SEO & AI search
A practical SEO checklist before launching a business website
Check the pages, links and measurement that matter before a new site or redesign goes live.
Make a URL inventory first
List the pages that customers and search engines should find: the homepage, service pages, important products, contact details and useful articles. For a redesign, map old URLs to their closest replacements before launch. Sending every old page to the homepage loses context for visitors.
Mark private pages separately. Admin screens, test routes and customer data should not be included in a public sitemap. Authentication and access control protect private information; a robots file is not a security boundary.
Inspect real page responses
Open important URLs directly, not only by navigating from the homepage. Check their status codes, readable content, title, description and canonical URL. Make sure a missing page returns a real 404 instead of an empty page with a success response.
Check mobile layout, keyboard navigation and form errors as part of the same review. A page that can be indexed but cannot be used is not a successful launch. Confirm that important text does not depend on a broken third-party widget.
Keep internal navigation intentional
Link related articles to the appropriate service or product, using text that describes the destination. Provide a clear route back to a topic hub. Avoid creating dozens of near-identical pages that differ only by a city name.
Structured data should describe visible, truthful content. Do not mark up reviews you do not have or add a different price in schema from the one shown to customers. A successful validation check does not guarantee a special search appearance.
Verify after deployment
Check the live domain, not just a preview deployment. Confirm that production has not inherited a staging noindex tag and that the sitemap contains production URLs. Submit the sitemap through Search Console and inspect representative pages.
Keep a launch log with the deployment date, changed URLs, redirects and known issues. Compare inquiry quality and conversion behavior after launch. Search visibility may take time to change; use technical checks to identify errors without interpreting every short-term fluctuation as a failure.