The Complete SEO Checklist for Your New Website

Most SEO failures are not about keywords or content. They are about foundations that were never laid. If Google cannot crawl your pages, read your titles, understand your structure, and load your site quickly on mobile, no amount of blogging will save you. Get the foundations right and everything else compounds.

This is the checklist we run on every Clap build before launch. It is deliberately practical: each item is something you can check today, and each one moves the needle on whether you get found.

1. Crawlability: can Google reach your pages?

• A robots.txt that allows crawling and points to your sitemap.
• An XML sitemap that lists every real page, submitted to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
• No accidental "noindex" tags on pages you actually want ranked (this single mistake hides more sites than any other).
• Clean, readable URLs: words, not query-string soup.

2. On-page basics: can Google understand each page?

• A unique, specific title tag on every page: the single most important on-page signal.
• A meta description that earns the click (it does not rank you, but it changes how many people choose you in the results).
• One clear H1 per page that says what the page is about.
• Descriptive alt text on images, for accessibility and image search.
• Internal links between related pages so Google understands how your site fits together.

3. Structured data: speak Google's language

Schema markup tells search engines exactly what your pages are: an organisation, a service, a person, a FAQ, a how-to. It is what makes rich results possible (the star ratings, the FAQ dropdowns, the knowledge panels) and it is increasingly what lets AI search engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity cite you accurately. Every important page should carry the right schema.

4. Speed and Core Web Vitals: the ranking factor people skip

• Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds: how fast the main content appears.
• Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1: nothing jumping around as the page loads.
• Interaction to Next Paint under 200ms: the page responds quickly to taps and clicks.
• Compressed, correctly-sized images (the single biggest speed win on most sites).

5. Mobile and local: where your traffic actually is

Google indexes the mobile version of your site first, and for most businesses the majority of visitors are on a phone. If your site is not genuinely good on mobile, you are invisible to most of your market. For local businesses, add a verified Google Business Profile, consistent name-address-phone details across directories, and local schema. That is what wins the local pack.

The five-minute starting point

You do not have to do all of this by hand to know where you stand. Run your site through our free audit and you will get your mobile PageSpeed score, your SEO basics, your structured-data coverage, and the two issues costing you the most, in under a minute. It is the fastest way to turn this checklist into a to-do list.