SEO checklist: 280 checks in the order that pays

Why a checklist rather than general advice

You open ten SEO articles and get ten different answers. One says meta descriptions are dead, another that they’re decisive. A third talks about speed, a fourth about backlinks. All are partly right, and you still don’t know what to do on Monday morning.

The problem isn’t a shortage of information. The problem is that you don’t have a list.

A checklist solves exactly that. It doesn’t ask you to understand SEO — it asks you to answer 280 concrete questions about your own site. Do the pages have unique titles? Does the site open without www as well? Is there text answering the questions customers ask before buying? You can answer every one of those, even if you’ve never read a word about SEO.

The items are split into ten areas, from technical foundations to reputation. Not one of them is there because „that’s how it’s done“ — each carries an explanation of what specifically you lose by skipping it.

What one item looks like

Every item on the list has five parts:

• The check itself — one sentence, no jargon. For example: the page title tag is unique and shorter than 60 characters.
• Why it matters — what happens when it isn’t so. This states the concrete consequence, not theory.
• How to fix it — the steps to take. Where in your site admin to click, what to change.
• Impact rating (1–3) — how much this one item changes the result. A three means it shows in the positions, a one means it’s fine polish.
• Estimated cost of the fix (1–3) — what it costs you in time or money. A one is ten minutes, a three is a job for a developer.

Alongside comes a list of recommended tools, clearly marked as free or paid. We don’t send you off to go looking.

You score with four buttons: Good, Could be better, Bad and Not applicable. The last is excluded from the score — if you don’t have a shop, basket items don’t drag your result down.

The repair plan

This is the part the checklist exists for.

Everything you scored „Bad“ or „Could be better“ enters the repair plan. The tool doesn’t show it alphabetically or in the order you filled it in, but sorted by the formula (impact + cheapness) × urgency. Translated: first comes what returns a lot, costs little and can’t wait.

The result is a list from first item to last. You don’t have to decide what’s more pressing — that’s already decided.

The plan exports to PDF and to CSV. The PDF goes to a client or a boss, the CSV goes into Trello, Jira or a spreadsheet — however you run your tasks.

What the tool scores instead of you

The automatic check covers around 150 checks and fills in part of the scores by itself.

It works by taking a sample of pages by type: up to eight products, four categories, two text pages, the basket and the homepage. It doesn’t walk the whole site — it walks a cross-section that says enough about the whole. It takes two to five minutes.

Two rules matter. First: the automatic check never touches manual scores. If you’ve already scored something yourself, it stays as you said. Second: everything the tool fills in is marked as filled automatically. When you check it and agree, you click „accept as manual“ and the score becomes yours.

So in five minutes more than half the checklist is filled in, and what remains are the things only you have the answer to.

A real example

A bicycle equipment shop, around 400 products. The owner is sure he needs „more links“.

The automatic check finishes in three minutes and fills in 148 items. Result: 62 good, 51 could be better, 35 bad. He fills in the rest by hand in an hour.

The repair plan puts three things at the top, none of them about links:

1. Every category page shares the same description — impact 3, cost 1.
2. The site opens both with www and without, as two different sites — impact 3, cost 1.
3. Product images are at full resolution, the average page weighs 6 MB — impact 3, cost 2.

The first two were solved in one afternoon. The third took three days. Links appear on the list only in fourteenth place.

Honestly: a checklist won’t bring you positions by itself — it tells you what to do, and the work is still yours. And no tool, ours or anyone else’s, knows with certainty how Google ranks. The area „Advice, myths and ranking factors“ exists for exactly that reason: to separate what has been verified from what gets repeated.