather than months.

One canonical URL per page

Pick one host form and one protocol and redirect everything else to it with a 301. Without this, the same page is reachable at the http and https variants, with and without www, and with and without a trailing slash, up to eight URLs competing as separate pages.

Then give every page a self-referencing canonical tag in the exact form you serve. Trailing slashes matter here: if you serve /services/ but declare /services as canonical, you have created the ambiguity you were trying to remove.

Crawlability and indexation

Serve a robots.txt that allows what should be crawled and points to your sitemap. The most expensive SEO mistake we see is a staging Disallow rule shipped to production, which quietly removes an entire site from search.

Generate sitemap.xml from the same source of truth your routes come from, so a new page cannot exist without appearing in it. List canonical URLs only: never redirects, never noindex pages.

Add llms.txt as well. AI answer engines increasingly read it to understand what a site covers, and it costs almost nothing to maintain.

Unique titles, descriptions and one h1

Every page needs a title nobody else on your site is using, written for a click rather than for a keyword count. Around 50 to 60 characters keeps it from truncating in results.

Meta descriptions do not rank you, but they win or lose the click, which does. Write 140 to 160 characters that promise something specific.

One h1 per page, describing that page and no other, with h2 and h3 nested in real order. Screen readers navigate by that structure and so do crawlers. Skipping from h1 to h4 because it looked right is a genuine accessibility failure, not a stylistic preference.

Structured data that matches the page

Organization and WebSite schema belong on every page. LocalBusiness belongs on a site with a real, verifiable address. BreadcrumbList should mirror the breadcrumb trail a visitor can actually see.

The rule that keeps you safe: never mark up something that is not visible on the page. FAQ schema for questions no visitor can read, or review markup for reviews that do not exist, is exactly what manual actions are for.

Internal linking and breadcrumbs

Internal links tell search engines which of your pages matter and how they relate. A case study should link to the services it used; a service page should link to the case studies proving it. Orphan pages, reachable only from the sitemap, rank accordingly.

Use descriptive anchor text. "Read our ecommerce SEO case study" carries meaning that "click here" does not.

Speed, images and the tab title

Core Web Vitals are a ranking input and, more importantly, a conversion one. Set explicit width and height on every image so layout does not shift while loading, serve modern formats with fallbacks, and lazy-load anything below the fold while eagerly loading your hero.

Write alt text that describes the image for someone who cannot see it. Decorative images take an empty alt attribute so screen readers skip them.

Then check the browser tab. A production site whose tab still reads "Vite + React" or "Create Next App" is telling every visitor that nobody finished the job, and it is the first thing a prospective client notices.