SEO Guides
SEO guides and templates
Practical content for finding, prioritizing, and fixing the SEO issues that affect crawlability, indexation, snippets, and performance.
How-to guides
Guides
What Is an SEO Audit? Scope, Evidence & Deliverables
An SEO audit is not a score. It is an evidence-based review that connects search performance problems to reproducible causes, owners, and validated fixes.
How to Check If Google Can Index Your Website
A practical guide to checking indexing: how to tell if a page is in Google, the four signals that control it, and what to do when a page is crawled but not indexed.
Technical SEO Checklist for Small Business Websites
A no-fluff technical SEO checklist for small sites: what technical SEO covers, the checks that matter most, and how to work through them in priority order.
On-Page SEO Checklist: What to Check on Every Page
Most on-page checklists are ranked by how easy something is to check, not by how much it matters. That is why sites pass them and still do not rank.
Core Web Vitals and SEO: LCP, INP & CLS Explained
Core Web Vitals measure loading speed, responsiveness, and visual stability. This guide shows how to read the data, isolate the failing metric, fix its actual cause, and validate the result.
WordPress SEO Audit Checklist: From Settings to Rendered HTML
A WordPress audit should find template-level faults, plugin conflicts, and unnecessary archives—not produce a list of generic green checks.
Shopify SEO Audit Checklist: The Platform-Specific Problems
Shopify handles the basics well and imposes a URL structure you cannot change. The audit is mostly about the duplicates that structure creates.
Webflow SEO Checklist: Static Pages, CMS Collections & Launch QA
Webflow makes SEO fields accessible, but collection patterns and publishing choices can repeat one error across every CMS item. Audit the output by template.
Wix SEO Checklist: Audit What Google Actually Receives
Wix handles much of the infrastructure, but it cannot choose your canonical strategy, remove duplicate content, or prove that Google indexed the right pages. This checklist verifies the published output.
Laravel SEO Checklist: Routes, Rendering, Metadata & Sitemaps
Laravel does not add or break SEO by itself. Your routes, controllers, templates, middleware, and deployment pipeline decide what crawlers receive.
Vue SPA SEO Checklist: Rendering, Routing & Hydration
A Vue app can be searchable, but an app shell plus asynchronous content creates extra failure points. This checklist tests what arrives before and after hydration.
JavaScript SEO: Why Google Might Not See Your Content
Google renders JavaScript — that is settled. What is not settled is whether it renders yours in time, completely, and before deciding what the page is about.
What Is llms.txt, and Should Your Site Have One?
llms.txt is a proposed Markdown index for helping AI tools find useful content. It is not robots.txt, not a licensing mechanism, and not a proven ranking shortcut.
Crawl Budget: When It Matters and When It Does Not
Crawl budget is real and almost certainly not your problem. Google says it below about a million URLs, and most sites discussing it have a few thousand.
Ecommerce SEO Audit Checklist: Products, Variants, Facets & Stock
Ecommerce audits are URL-policy audits. The hardest decisions concern variants, filters, stock states, and duplicated catalog paths—not title length.
Next.js SEO Checklist: Metadata, Rendering and Routing
Next.js does most of SEO correctly by default. The failures come from choosing the wrong rendering mode for a route and from metadata that runs on the client.
Free SEO Checker: How to Turn a URL Report into Fixes
A checker creates observations, not an SEO strategy. The value comes from selecting the right URL, interpreting evidence, and validating the live fix.
How to Do SEO Analysis: From Data to a Prioritized Decision
SEO analysis is the process of testing an explanation against several datasets—not exporting every metric into one report.
How to Improve Google Rankings and Get More Organic Traffic
Rankings are an output, not a lever. The useful question is never "how do I rank higher" but "which of the four things that gate ranking is currently failing".
Log File Analysis for SEO: How Googlebot Actually Crawls Your Site
Search Console tells you what Google concluded. Server logs tell you what Google actually did — every request, with a timestamp and a status code.
SEO for Beginners: A Step-by-Step Guide to Ranking on Google
New to SEO? This step-by-step beginner’s guide explains how search engines work and shows you how to start improving your Google rankings today.
Keyword Research: How to Find Keywords That Bring Traffic
Keyword research tells you what your audience is searching for. This guide shows how to find the right keywords and turn them into content that ranks.
Local SEO: How to Rank in Your City and Get Found Nearby
Local SEO helps nearby customers find you in search and on Google Maps. This guide covers the steps that actually move local rankings.
Small Business SEO Checklist: What Actually Moves the Needle
A small business does not need an SEO strategy. It needs about eight things done correctly once, and one of them matters more than the other seven combined.
SEO Audit Report Example: What to Include and What to Cut
Most audit reports fail for the same reason: they list everything a tool found instead of answering what to do first. Length is not the deliverable.
How to Prioritise SEO Fixes After an Audit
An audit produces findings. A plan produces changes. The difference is an ordering that accounts for what blocks what, and the honesty to leave things undone.
Google Search Console Audit: What to Read, in What Order
Search Console has a dozen reports and three of them answer most questions. Reading them in the wrong order is how people spend an afternoon and learn nothing.
SaaS SEO Audit Checklist: The Problems Specific to Software Sites
A SaaS site is usually three sites — marketing, docs and the app — under one domain, and most SaaS SEO problems come from them being audited as though they were one.
Startup SEO Checklist: What Actually Matters in Year One
A new domain has no authority and no history. That single fact should determine your entire SEO plan, and it rules out most of what generic advice recommends.
International SEO Checklist: Structure, Hreflang and Targeting
The structure decision is made once and is expensive to change. Everything else in international SEO is downstream of getting it right.
React SEO Checklist: Making a React App Indexable
React is not bad for SEO. Client-side-only rendering is risky for SEO, and React happens to be the most common way people end up there.
WooCommerce SEO Audit Checklist: Products, Variations and Bloat
WooCommerce inherits WordPress's habit of publishing an archive for everything. Most WooCommerce SEO work is deciding which of those archives should exist.
Squarespace SEO Checklist: What You Can and Cannot Control
Squarespace handles most technical SEO for you and takes several decisions out of your hands. Knowing which is which saves a lot of wasted effort.
Magento SEO Audit Checklist: Layered Navigation and URL Bloat
Magento is configurable enough to produce almost any URL structure, including several at once for the same product. Most Magento SEO work is deciding which one wins.
Nuxt SEO Checklist: Rendering Modes, Head Management and Routing
Nuxt server-renders by default, which removes most of what goes wrong with Vue and SEO. The remaining work is metadata, canonicals and status codes.
Astro SEO Checklist: Static Output and Selective Hydration
Astro ships zero JavaScript by default and renders to static HTML. That removes the entire category of rendering problems, which leaves only the ordinary work.
Technical SEO Audit Prioritization: Fix What Matters First
An SEO audit can produce dozens of issues. This guide shows how to turn findings into a practical fix order.
Website Migration SEO Playbook: Redirects, URL Mapping, and Post-Launch Checks
A step-by-step website migration playbook: what a migration risks, how to map URLs and redirects, the launch-day checklist, and how to monitor recovery.
Google Indexing API: What It Does and What It Cannot Do
The Google Indexing API is not a fast lane to the index. Google supports it for two structured data types, and using it elsewhere returns success while changing nothing.
Search Console URL Inspection: Check If Google Indexed a Page
URL Inspection answers one question precisely: what does Google currently know about this URL? Most misreadings come from confusing the live test with the indexed version.
Google Search Console API: Endpoints, Access, and Quotas
The Search Console API exposes four surfaces: search analytics, URL inspection, sitemaps, and site management. Each has a different quota and a different blind spot.
.htaccess Redirects: 301, RewriteCond and Rules That Actually Fire
Most broken .htaccess redirects are not syntax errors. They are rules that never fire because an earlier rule matched first, or conditions that apply to the wrong line.
nginx for SEO: Redirects, Status Codes, Compression and HTTP/2
Four parts of an nginx config decide how a site looks to a crawler: which hostname it settles on, what status codes it returns, how much it sends, and how fast it can send it.
How to Find and Fix 404 Errors on Your Site
Finding 404s is easy. The judgement is deciding which ones matter: a 404 on a URL nobody ever linked to is working as designed.
Certbot and Let's Encrypt: Issuing and Auto-Renewing Certificates
Issuing the certificate is the easy part. What separates a working setup from a future outage is whether renewal reloads the server — and whether anyone would notice if it stopped.
OpenSSL Commands: CSRs, Self-Signed Certificates and Format Conversion
Six commands cover almost every certificate task. The one worth memorising is s_client, because it shows what a server actually presents rather than what you believe you installed.
Installing an SSL Certificate on nginx, Apache and IIS
Installation is three files and a reload. What goes wrong is almost always the chain: a certificate that works in your browser and fails on someone else's device.
nslookup and dig: The Commands for Every DNS Record Type
A DNS lookup from the terminal answers a narrower question than most people assume. These are the commands per record type, how to read what comes back, and why a cached answer is not the same as a published one.
Website Speed Test: Diagnose Real User Performance Before Chasing a Score
A useful website speed test identifies the metric, the affected template, and the evidence needed to make one focused fix.
Mobile-Friendly Test: Check the Page a Phone User Actually Gets
Mobile friendliness is not one score. It is whether a real phone can load, read, tap, and navigate the content without a broken layout.
Website Launch Checklist: SEO, Redirects and Indexability Before Go-Live
A safe launch is not a design sign-off. It is proof that real production URLs return the intended response and can be discovered by Google.
Issue explainers
Learn
Missing Meta Description: Why It Matters and How to Fix It
A plain guide to the meta description: what it is, why it goes missing, whether it affects SEO, and how to write one that earns more clicks.
Redirect Chains: Why They Accumulate and How to Collapse Them
Nobody designs a three-hop redirect. They appear when three separate rules each add one, and none of their authors knew about the others.
Broken Internal Links: Finding Them and Fixing the Cause
A broken internal link is a bug you shipped. Unlike a broken external link, nobody else can fix it, and nothing about the internet changed to cause it.
Hreflang Tags: Syntax, Common Errors and How to Validate Them
Hreflang is not a ranking signal — it tells Google which language version to show which user. Almost every broken implementation fails the same rule: the links must point both ways.
Schema Markup: Meaning, Examples, and How to Validate It
Schema markup describes a page in a vocabulary machines already agree on. It does not improve rankings directly — it makes a page eligible for richer presentation.
Open Graph and X Cards: Build Reliable Link Previews
Social previews are generated from server-accessible metadata and cached aggressively. Correct tags need a crawlable URL, valid image, and a deliberate refresh workflow.
Mixed Content: Finding Insecure Resources on an HTTPS Page
Your page is HTTPS and something on it is not. Browsers block the dangerous half outright, which is why a mixed-content page often looks broken rather than insecure.
Title Tag Best Practices: Length, Keywords, and Duplicates
A practical guide to the title tag: what it controls, how long it should be in pixels, how to write one that earns the click, and how to fix duplicates.
Image Alt Text for SEO and Accessibility: A Decision Guide
Good alt text communicates the image’s purpose in context. It is not a caption, a keyword field, or a requirement to describe every pixel.
TTFB: What It Measures and How to Reduce It
TTFB is everything that happens before your page starts arriving. It is not a Core Web Vital, and it sets the floor that every Core Web Vital has to clear.
XML Sitemap Example, URL Location, and How to Validate One
A sitemap is a discovery hint, not an indexing instruction. Its value comes entirely from being accurate: every URL canonical, indexable, and returning 200.
H1 and Heading Structure: How to Organize Page Headings
A practical guide to headings: what the H1 and H2–H6 are for, the rules of a good hierarchy, how H1 differs from the title tag, and how to audit your structure.
Thin Content: How Much Text Does a Page Really Need?
Thin is not short. A 300-word page that fully answers its question is fine; a 2,000-word page that circles one is thin, and padding is how sites get there.
HTTP Status Codes for SEO: What Google Does With Each One
A status code is the first thing a crawler reads and the only part of the response it cannot ignore. Sending the wrong one overrides everything the page says about itself.
Internal Linking Strategy: Anchor Text, Depth and Distribution
Internal links are the one ranking input you fully control. Most sites treat them as navigation and leave the distribution to whatever the template happens to produce.
Mobile Usability: What Mobile-First Indexing Actually Means
Google indexes the mobile version of your site. Not primarily — exclusively. Anything present only on desktop is, for search purposes, not on your site.
Duplicate Content: What Google Actually Does About It
The duplicate content penalty does not exist. What exists is Google picking one version and ignoring the rest — and picking a version you did not intend.
Nofollow, Sponsored and UGC: Choose the Right Link Attribute
Link attributes describe why a link exists. Sponsored is for compensation, UGC is for user contributions, and nofollow is the fallback when you do not endorse a link.
Pagination SEO: Paginated Content, rel next/prev, and Infinite Scroll
Google stopped using rel next/prev in 2019. What replaced it is simpler than most sites implement: each page is its own page, and every page must be reachable by a real link.
How to Fix Crawl Errors in Google Search Console
Crawl and indexing errors quietly keep pages out of Google. This guide explains the Search Console reports and how to fix the most common causes.
HTML Lang Attribute: What It Does for Accessibility and Search
One attribute on the html element. Screen readers depend on it to choose a voice; Google mostly ignores it and works out the language from the content.
Security Headers: What Each One Does and What It Costs
Security headers do not improve rankings. One of them can silently break your page for everyone, which is the real reason to understand them before deploying them.
Lazy Loading Images: When It Helps and When It Costs You LCP
Lazy loading defers images until they are needed. Apply it to the one image that is needed immediately and you have delayed your own Largest Contentful Paint.
AMP in 2026: Is It Dead, and How to Remove It Safely
AMP was a bargain: constrain your HTML, get the Top Stories carousel. Google ended that bargain in 2021, and most sites have been maintaining the constraint without the benefit ever since.
Soft 404s: Pages That Say Not Found and Return 200
A soft 404 is a contradiction: the page says the content is missing and the server says everything is fine. Google believes the server, then notices the page, and reports the mismatch.
SEO-Friendly URL Structure: What Matters and What Does Not
URLs are a weak ranking signal and a strong usability one. Most URL advice optimises the wrong one of those, and the cost of changing them is high.
Image SEO: Formats, Sizing and Getting Into Image Search
Image optimisation splits into two jobs that get conflated: making pages fast, and making images findable. The first is technical and the second is editorial.
Indexability Debugging Guide: Why Google Cannot Index Your Page
A practical workflow for pages that are crawled but not indexed: what the Search Console states mean, the signals that decide indexing, and how to fix each cause.
Structured Data Errors Guide: Fix JSON-LD, Schema Markup, and Rich Results
A practical guide to structured data errors: what blocks rich results versus what is only a warning, the common JSON-LD mistakes, and how to validate the fix.
Hreflang Debugging Guide: Fix Multilingual SEO, Return Tags, and x-default
A practical hreflang debugging guide: the rules every cluster must follow, the common return-tag and language-code errors, and how to validate multilingual SEO.
Duplicate Content Canonicalization Guide: Fix Canonical Tags, Parameters, and URL Variants
A practical guide to duplicate content and canonicalization: where variant URLs come from, how to choose between canonical, redirect, and noindex, and how to consolidate safely.
Internal Linking Audit Guide: Fix Orphan Pages, Link Depth, and Anchor Text
A practical internal linking audit: why links decide what ranks, the problems the audit finds, and how to fix orphan pages, depth, anchor text, and topic clusters.
Security Headers SEO Guide: HTTPS, HSTS, CSP, and Trust Signals
A practical guide to security headers and SEO: how security connects to rankings, what each header does, and how to add them without breaking crawling.
Robots.txt Example: Allow All, Disallow All, and Common Rules
A robots.txt file controls crawling, never indexing. Most damage comes from two lines that look almost identical and do opposite things.
Canonical Tag Example: HTML Syntax and What It Is Used For
A canonical tag names the preferred URL among duplicates. It is a hint Google weighs against other evidence, not an instruction it must obey.
Cache-Control Header: max-age, no-cache, no-store and What Each Does
Two directives are routinely confused: no-cache still caches, and no-store is the one that does not. Getting that pair wrong is the most expensive caching mistake there is.
Gzip vs Brotli: Choosing HTTP Compression
Brotli compresses text roughly 15–20% smaller than gzip at comparable settings. The decision is not which one — it is serving both and letting the client choose.
DNS Record Types Explained: A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, TXT and the Rest
A DNS zone is a lookup table. Each record type answers one question about a name, and most confusion comes from expecting a type to answer a question it was never designed for.
CNAME vs A Record: Which to Use and Why Root Domains Are Different
An A record names an address. A CNAME names another name. The choice is about who controls the address — and at the root domain the choice is made for you.
SPF, DKIM and DMARC: The Three DNS Records Email Authentication Needs
Three records answer three different questions: who may send, whether the message was altered, and what to do when the answers disagree. Publishing one without the others leaves the job half done.
DNS Propagation: Why Changes Take Time and How to Check
Nothing propagates. A DNS change is instant at the authoritative server; what you are waiting for is every cache in the world to expire the old answer.
Dangling DNS and Subdomain Takeover: Finding Records That Point Nowhere
You cancelled the service but left the CNAME. Anyone who can claim that provider hostname now controls a subdomain of your domain — and inherits the trust that comes with it.
Cloudflare 5xx Errors: 502, 520, 521, 522, 524 and 525 Explained
Cloudflare's 5xx codes are unusually informative: each one names a specific stage of the connection to your origin that failed. Reading the number correctly saves most of the debugging.
Cloudflare SSL Modes: Flexible, Full, Full (Strict) and Origin Certificates
The mode does not change what visitors see — they always get HTTPS. It changes the leg between Cloudflare and your server, and Flexible leaves that leg unencrypted.
Subdomain vs Subdirectory: What It Means for SEO
Google treats both as part of your site and works out the relationship. The practical difference is smaller than the debate suggests — but it is not zero, and it favours subdirectories.
SSL Certificate Expired: Diagnosing and Fixing It
An expired certificate does not degrade the site — it stops it. And the most common version of this problem is a certificate that was renewed successfully and never actually loaded.
SSL Certificate Types: DV, OV, EV, Wildcard and SAN
Two independent axes get confused constantly: how thoroughly the authority checked who you are, and how many hostnames the certificate covers. They have nothing to do with each other.
curl SSL Errors: Reading Certificate Validation Failures
curl is stricter than a browser and says exactly what failed. That makes it the fastest way to diagnose a certificate problem — as long as you resist reaching for -k.
Security Headers Checker: Read HSTS, CSP and Browser Protection
Security headers protect browser behavior. They matter for safe delivery and reliable rendering, even though they are not a shortcut to rankings.
Robots.txt File: What It Controls and a Safe Example
robots.txt is a crawl-access file. It can reduce unnecessary fetching, but it is not a privacy, deindexing, or canonicalization control.
DNS Record Lookup: Read A, MX and TXT Results
A DNS record lookup is useful only when each returned record is compared with the job that hostname is meant to do.
Rich Results Test: Validate Eligibility Without Overpromising
A passing rich results test creates eligibility. It does not guarantee a visual treatment or improve a weak page.
HTTP Status Code Checker: Read 200, 301, 404 and 5xx
A status code describes the server response. The useful diagnosis includes every redirect hop and the final page state.
Domain WHOIS Lookup: Registration, Expiry and Registrar Data
A domain WHOIS lookup explains registration facts. It usually cannot reveal a private owner or a complete domain history.
SSL Certificate Expiry: Check Renewal Before HTTPS Breaks
A certificate expiry date is an operational deadline. Renew early, verify the live certificate, and make sure every hostname presents the intended chain.
Decision support
Comparisons
Free vs Paid SEO Audit Tools: What Are You Actually Buying?
Free tools can diagnose a URL well. Paid tools become valuable when the problem is scale, history, automation, team workflow, or combining datasets.
PageSpeed Insights vs Lighthouse vs CrUX: Three Views of One Site
These are not three competing tools. CrUX is the data, Lighthouse is the simulator, and PageSpeed Insights is the page that shows you both.
Screaming Frog vs Online SEO Auditors: Which to Use When
A desktop crawler maps a whole site. An online auditor inspects one URL from outside. Choosing between them is really choosing which question you are asking.
Manual vs Automated SEO Audits: Use Each for the Right Evidence
Automation finds patterns consistently; manual review decides intent, business value, and whether a technically valid page deserves to exist.
Hreflang vs Canonical: Which to Use for Language Variants
They look similar and do opposite things. Canonical says "index that one instead". Hreflang says "index all of these, and show the right one to each person".
Search Console vs Third-Party SEO Tools: What Each Can Actually Know
One reports facts about your site from Google itself. The other estimates, models, and covers sites you do not own. Treating an estimate as a fact is where most reporting goes wrong.
Best Free SEO Tools: What You Actually Need to Audit a Website
You don’t need an expensive subscription to audit a site. Here are the best free SEO tools, what each one does, and how to combine them effectively.
Technical SEO vs On-Page SEO: Where the Boundary Is
The distinction is not really about the work — it is about what fails. Technical problems stop a page existing in search. On-page problems stop it competing.
Core Web Vitals vs Lighthouse Score: Which One Google Uses
One is a measurement of your real users. The other is a weighted average of simulated metrics. Only the first affects ranking, and most teams optimise the second.
Search Console vs PageSpeed Insights: Field Data or Lab Data
They disagree because they measure different things: one reports what real visitors experienced over 28 days, the other simulates one load on a throttled device.
Reusable workflows
Templates
SEO Audit Checklist Template
A checklist in the order things block each other, so you never spend an afternoon on content for a page that turns out to be noindexed.
Technical SEO Audit Template
The technical half of an audit, separated out — the checks a tool can settle, with the evidence each one needs to be actionable.
Core Web Vitals Fix Priority Template
Core Web Vitals work goes wrong when teams optimise the metric that is easiest to measure rather than the one that is failing for users.
Website Launch SEO Checklist
One item on this list has removed more sites from Google than everything else combined: the staging noindex that shipped to production.
Monthly SEO Report Template
A monthly report should answer three questions: what changed, why, and what we are doing next. Most answer none of them and show a lot of charts.
SEO Issue Prioritisation Template
A scoring sheet that produces an order you can defend, without pretending to forecast traffic you cannot predict.
Website Migration URL Mapping Template
Every migration failure traces back to a URL nobody knew existed. The mapping sheet is the artefact that prevents it, and building the inventory is most of the work.
Check your site before you start fixing
Run a fresh DomainLens audit and use the report as your priority list.