The 12-point SEO checklist for small business websites

Skip the 50-point agency audits. These 12 items move the needle for 90% of small-business sites.

Technical

1. HTTPS enabled and all HTTP traffic redirects to HTTPS.
2. Mobile-friendly — passes Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.
3. Core Web Vitals green — LCP under 2.5s, INP under 200ms, CLS under 0.1.
4. XML sitemap submitted in Google Search Console.
5. Robots.txt that allows Google to crawl your important pages.

On-page

6. One H1 per page that matches the target keyword.
7. Title tag under 60 characters including the primary keyword.
8. Meta description under 155 characters with a clear value prop.
9. Schema markup for Organization (site-wide) and Article (blog posts).

Content & links

10. Internal linking — every post links to at least 2 other posts and 1 pillar page.
11. Alt text on every image — describe what’s in the image, not keyword-stuff.
12. Canonical URLs on every page to prevent duplicate-content issues.

That’s it. Run through this once a quarter and you’ll stay ahead of 90% of the competition.