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The 20-Point SEO Self-Check Checklist

Updated July 2026 · 9 min read · By MintShovels Team

Rankings don't fall overnight — they erode one forgotten setting at a time. Run this 20-point check monthly and you'll catch problems while they're still cheap to fix.

Crawlability & indexation (1–5)

1. XML sitemap — submitted in Search Console and returns 200.
2. robots.txt — doesn't accidentally block CSS/JS or key pages.
3. No orphan pages — every important URL is linked from somewhere.
4. Canonical tags — point to the correct version, no self-conflicting loops.
5. Index coverage — zero unexpected "excluded" or "soft 404" in GSC.

On-page basics (6–11)

6. Unique title tags — under ~60 chars, with the target keyword near the front.
7. Meta descriptions — present, compelling, not duplicated.
8. One H1 per page — and a logical H2/H3 outline.
9. Internal links — related pages link to each other with descriptive anchors.
10. Image alt text — describes the image; not keyword-stuffed.
11. Mobile-friendly — renders and is usable at 390px width.

Performance & trust (12–16)

12. Core Web Vitals — LCP < 2.5s, CLS < 0.1, INP responsive.
13. HTTPS everywhere — no mixed content warnings.
14. Page speed — images lazy-loaded and properly sized.
15. Structured data — valid Organization/Article/Breadcrumb markup.
16. No broken links — internal 404s fixed or redirected.

AI & future-proofing (17–20)

17. Clear authorship & entity signals — who/what the site is, stated plainly.
18. Direct answers — content answers questions in plain language AI can quote.
19. Freshness — key pages updated within the last 12 months.
20. Brand mentions — consistent name/description across the web.

How to make it stick as a habit

A checklist you run once is worthless; one you run monthly is gold. Put it on a calendar, not a todo list. Each pass should take 20–30 minutes: skim the 20 points, mark what changed, and fix only what's red. Over a year this catches the slow erosion — a broken internal link from a redesign, a page that quietly dropped from index, a title someone overwrote — before any of it costs rankings. The audit tool handles the mechanical pass; your eyes handle the judgment the tool can't.

What this list deliberately leaves out

This is a health check, not a growth plan. It won't tell you which new topic to write, or whether a competitor just launched a better page. Those are strategy questions for a different day. What it guarantees is that the foundation underneath any strategy stays solid — because the best content in the world can't rank on a site that fails points 1 through 5. Run the free audit for the numbers, then use this list to decide what the numbers mean for your site.

Shortcut: Our free SEO audit runs most of these 20 checks automatically in seconds — use it as the engine, and treat this list as the human review on top.

Prioritizing when you are short on time

If you only have one afternoon, work the list in this order: fix crawl errors first (a page Google cannot reach is worse than a weak page), then indexation (titles, canonicals, noindex mistakes), then performance. Polish like structured data and monitoring comes last because it rarely blocks traffic on its own. The order matters more than the count — ten fixed crawl errors beat a hundred tweaked meta descriptions.

A printable one-page version to pin above your desk

Turn the 20 points into a single checklist you actually reuse. Print the crawlability and on-page sections, tick them off per template rather than per page, and you will cover a whole site in an hour. The goal is not to admire the list but to run it on a schedule — once a month for a small site, weekly during a rebuild. Consistency is the entire game.

Keep reading

→ Meta Tags That Rank
→ Core Web Vitals Explained
→ Technical SEO Audit Basics

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