No email gate, no download, no upsell. The whole checklist is on this page. It is the same nine steps we run on our own site and on customer sites, in the order they actually work.
Most checklists you find are a list of tasks with no order and no stopping rule. They tell you to "do keyword research" and "build backlinks" without saying which keywords, how many, or when you are done. That is why teams work through them for a quarter and cannot tell whether anything moved.
This one is different in two ways. Every step has a finish condition, so you know when to move on. And every step names the thing that breaks if you skip it, so you can see why the order matters.
Put on one page what you sell, who buys it, what makes you different, and how a visitor converts. This sounds like busywork and it is the step that decides everything downstream. Without it you will target keywords that bring traffic from people who will never pay.
Done when: you can name your ideal customer in one sentence and list three things a competitor cannot claim.
Pull the last 90 days of queries and pages. You are looking for three things: pages ranking on page two that could be pushed up, queries with impressions and no clicks, and two pages competing for the same query. Fixing what already ranks is faster than publishing something new.
Use Search Console as the source of truth here, not a third-party estimate. Tool numbers and Google's own numbers diverge more than most people expect, which we measured in our breakdown of how accurate Semrush is on its own metrics.
Done when: you have a list of pages in positions 5 to 20, and a list of duplicate-intent pairs. Our guide on how to run an SEO audit covers the pulls in detail.
Pick the three sites that outrank you most often. For each one, record the page format that ranks, the heading outline, whether they have comparison pages, and where their links come from. You are looking for the gap you can fill, not a site to copy.
A head-to-head comparison page is the format most often missing. If you want to see what one looks like before you write your own, our Surfer SEO vs Ahrefs comparison is the shape to work from.
Done when: you can name one format they all use that you do not have.
A list is 500 keywords in a spreadsheet nobody opens. A roadmap is one keyword per publishing day for 90 days, sorted so the easy commercial wins go first. Filter hard on difficulty: if your domain is young, anything above KD 30 is a waste of a slot.
Done when: every publishing day for the next quarter has a keyword and a target format next to it.
Take the roadmap and group it into four or five clusters, each with one hub page and its supporting articles. A cluster is what tells Google you have depth on a subject rather than one lucky post. It is also what makes internal linking obvious later, because siblings link to siblings and everything links to the hub. Our practical guide to semantic search explains why search engines reward this shape.
Done when: every keyword in the roadmap belongs to exactly one cluster with a named hub.
Consistency beats volume. Four solid articles a month for a year outperforms forty in one month and then silence. Pick the cadence you can sustain when a launch week goes badly, then publish straight into your CMS so drafts do not rot in a doc.
Done when: the next four weeks are scheduled and the first one is live.
Every new post lands orphaned. If nothing links to it, it will sit unindexed or stuck on page three no matter how good it is. Add two or three contextual links from older posts on the day you publish, using anchor text that describes the target page.
Done when: no published page has zero inbound internal links.
This is the slowest step and the one people fake. Directory spam and paid link farms move a metric in a third-party tool and do nothing in Google. What works is getting linked from real sites in your niche, whether by trading placements, pitching journalists, or publishing data other people need to cite.
Done when: you are adding links from sites that get their own organic traffic, at any pace above zero. Our SEO audit checklist includes the checks for spotting a worthless link.
A large share of searches now end without a click, because the answer appears in an AI summary. That means position 8 with no clicks can still be valuable if you are the source being quoted. Check monthly whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI answers name you for your main queries, and treat being cited as a ranking in its own right. The share of searches that end this way is worth knowing precisely, and our page of SEO statistics keeps the current numbers.
If you are still working out what a position actually means once AI answers sit above the results, start with our explainer on SEO positioning and how to improve it.
Done when: you have a monthly record of which AI engines mention you for your top ten queries.
The checklist is honest about the work. Steps 1 to 5 are a few days of thinking, done once and revisited quarterly. Steps 6 to 9 are the ones that never stop, and they are where most SaaS teams quietly abandon the plan around week six.
That recurring half is what Distribb automates: keyword research, publishing into WordPress, Webflow or Shopify, internal linking across your clusters, and a backlink exchange network for step 8. You can also run the audit in step 2 with our AI SEO audit tool, and we tested the wider field in our roundup of automated SEO software.
One honest limit: Distribb is not a rank tracker and does not replace Search Console. You still need to look at your own data, and step 2 assumes you will.
Pricing is $97 per month with a 3-day free trial. There is a $495 per month Accelerator plan if you want the publishing done for you. There is no free plan, so if a checklist is all you needed today, take it and go.
No, and that is deliberate. The checklist is short enough to read here, and a PDF would go stale the moment a step changed.
Steps 2 and 7 can move existing pages within a few weeks, because you are improving pages Google already knows. New content from steps 4 to 6 typically takes two to four months to settle. Anyone promising faster on a new domain is guessing.
Mostly. Step 2 has nothing to audit yet, so skip it on the first pass and come back once you have 90 days of data. Everything else applies from day one, and our guide to SEO strategies for new websites covers what to prioritise in the first quarter.
No. Every step can be done by hand with Search Console and a spreadsheet. Tools save time on the repetitive half, they do not change the order of the work.
Distribb handles the recurring half of this checklist: research, publishing, internal linking and backlinks, on your own CMS. Three-day free trial, then $97 per month.