SEO checklist: 44 optimization checks for Google, AI, and social media
How many SEO checklists have you downloaded in recent years? And how many are lying forgotten in a folder on your computer? If you don’t use them, the reason is simple: the silo approach (technical, on-page, off-page) is a relic, treating websites like machines to be assembled, ignoring the integrated reality of modern SEO.
Today, conversational and generative search and E-E-A-T evaluation require a change of pace. Add to this the shift in search towards social platforms such as TikTok and YouTube, and you’ll understand that a static list of SEO tasks is a dead end. Google (and users) reward real satisfaction and reliability on every channel.
You need a continuous diagnostic process. So, this isn’t just another list: it’s an operating model that integrates technique (for trust), content (for value), and authority (for demonstration), guiding you in your evolution towards GEO and Social Search. It’s the strategic “compass” that we’ve transformed into our SEO Checklist tool, designed to guide you from analysis to action.
What is an SEO checklist?
An SEO checklist is your operational map, a detailed list of actions that guides the optimization of your site to attract qualified traffic.
It acts as a strategic compass: in a complex and multidisciplinary discipline such as SEO, where it is easy to get lost in the details, it helps you set up a control process on the status of the project and prioritize interventions. Its purpose is to ensure that you do not overlook any essential activities, from basic configurations to advanced strategies, with the ultimate goal of satisfying the user’s search intent and meeting the quality standards required by Google.
To be effective, a checklist must be complete (covering all issues), productive (guiding the workflow), and comprehensible (easy to follow). The traditional approach segments this map into rigid silos: Technical SEO, On-Page, Content, Off-Page. This model, useful at an educational level, now shows its limitations because it treats areas as separate compartments, leading to reactive and disconnected optimizations.
The reality is that your site’s performance does not depend on isolated tasks, but on the continuous interaction of at least four major forces: algorithmic (continuous Google updates and the evolution of SERP features), technical (the impact of changes to design, CMS, hosting, or content on a large scale), seasonal (natural fluctuations in user interest), and competitive (the actions of your direct and indirect competitors, what we call attention competitors).
A static checklist, the same for everyone, cannot handle this dynamic complexity, and you need a process that allows you to diagnose problems while taking all these variables into account. For this reason, your checklist needs to take a quantum leap, becoming a continuous diagnostic process. It is the operating model that guides you to organize actions not by type, but by strategic objective.
A new vision of SEO checklists
Your task is clear: ensure technical accessibility (build trust), demonstrate the value of content (give the right answer), and build recognized authority (obtain external validation). You no longer use the checklist to “fix” the site, but to manage its growth in a consistent and strategic way.
The silo approach leads to reactive and disconnected optimizations—you end up “optimizing CWVs” as a purely technical exercise, forgetting that they measure user frustration, or “link building” as an activity separate from content creation, when they are two sides of the same coin (authority).
We, on the other hand, offer you something different. The SEOZoom SEO checklist is organized as a 4-step logical process (Trust, Value, Demonstration, Evolution) to allow you to actively manage the four forces that constantly influence your performance. Furthermore, its strength also lies in its adaptability: it is a valid guide both for launching a new project with solid foundations and for diagnosing and improving an existing site, regardless of your level of expertise, because it focuses on strategic objectives, not on a rigid list of tasks.
A static list tells you what to check, but not when or why in relation to the context, whereas our approach guides you.
- Address technical forces head-on. By making technical foundations (accessibility, security, indexing) a top priority, you prevent errors that can undo all your subsequent efforts. Continuous monitoring, integrated into SEOZoom’s SEO Checklist tool, helps you quickly diagnose issues arising from site changes.
- It equips you against seasonal and competitive forces. Focused on intent and topics, it guides you in planning content with seasonality in mind, supported by tools such as Seasonal Keywords and Quarterly Plan. By analyzing the intent and content of your competitors (as you do with Topic Explorer or Editorial Assistant), you can respond to the competition in a targeted manner.
- It responds to algorithmic and competitive forces. By working on E-E-A-T (on-site Experience and Expertise, off-site Authority and Trust), you directly meet the quality requirements of Google updates. Analyzing and building external authority (backlinks) allows you to actively compete against your competitors.
- It prepares you for emerging algorithmic forces and new competitive forces. Monitoring and adapting to GEO and Social Search Optimization (SSO) allows you to dominate the new battlefields where future visibility is at stake.
As you will notice, our list consists of about 40 points, which is fewer than other guides. This is a conscious choice: we have not accumulated fragments of micro-tasks, but have organized an operational process that integrates fundamental concepts such as E-E-A-T, GEO, and social search directly into the workflow. We have not focused on the quantity of items, but on the strategic consistency and effectiveness of the resulting process. We have prioritized logical integration to offer you a clear and applicable model, not just a list to passively tick off.
Step 1: Technical setup for trust
Technical reliability precedes editorial authority.
The technical setup is your first demonstration of Trust (the T in E-E-A-T). Google, ChatGPT, and Perplexity require accessible, secure, and fast sites as a basic requirement to consider you an authoritative source. Every technical error (a slow, insecure, or mobile-inaccessible site) is a sign of poor attention to user experience, which undermines your reliability even before the content is read. Here, the technique is the User Experience.
The 12 technical checks for accessibility and indexing
These are the operational tasks for building your foundations. Perform them at the start of each project and monitor them constantly.
- Verify ownership on Google Search Console. This is your direct channel of communication with Google. From here, you can monitor performance, crawl errors, indexing status, and receive notifications about manual actions or security issues.
- Connect Google Analytics 4. You need it to analyze post-click behavior (e.g., dwell time, interactions) as a primary signal of search satisfaction.
- Create and submit the XML Sitemap. Generate a dynamic sitemap that includes only your canonical URLs with a 200 OK status. Submit it to GSC to provide crawlers with the official map of your priority content.
- Configure the Robots.txt file. Check that the file allows useful bots (such as Googlebot and GPTBot) to crawl and does not block essential resources (CSS, JS). Always include the path to the sitemap.
- Implement HTTPS across the entire domain. The entire site must be served via HTTPS. Verify the validity of the SSL certificate: this is the basic requirement for Trust for users and crawlers.
- Define the canonical version of the domain. Choose a preferred version (e.g., https://www.tuosito.com) and make sure that all other variants (http, non-www) redirect to this one with a permanent 301 redirect.
- Ensure mobile-first optimization. Google’s indexing is mobile-only. Your site must be flawless on smartphones: test the readability of fonts, the size of “tap targets” (buttons), and the fluidity of navigation.
- Manage duplicate content. Make sure that every strategic page has a correct rel=canonical tag (self-referencing or pointing to the source). This consolidates your authority and tells search engines which is the original source to cite.
- Design a logical site structure. The information architecture must be clear to both users and crawlers. Organize content into consistent thematic categories and use intuitive navigation.
- Ensure low click depth. Your strategic pages (those that drive conversions or primary traffic) should be easily accessible, ideally no more than 3 clicks from the homepage. A structure that is too deep hides important content.
- Monitor Core Web Vitals (CWV). LCP, INP, and CLS measure loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability. A poor score is a direct sign of a bad user experience.
- Resolve 404 errors and redirect chains. Fix broken internal links (404 errors) to avoid losing authority and frustrating users. Check for and eliminate redirect chains (e.g., A > B > C) that slow down crawling.
How SEOZoom helps you
Performing this technical audit manually is impossible. Our platform transforms these 12 checks into a process managed through the SEO Checklist tool, integrated into your Project, which represents your interactive “compass,” already pre-set with strategic categories, including “Technical SEO.” It guides you through the setup tasks and, for many technical audit tasks, provides you with an “Go to” button that takes you directly to the SEO Spider tool or the relevant section of the platform to perform the check. With the spider, in particular, you can perform a real SEO audit and analyze the entire site specifically for technical errors, with operational instructions that take you from diagnosis to solution quickly.
Phase 2: Add value with content, UX, and search satisfaction
If Phase 1 has made your site technically reliable, Phase 2 must demonstrate why the user (and an AI engine) should choose you. After building the foundation, now let’s move on to the house!
Old checklists separated “keyword research” from “on-page,” but its real name is “answering the question”: helpful content algorithms and AI summaries have made this division obsolete—which is why so much content fails: it is “optimized” for a keyword but does not respond to the search intent, making it useless.
The goal is no longer to match a query, but to provide a complete answer and satisfy the user. You need to address the user’s need comprehensively, quickly, and clearly, and your content strategy and on-page optimization must merge into a single process, which we can define as search satisfaction.
5 strategic checks for working on topics
This is the strategic phase that precedes page optimization. Start by accurately mapping the need: identify who is searching (the user), understand what they want to achieve (the intent), and define the entire scope of the subject (the topic) with all its nuances, to transform keyword research into the basis of your thematic authority.
- Identify your target audience. Before you even search for keywords, you need to know who you are targeting. Define your buyer personas or search personas: who are your ideal users? What are their needs, their pain points, the language they use? Understanding your audience is the basis for creating content that truly resonates and meets their real needs.
- Analyze search intent. The next step is to understand what that user wants to do when they type in a query. In the classic view, intent can be Informational (learning something), Navigational (finding a specific brand), Commercial (comparing products), or Transactional (buying), although in reality it is also divided into micro-intents. What matters is that the type of content you create (article, product page, category) depends mainly on what the person wants to find (and what the engines bring up for those searches, of course).
- Identify “money keywords” and long tails. Identify the main terms that generate conversions (money keywords) and all the long-tail variants, which are more specific and often have less competition.
- Map user questions (PAA and related). Search engines are machines that answer questions. Use the “People Also Ask” sections and related searches to discover secondary queries. Answering these questions is essential for visibility in snippets and AI summaries.
- Create a keyword map (keyword mapping). Assign keyword groups (topic clusters) to specific URLs on your site. This avoids cannibalization (multiple pages competing for the same keyword) and builds a clear semantic structure.
How SEOZoom helps you
You have a complete arsenal at your disposal for this strategic phase. Start with Keyword Infinity to explore the semantic universe and Question Explorer to discover user questions. Analyze your competitors and use Topic Explorer to understand how Google semantically groups concepts and build your topical authority in a scientific way.
To organize your findings, you can use Your keyword research and the “Suggest Editorial Plan” feature to turn your lists into an action plan.
8 operational checks for a “helpful” page
This is the execution. Even if your strategy starts with intent and aims to cover the entire topic, operationally you still need to use keywords as primary signals. They are the language with which the user expresses their need and the first indicators that Google uses to associate a query with a page—and we know that even the query fan-out ultimately leads back to keywords, even in AI-based engines. Every on-page element, therefore, must serve readability and clarity for the user, using keywords strategically to communicate relevance.
- Optimize Title Tags and Meta Descriptions. The title remains a relevant on-page factor; it must clearly communicate the topic of the page to the user in SERP and, according to classic best practices, it must include the main keyword as a signal of relevance, preferably at the beginning. Keep it under 60 characters. The meta description must be persuasive; it is your “billboard” to maximize CTR, reinforcing relevance with the query.
- Use a single H1. Each page must have only one H1 tag that unequivocally states the main topic, including the target keyword as a natural part of this statement.
- Structure your content with H2-H6. Use subsequent headings (H2, H3, H4…) to logically organize subtopics within the page. This creates a logical hierarchy, improves readability for the user, and helps search engines understand the semantic structure of your content.
- Pay attention to the URL structure. The URL should be short and semantically descriptive for both the user and the crawler, including the main keyword as an indicator of the page’s content. Use hyphens (-) to separate words.
- Place the keyword in the content. Include your main keyword in the first 100-150 words of the text. This serves to immediately confirm the topic of the page to the user and the crawler.
- Demonstrate semantic completeness. Avoid forced repetition of the main keyword (keyword stuffing); instead of limiting yourself to synonyms, delve deeper into the topic by covering subtopics and related entities that Google (and expert users) expect to find. Use natural, rich language, demonstrating real mastery of the subject (Expertise). This enriches the semantic context and signals that your content is a comprehensive resource, not a superficial one.
- Optimize images and alt text. Follow best practices for image optimization—compression, more modern formats, possibly a CDN. Always use alt text to describe the image: it is useful for accessibility and for communicating relevance through images (and for image search).
- Create an internal linking strategy. Link content strategically. Internal links guide the user, distribute authority, and help Google understand the semantic relationships between your pages.
- Format text for readability. Use short paragraphs, bulleted lists, bold text, and subheadings (H2, H3). Better readability increases time on page and promotes user satisfaction.
How SEOZoom helps you
Performing these 8 operational checks blindly is a waste of time. For this phase, the platform offers you two levels of support: diagnostic and operational.
For diagnosis and problem identification, your ally is always the SEO Spider, which analyzes the entire site and accurately identifies on-page technical issues, showing you exactly where you have duplicate or missing titles, missing meta descriptions, pages with multiple or missing H1s, and images without alt text. This way, you know exactly where to take action.
At the operational level, for content creation and optimization, the reference is the Editorial Assistant, which analyzes Google’s SERP and competitors ranking for your keyword in real time, actively guiding you with suggestions on related topics and synonyms to include, questions to answer, paragraph structure, and title and description optimization. It is the tool that transforms SERP analysis into a guided writing track, ensuring that your content is truly useful and semantically complete.
Step 3: Demonstration and validation with E-E-A-T and off-page authority
When content is equally helpful, Google and users choose the one that inspires trust. This is the demonstration phase under E-E-A-T, the framework Google uses to evaluate the reliability of your entire entity.
In this phase, off-page SEO (which essentially boiled down to link building) merges with the need to demonstrate who you are and why your Experience is real. It’s not enough to write a good article; you have to prove that you are the most competent (Expertise) and authoritative (Authoritativeness) source, and external signals (backlinks, mentions) are the validation of this trust (Trust).
4 checks to demonstrate Experience and Expertise (E-E)
How do you prove that your content is the result of real expertise? These on-site checks build your credibility.
- Take care of author pages. Who writes your content? Display clear biographies, credentials, social links, and other articles written by that author. Make it clear who is behind the information.
- Show direct experience. This is especially crucial for YMYL (Your Money Your Life) topics: include original data, case studies, product tests, photos, or videos that prove you have used the product or experienced what you are talking about.
- Update content (content pruning). Accuracy demonstrates competence. Periodically review and update old articles, update them with new information, and indicate the date of the last update. Delete or consolidate obsolete content (dead weight) that does not drive traffic and disperses your authority.
- Manage reviews and reputation. Customer reviews are direct social proof of experience. Monitor and respond to opinions (positive and negative) on your site and on third-party platforms.
How SEOZoom helps
You need accurate work on content and transparency.
To update content, you can use the Pages > Page Performance section of your project. By filtering by traffic and volume, you can quickly identify “dead weight” content to update or delete. The Editorial Assistant and AI Writer then help you rewrite or expand your texts effectively.
The Editorial Assistant, AI Writer, and AI Assistant then help you rewrite or expand your texts effectively, also integrating elements that show direct experience, such as data or examples suggested by competitor analysis.
5 checks to build Authority and Trust (A-T)
This is strategic off-page SEO. Authority (A) is built with quality backlinks; Trust (T) with consistent signals.
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- Audit your backlink profile. Analyze the quality and relevance of the domains that link to you. A toxic profile or one full of spam links undermines trust.
- Analyze the backlink gap with your competitors. Study who links to your competitors but not yet to you. This is your hottest prospect list for outreach.
- Do Digital PR. Focus on quality: don’t accumulate links from any source and with any type of content, but work on strategic guest posts, digital PR, creation of “linkable assets” (studies, original data), and authoritative mentions, with a view to enhancing your brand as a whole and not just a single page.
- Claim unlinked mentions. If your brand is often mentioned without links, use brand monitoring tools to find the sources and contact the authors to ask them to add the link.
- Monitor communities. Reddit, Quora, forums, and other UGC platforms are trusted hubs where users seek authentic answers. AI knows this and draws on these conversations. Being present here means intercepting crucial questions, demonstrating expertise in a “social” context, and influencing the perception of your brand where opinions are formed.
- Optimize your Local SEO. If you have a physical location, NAP (Name, Address, Phone) consistency and a well-optimized Google Business profile are signs of Trust (T).
How SEOZoom helps you
This phase requires reliable metrics and comparative analysis tools. Zoom Authority is your benchmark metric: it is our proprietary indicator that assesses the real trust that a domain possesses. For operational analysis, the platform supports you on all fronts: for example, you can perform Backlink Analysis on your site and—most importantly—on your competitors’ sites, thereby identifying possible “gaps,” i.e., your competitors’ link sources that you are still missing, whose quality you can evaluate with the Evaluate Domain List tool. To find new potential partners for link building, you also have two specific tools, Find Link Partners and Find Industry Partners, while for mentions, you can monitor branded keywords in the Keyword Studio section of the project to understand how your brand is being searched for.
Step 4: Evolution, GEO, and Social Search
SERPs have never been particularly static, and today they are less so than ever. For this reason, your checklist must also be dynamic: search has become fragmented and goes beyond Google. On the one hand, Generative Engine Optimization forces you to optimize for AI Overview summaries and conversational engines (ChatGPT and Perplexity); on the other hand, social platforms such as TikTok and YouTube have become discovery and search engines. If your strategy ignores these areas, you are optimizing for an obsolete field.
4 checks for GEO
The goal is to be the source that AI chooses to cite. This is achieved through clarity and reliability.
- Structure your content with an answer-first approach. AI looks for direct answers. Structure your content to answer specific questions (Who, What, How, Why) clearly and concisely, especially at the beginning of the paragraph.
- Use HTML tables and structured data (wisely). Schema.org markup remains useful for traditional Google Search (rich snippets, entity disambiguation) and can support E-E-A-T signals in the long term, helping AI models in training to correctly classify your brand or product as an entity. However, for generating real-time AI responses (such as in AI Overviews or chatbots), tests show that AIs often do not read or interpret Schema correctly. In this scenario, simple HTML tables (<table>) prove to be much more effective, especially for comparative data or technical specifications. AI interprets them perfectly, extracting the “key-value” relationships needed to build its summaries. So: use Schema for classic SEO benefits and for entity; use well-formatted HTML tables to facilitate direct extraction by generative AIs.
- Reinforce E-E-A-T on-site. AIs are trained to prioritize sources that demonstrate expertise and experience. Author pages, update dates, and evidence of experience are relevant signals.
- Create “decomposable” content. AI loves (and users appreciate) bulleted lists, tables, and “key takeaways.” Do chunking and make content easy to “break down” into logical blocks.
4 checks for Social Search Optimization (SSO)
This is optimization for search on social platforms. The hashtag-only approach is outdated. Search here is visual, semantic, and audio-based.
- Optimize for YouTube. Do SEO for YouTube, remembering that it is a relevant search engine. Start with video titles and descriptions, including keywords and using descriptions and “chapters” (timestamps) to deepen semantics (and help Google index specific segments of the video).
- Do SEO for TikTok and Instagram. Don’t overlook new search methods beyond Google, where people search with more direct language and are in the social bubble, relying on the platform’s suggestions. Platforms “read” audio and text overlays: the most important keywords are those spoken (automatic subtitles) and those written on the screen.
- Pay attention to visual semantics. Social engines analyze frames. If the user searches for “red shoe review,” the algorithm rewards videos that show a red shoe in the first few seconds. Visuals are the new keywords.
- Validate authority through direct evidence. On social media, experience is everything. Authority is given by the credibility of the creator: in your content, you must show the product or service in action and also provide for collaboration with creators and authoritative figures in the sector.
How SEOZoom can help you
SEOZoom also has specific tools for these two innovative areas, which go beyond classic SEO analysis.
For SEO for AI, the platform has introduced the new GEO section (available in both Projects and Domain Analysis): at its heart is the GEO Audit, a report that reveals how AI interprets your site (Brand, Mission, Topic, Sentiment, Competitor AI), verifying its alignment with your identity. For monitoring, here you can read specific referral traffic data from AI engines (via Analytics), while the AI Overview tool tracks your presence in Google’s AI responses, with metrics such as AI Rank and Mentions, and AI Overview Gap identifies keywords where competitors are mentioned by AI and you are not. At the operational level, the AI Engine evaluates the relevance of your content for AI engines, while Editorial Assistant, AI Writer, and AI Tools support you in creating “answer-first” and “decomposable” content.
For Social Search Optimization, your hub is the Social Media section. Monitor Social Profiles allows you to analyze performance (yours and your competitors’); Social Trends helps you intercept viral topics and audio; AI Tools for Social generate optimized video scripts and posts; Social Opportunities shows you where social content ranks on Google, guiding you in your choice of format. For YouTube, you can use Keyword Suggest, which extracts automatic suggestions and shows you long-tail variations and related terms as both a list and a visual map, helping you understand the real language of users on that platform.
The operational process in action: using SEOZoom’s SEO Checklist
You’ve seen the strategic steps and checks necessary for modern SEO. But how do you manage this complex process without getting lost in the operational details, especially at the beginning of a new project or when you’re working on several projects at once?
We have transformed our framework into a practical tool. The SEO Checklist tool, integrated into the Projects area, is your interactive control panel, the compass that guides you step by step through the development and management of your project. It is designed to ensure that you don’t overlook any essential tasks, from basic configurations to editorial aspects, transforming complexity into an organized workflow.
The function is organized into strategic categories that reflect the phases we have analyzed: “Basic Elements,” “User Experience,” “Performance,” “Technical SEO,” “Content,” “Off-Page SEO,” and “Local SEO,” so you can work in an orderly manner, following a logical progression.
For each task listed within a category, you have two buttons at your disposal:
- Info explains the strategic importance of that specific activity.
- The operational button (“Go to” / manual check) connects you directly to the specific platform tool where you can take action (e.g., it sends you to SEO Spider to analyze redirects) or allows you to manually mark the task as completed.
This interface transforms the checklist from a passive document into an active guide. After using the tools indicated to perform the checks and correcting any problems on your site, you will return to the SEO Checklist to manually check off the corresponding task. This system allows you to always keep track of the actual status of the work, monitoring progress and ensuring that corrections have been made, actively managing the workflow.
FAQs about the SEO Checklist
We have defined the SEO checklist as a dynamic and strategic process, a compass for navigating the complexity of modern SEO, from technique to E-E-A-T, to GEO and social search.
However, putting this approach into practice can raise common operational questions, and here we address the most frequently asked questions: not to provide definitive answers that are valid for every site (that would contradict our premise), but to clarify how to integrate this process into your daily work, how to measure its effectiveness, and how to overcome the old silo mentality that still holds back many projects.
- How often should I check the SEO checklist?
The checklist is not a one-time event. Phase 1 (technical setup) is mainly initial, but requires constant monitoring (especially for 404 or CWV errors). Phases 2 (content/UX) and 3 (E-E-A-T/Authority) are ongoing processes: content creation, updating, and link building never end. Phase 4 (GEO/social search) requires active monitoring to adapt to rapid changes in AI and social platforms. SEOZoom’s SEO Checklist tool is designed to be a control panel that you can consult regularly.
- Can I do SEO myself using a checklist?
Yes, as long as you understand the checklist as a guided process, not just a simple list. A static, generic checklist is useless. A structured workflow, supported by a platform such as SEOZoom that integrates analysis and action, can guide even non-experts through the optimization phases.
- What is most important: technical SEO, content, or link building?
This is an outdated question, born of a siloed approach. Modern SEO is integrated. Technique (phase 1) is the foundation that allows content (phase 2) to be found and appreciated. Authority (phase 3), built in part with links, validates trust in your content. One without the other is ineffective. A technically perfect site with poor content will not rank, just as excellent content on a slow and inaccessible site will not be rewarded.
- How do I measure the success of my SEO strategy based on the checklist?
Not just with individual keyword rankings. Success is measured by the increase in overall organic traffic, the growth in visibility for entire strategic topics (not just individual keywords), the improvement in Zoom Authority (which measures authority), and, for sites that provide it, the increase in conversions generated by the organic channel. AI traffic analysis (via the GEO section in SEOZoom) is also useful for understanding how new engines rate your site.
