SEO Launch Checklist for a New Website, With Worksheets

A new or redesigned website is found by search engines, and quoted by AI assistants, because of about sixty decisions made before and during launch. Most of them are small. Most of them get skipped because nobody wrote them down. This is the list we run on our own builds, in ten parts, with the three worksheets most teams never fill in: keywords per page, on-page fields per page, and local presence. The whole thing is a seven-page printable PDF at the end.

How to use the checklist

Parts 1 to 4 happen before design. Parts 5 to 8 happen on the staging site. Part 9 is launch day. Part 10 is the month after. Tick every line or write why it does not apply. “Later” is an answer. Blank is not.

1. Technical foundation

Search engines cannot rank what they cannot crawl, and most “the site does not rank” problems we find in a second opinion audit live here.

• HTTPS everywhere, with http and www variants redirecting to one canonical host
• robots.txt that allows crawling and names the sitemap
• An XML sitemap listing only live, indexable URLs
• No stray noindex tags carried over from staging
• One canonical URL per page
• Core Web Vitals passing on the key templates: main content under 2.5 seconds, layout shift under 0.1, interaction under 200 milliseconds
• Hosting that answers in under half a second
• Image sizes capped, modern formats, lazy loading below the fold
• Search Console and Analytics verified before launch
• A redirect map: every old URL to its new home. The single most skipped line on this list, and the reason a redesign loses rankings.

2. The keyword worksheet

One row per page you intend to rank. The columns: the page, the primary query a customer would type, the intent (buy, learn, compare, local), two supporting queries, and whether another page on your own site already targets it. If a page has no row, it has no job. If two pages share a row, they cannibalize each other, which is the most common structural SEO problem we see on sites with a blog. The worksheet in the PDF has nine rows; most small business sites need between six and twelve.

3. Content plan

• Every service, product, and location has its own page
• Each page answers one question in its first 60 words
• Plain-language guides exist for the questions customers ask before they call: what it costs, how long it takes, what happens first
• No two pages target the same query
• Thin pages, under 300 words of real content, merged or expanded
• An author named on every article, with a page of their own
• Published and updated dates shown

4. The on-page worksheet

One per key page: title tag under 60 characters, meta description under 160, one H1 that carries the primary query in natural language, and the first H2. Then the checks that go with it:

• Headings in order: H1, then H2s, then H3s
• Primary query in the title, the H1, the first paragraph, and the URL
• Internal links to and from at least three related pages, with descriptive anchor text
• Images named and alt text written for meaning, not keywords
• Buttons and links that say what happens next

5. Structured data

This is what an AI assistant reads when someone asks “who does this in Charlotte and is open now.” Specific beats generic, and most sites stop at generic: in our audit of 48 Charlotte business websites, 94 percent had structured data and 46 percent said what kind of business they were.

• The business entity with its specific type (Dentist, Plumber, LegalService), address, phone, hours, service area, and sameAs links to real profiles
• Service nodes for each service page
• FAQ markup where a page carries questions and answers
• Article markup with author, published and modified dates
• Breadcrumbs
• Reviews or a rating only where the reviews are real and visible on the page
• Validated in Google’s Rich Results Test with zero errors

6. The local worksheet

Most local searches end on the map. The order below is the priority order, and most checklists get it backwards by starting with directory listings.

1. Google Business Profile. Claimed, primary category right, services listed, hours, photos, posts. Our GBP service exists because this one item moves more local calls than the rest combined.
2. Name, address, phone. Identical on the site, the profile, and every directory. One stale address on a state record or an old listing undoes the rest.
3. Location pages. One per office or service area, with real proof of presence, not a template with the town name swapped.
4. Reviews. A way to ask, a way to answer, a cadence.
5. Directory listings. Clutch, Yelp, BBB, the chamber, industry bodies, same details everywhere.
6. Local content. Pages that name the places you serve and why.

7. Tracking

A site that cannot say which page produced the call cannot be improved. GA4 installed once, not twice. Events for forms, phone taps, email taps, downloads, and purchases, marked as key events. Search Console linked. Spam filtered on forms and in referral reports. A monthly report that one named person reads.

8. Trust and accessibility

• An About page with real people, credentials, and a founding date
• A Contact page with a real address, phone, email, and hours
• Privacy policy and terms linked in the footer
• Accessibility checked on each template: contrast, keyboard, form labels, alt text
• Testimonials that are real, dated, and attributed; case studies with outcomes
• No stock photos standing in for the team

9. Launch day

• Redirects live and spot-checked before DNS changes
• DNS switched, SSL valid on the new host
• Staging noindex removed, robots.txt checked on the live site
• Sitemap submitted in Search Console
• Analytics events firing on the live domain, forms tested end to end
• Top 20 old URLs opened by hand
• Backups and uptime monitoring on
• Admin, domain, hosting, and analytics access in the owner’s name

10. The 30 days after

Write the baseline before launch and re-read it at 30 and 90 days: indexed pages, impressions and clicks per day, the top ten queries and their positions, form submissions, phone taps, field Core Web Vitals, crawl errors. Watch Search Console coverage daily for two weeks and fix every crawl error within a day. Add internal links to the new pages from older ones. Update the Google Business Profile with the new site. Name an owner for updates, backups, and security, whether that is your team or a care plan.

Download the checklist and worksheets

All ten parts with tick boxes, plus the keyword, on-page, and local worksheets with blanks, as a seven-page PDF you can print or share with whoever is building the site.

When a checklist is not enough

A checklist catches omissions. It does not fix a site whose structure is wrong, whose platform is slow, or whose content was written for nobody in particular. If you are launching a redesign, run it inside the website redesign project plan; this checklist is its Phases 1, 4, 5, and 10. If you have a live site and the phone is quiet, the second opinion audit reads it against this list and says, in writing, what to fix first. And if you are deciding what a build that includes all of this costs, the pricing guide has the ranges.