A 47-Point On-Page SEO Checklist You Can Work Through This Week

This checklist is organized into four [law firms](/industry/legal/attorney)s: Critical (fix before anything else), High (fix this sprint), Medium (schedule within 30 days), and Low (batch and automate). Don't work through it alphabetically or randomly — the order matters.

The logic behind the tiers is simple: Google reads pages in a specific way. It looks at the title tag and URL before it reads a single word of body copy. It evaluates header structure before it scores content quality. Front-loading your effort on Critical items means you're fixing what Google weighs most heavily, not what feels most visible to you as the author.

A few ground rules before you start:

• Run this checklist one URL at a time. Bulk audits are for tools, not humans.
• For each item, record the current state, the target state, and who owns the fix. A checklist without ownership stalls.
• Prioritize pages that already rank on page two for commercial keywords — those are the fastest wins. A page sitting at position 11-20 is much closer to page-one traffic than a page at position 50.
• If you're auditing more than 20 pages, consider using an on-page SEO analyzer to run the repeatable checks automatically and focus your manual time on judgment calls.

The 47 items below are grouped by category within each tier. Use the priority matrix in a later section if you want a visual summary of effort versus impact before you begin.

These 14 items have the highest direct influence on whether Google ranks your page or ignores it. Most can be fixed in under 15 minutes per page once you know what to change.

Title Tag (Items 1–4)

• Item 1: Title tag includes the primary keyword, ideally near the front.
• Item 2: Title tag is between 50–60 characters (longer titles get truncated in SERPs).
• Item 3: Title tag is unique — no two pages on the site share the same title.
• Item 4: Title tag matches the page's actual content and search intent (informational, commercial, transactional).

Header Structure (Items 5–8)

• Item 5: Page has exactly one H1 tag — not zero, not two.
• Item 6: H1 contains the primary keyword or a close variant.
• Item 7: H2s and H3s follow a logical hierarchy — no skipping from H1 to H4.
• Item 8: Subheadings reflect real content sections, not keyword stuffing.

URL Structure (Items 9–11)

• Item 9: URL is short, descriptive, and includes the primary keyword.
• Item 10: URL uses hyphens, not underscores, to separate words.
• Item 11: No dynamic parameters cluttering the URL unless canonicalized.

Indexability (Items 12–14)

• Item 12: Page is not accidentally blocked by robots.txt or a noindex tag.
• Item 13: Canonical tag points to the correct version of the URL (self-referencing or to the preferred variant).
• Item 14: Page returns a 200 status code — not a soft 404 or redirect chain.

These 17 items don't have the binary pass/fail quality of the Critical tier, but in our experience working with content-heavy sites, they're where most ranking gaps actually live. Fixing a single item here — say, a broken internal link structure or thin content — can move a page faster than tweaking title tags ever will.

Content Quality (Items 15–20)

• Item 15: Content fully answers the search intent — not just the keyword, but the underlying question behind it.
• Item 16: Primary keyword appears in the first 100 words of body copy.
• Item 17: Content covers semantically related subtopics that appear in competing top-10 pages.
• Item 18: No keyword stuffing — keyword density feels natural when read aloud.
• Item 19: Content includes a clear, specific answer to the query (particularly important for featured snippet eligibility).
• Item 20: Content is factually accurate and includes inline qualifications for claims that can't be sourced precisely.

Internal Linking (Items 21–25)

• Item 21: Page links to at least 2–3 relevant internal pages using descriptive anchor text.
• Item 22: Anchor text is specific and contextual — not "click here" or "read more".
• Item 23: High-authority pages on the site link back to this page (not just outbound links from it).
• Item 24: No orphan pages — every indexed page is reachable from at least one other internal link.
• Item 25: Breadcrumb navigation is present and correctly structured for site hierarchy.

Meta Description (Items 26–28)

• Item 26: Meta description is between 120–155 characters.
• Item 27: Meta description includes a clear benefit or reason to click — not just a keyword restatement.
• Item 28: Meta description is unique across the site.

Image Optimization (Items 29–31)

• Item 29: All images have descriptive alt text that reflects what's in the image.
• Item 30: Image file names are descriptive, not "IMG_4821.jpg".
• Item 31: Images are compressed — oversized images are one of the fastest Core Web Vitals fixes available.

These items matter — but only after the Critical and High tiers are clean. Many practitioners make the mistake of jumping straight to structured data or page speed without first fixing a missing H1 or a cannibalized title tag. Sequence matters.

Structured Data / Schema (Items 32–36)

• Item 32: Page has appropriate schema markup for its content type (Article, FAQ, Product, HowTo, etc.).
• Item 33: Schema validates without errors in Google's Rich Results Test.
• Item 34: FAQ schema is implemented on pages that include a Q&A section.
• Item 35: Breadcrumb schema matches the visible breadcrumb navigation.
• Item 36: Organization or WebSite schema is present on the homepage.

Core Web Vitals & Page Experience (Items 37–41)

• Item 37: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is under 2.5 seconds on mobile.
• Item 38: Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) score is under 0.1 — no elements jumping around on load.
• Item 39: Interaction to Next Paint (INP) is under 200ms.
• Item 40: Page is fully mobile-responsive with no horizontal scroll.
• Item 41: No intrusive interstitials blocking content on mobile immediately after page load.

Advanced Content Signals (Items 42–47)

• Item 42: Outbound links point to credible, relevant sources (not just any external link for the sake of it).
• Item 43: Content includes a visible last-updated date where freshness is a ranking factor (news, how-to, evergreen guides).
• Item 44: Author byline and credentials are present on YMYL or expertise-sensitive content.
• Item 45: Table of contents is present on long-form pages (>1,500 words) for jump-link navigation.
• Item 46: Reading level matches the target audience — technical content for technical audiences, plain language for general queries.
• Item 47: Page passes a manual quality check: would you be comfortable if Google's quality team reviewed this page today?

Once you've worked through all 47 items manually, you have a clear baseline. To maintain that baseline at scale — especially across sites with 50+ pages — you'll want to run each check inside an on-page analyzer rather than repeat this process by hand every quarter.

Not all 47 items carry equal weight, and not all fixes take the same time. This matrix helps you sequence work when you're constrained — whether that's time, budget, or development bandwidth.

High Impact, Low Effort (Do First)

• Title tag rewrites — typically 10 minutes per page, measurable ranking movement within 2–4 weeks.
• H1 tag fixes — often a single line of code or a CMS field change.
• Meta description updates — no ranking impact directly, but click-through rate improvements show up in Search Console within days.
• Internal link additions — adding 2–3 contextual links to a high-priority page costs 20 minutes and compounds over time.
• Alt text on existing images — pure technical hygiene, fast to fix, and improves accessibility alongside SEO.

High Impact, Higher Effort (Schedule and Resource)

• Content gap filling — requires research, writing, and editorial review, but fixing thin content on a near-ranking page is one of the highest-ROI activities in SEO.
• Core Web Vitals improvements — often require developer involvement, but LCP and CLS fixes can improve ranking improvements that no amount of copy editing will achieve.
• Schema markup implementation — a one-time build effort that unlocks rich result eligibility indefinitely.

Lower Impact (Batch and Automate)

• Image compression at scale — use a plugin or build step, not manual exports.
• Canonical tag audits across a large site — run through a crawler or on-page tool.
• Breadcrumb schema on every page — template-level fix, not page-by-page.

Industry benchmarks suggest that teams who triage by this matrix — rather than working through checklists sequentially — complete meaningful on-page improvements roughly twice as fast. The reason is simple: you're spending your first hours on items that Google weights most heavily, not on items that happen to appear first in a list.

Running this checklist manually on a single page takes an experienced SEO about 45–60 minutes. On 10 pages, that's a full day. On 100 pages, it's a two-week project — and by the time you finish, the first pages may have drifted again.

The practical threshold, in our experience, is around 15–20 pages. Below that, manual audits are fast enough and give you the depth of judgment that tools can't always replicate. Above that, you need a repeatable system that catches regressions automatically and surfaces new issues as pages are added or updated.

What good on-page tooling handles automatically:

• Title tag length and duplication checks across every indexed URL
• Missing or duplicate H1 detection
• Thin content flagging based on word count and content-to-code ratio
• Internal link gap identification — pages with few or no inbound internal links
• Image alt text audits at scale
• Canonical and indexability conflict detection
• Core Web Vitals monitoring with URL-level drill-down

What tools don't replace:

• Judgment calls about whether content fully answers search intent
• Decisions about which keyword variant belongs in a title tag
• Editorial quality assessment — whether a page would pass a human quality review
• Strategic decisions about which pages to prioritize based on business value

The best workflow combines both: automate this checklist with on-page SEO tools for the repeatable technical checks, and reserve your manual time for the judgment-intensive items that actually require a human editor. That's how teams maintain on-page quality across growing sites without proportionally growing their headcount.