SEO QA checklist: what to check before a client page goes live.

This SEO QA checklist is for the pages an agency delivers to clients: new service pages, blog posts, location pages, landing pages for campaigns. It takes minutes per page. For a full review of a whole site, use the technical SEO audit checklist instead. QA is part of every deliverable in our white label SEO work, because a page with a leftover noindex is a page the client paid for and nobody can find.

What is SEO QA?

SEO QA is the quality check a page passes before and right after it is published. It confirms the page can be crawled and indexed, sends the right signals about which URL is the main one, has a unique title and description, valid structured data, working links and images, and works on mobile. It is a routine, not a project.

The difference from an audit is scope and timing. An audit looks at a whole site, finds patterns and produces a plan. QA looks at one page at the moment it changes and produces a pass or a fix. Agencies that publish at volume need both. On a team serving 600+ US car dealerships, where 81,210 pages were published, a repeatable check per page was the only way to keep quality consistent across that many sites.

What should an SEO QA checklist include?

Indexability, canonical, title and description, headings, internal links, structured data, images, mobile rendering and a final live inspection. Each item should be a yes or no question someone can answer in under a minute. If a check needs judgment or research, it belongs in the content brief or the audit, not in pre-publish QA.

How do you catch noindex and canonical leftovers?

View the page source or use a browser extension to read the robots meta tag, the X-Robots-Tag header and the canonical on the live URL, not in the editor. Staging settings often travel with templates and plugins. Check the HTTP status too. Then run a URL Inspection in Search Console to see what Google receives.

Two details from Google's documentation matter here. Google's guide to noindex explains that the rule only works if the page is not blocked by robots.txt, because the crawler has to see it, and that a noindex can also arrive as an HTTP header. Google's guide on canonical URLs recommends absolute URLs in the canonical and says not to use robots.txt for canonicalization. Both mistakes are easy to miss when you only look at the CMS.

How do you validate schema before publishing?

Run the page through Google's Rich Results Test, fix errors, then compare every marked-up field with what a visitor can see. Google's guidelines say structured data must be a true representation of the page and that you should not mark up content readers cannot see. Valid markup still does not guarantee a rich result.

The quotes come from Google's general structured data guidelines. In practice the most common QA failure is not invalid code but mismatched content: a price, rating or address in the schema that differs from the page. For local clients, our LocalBusiness schema guide lists the fields to compare.

What should you check on images and mobile?

Every meaningful image should be an HTML img element with descriptive alt text, a short descriptive file name and a size suited to the layout. On mobile, the main content, links and structured data should match desktop. Open the page on a phone or a mobile emulator and scroll the whole thing before you approve it.

Google's image SEO best practices say Google does not index CSS background images and calls alt text the most important attribute for image metadata, while warning against filling it with keywords. Google's mobile-first indexing best practices explain why mobile parity matters: Google mostly uses the mobile version of a page for indexing.

What should you check right after a page goes live?

Inspect the live URL in Search Console, confirm the page is available to Google, look at the rendered HTML and screenshot, and check that the main content is there. Click every link once. Add the page to the sitemap if your CMS does not do it automatically. Note the publish date in the client's change log.

The URL Inspection tool lets you test the live URL and view the tested page, including the HTML, a screenshot and JavaScript console messages. Its help page also notes that requesting indexing does not guarantee indexing, which is worth repeating to clients who expect new pages to appear the same day.

How do agencies make QA a habit across a team?

Put the checklist inside the task template, so a page cannot be marked done without it. Assign QA to a different person than the one who built the page. Keep a short log of failures; after a month the log shows which templates, plugins or writers cause most problems, and you fix the source instead of each page.

• One checklist per page type: post, service page, location page, landing page.
• A second pair of eyes for every page, even senior work.
• A failure log with the cause, not only the fix.
• A monthly look at the log to fix templates and briefs.
• A full audit at least once a year to catch what page-level QA cannot.

Platform-specific checks are in our WordPress SEO checklist, and launches of a whole new site are covered in the website redesign SEO checklist. If you want QA handled for you, our white label technical SEO team can run it under your brand, or book a 30-minute call.

Frequently asked questions

About the author

Juan José Giraldo is a senior SEO specialist with 5+ years of experience. He works on technical and local SEO for 600+ US car dealerships and supervises the SEO of 18 US e-commerce stores. He runs White Label SEO LATAM from Medellín, Colombia, and delivers white label SEO for agencies in the US, UK, Canada and Australia. Read more · LinkedIn.

Sources

1. Google Search Central, Block Search indexing with noindex
2. Google Search Central, How to specify a canonical URL
3. Google Search Central, General structured data guidelines
4. Google Search Central, Google image SEO best practices
5. Google Search Central, Mobile-first indexing best practices
6. Search Console Help, URL Inspection tool