The on-page SEO launch checklist
| Item | What good looks like |
|---|---|
| Page plan | One page per main service and city, mapped to real searches |
| Title tags | Unique for every page, naming the service and place |
| Meta descriptions | Unique summaries that make people want to click |
| Headings | One clear H1 and logical H2s that outline the page |
| URLs | Short, readable words with hyphens |
| Internal links | Every important page linked from at least one other page |
| Images | Compressed, sized and described with alt text |
| Structured data | Generated from your content for each page type |
Build it into the CMS
The best way to keep on-page SEO right is to make it part of the CMS. Every page type should ask for a title and description, warn when they are missing and keep URLs stable. Writers then cannot publish a page without the basics.
On rathly.com, the build checks every page before it publishes. It blocks duplicate titles, missing descriptions and broken internal links.
Common gaps at launch
- Every page sharing the homepage title
- Old URLs with no redirects
- Sample text left in footers and headings
- The staging site's noindex tag left on
- No sitemap submitted to Search Console
Good example. A dental site launches with a unique title, description and H1 for each treatment. Every old URL redirects, and the sitemap is already in Search Console.
Bad example. The same site launches with "Home" as every page title and the staging block still in robots.txt. It drops out of Google within a week.
Read how web design affects SEO and how to redesign without losing SEO. Our web design team runs this checklist before every launch.