The 14-Point On-Page SEO Checklist to Run Before Any Page Goes Live

Your page looks great. Nice photos. Big button. Your cousin said "wow."

Google doesn't care about your cousin.

On Oct 20, 2026, Nathan Gotch took a real local heating company's "heater repair" page and ran it through 14 pass/fail checks. It failed most of them. Here's the same checklist, in plain English, so your page doesn't.

Quick words (one line each):

• On-page SEO: everything you fix on the page itself so search engines get it.

• Crawl: a search engine's bot visiting and reading your page.

• noindex: a tag that tells Google "don't put this page in search results."

• H1 / H2: the main heading and the sub-headings, in the page's code.

• Slug: the end part of the URL, like /heater-repair-webster-groves.

• AEO / GEO: getting picked by AI answers (answer engines, generative engines).

Gotch's big line: "traditional on-page SEO best practices are the same for AEO best practices or GEO best practices." One checklist covers Google and AI.

Part 1: Can anyone even read it?

Check 1: Can it be crawled? Open yoursite.com/robots.txt and make sure the page isn't blocked. Then view the page source and search for "noindex." Found one? That's a fail.

Check 2: Can AI fetch it? In ChatGPT, open a temporary chat with personalization off and ask it to "review" your URL. If it describes the page, it can get there. (It can also answer from a cached copy, so treat this as a quick check.)

Check 3: Is the page reasonable in size and speed? Google has confirmed a 2 MB limit, which pages rarely hit. Response speed matters for AI fetches.

Check 4: Is the content in plain HTML? In a study Gotch showed, "90-something percent" of cited pages were HTML. Test: copy a sentence from your page, search for it in the page source, and check it sits in normal tags like paragraphs.

Check 5: Is speed "OK"? Speed only matters from terrible to OK. His example page scored about 71 on mobile and 98 on desktop in PageSpeed Insights. That's a pass. Don't burn a week chasing 100.

Part 2: Does it match the search?

Check 6: Does it match the intent? "Heater repair" is a buying search. The page has to get the call, not teach a class.

Check 7: Is it built for people, and local? His example page said "call today" with no easy way to call, and never named the city it wanted. Double fail.

Part 3: Is the topic in the right spots?

Check 8: Topic in the key spots: the URL, title tag, meta description, H1, the first 100 words, and a close variant in one H2. Serve many cities? Give each city its own page inside a folder for the wider area, so the URL shows both.

Check 9: The slug test: pretend the domain doesn't exist. Does the URL alone tell you what the page is about?

Check 10: Clean headings: one H1 as the main heading. Menu or top-bar text tagged as H2s (sitting above the H1) should just be paragraphs. Website templates do this a lot, so check every page.

Part 4: Is it worth citing?

Check 11: Same rules for AI. Gotch's point: the on-page basics above are the same ones AI search wants. No separate secret AI checklist.

Check 12: At least 20% unique. Not "written by a human." Unique means things only this business can say: its selling points, testimonials and proof. Gotch says human-written doesn't mean good and AI-written doesn't mean bad.

Check 13: Experience you can see, decent design, and a way to finish the job. Show real expertise, and give the visitor a working way to become a lead.

Part 5: The test almost nobody runs

Check 14: Stress-test the contact form. Gotch typed junk into a real form, with a made-up email address, and it went straight through. No phone field either. He thinks about 80% of local businesses have lead capture this bad.

Do this before launch:

1. Submit the form once with junk.

2. Submit it once as a real test lead.

3. Check where both went, and that the junk can be filtered out.

Bonus: rewriting a page with AI

Gotch had ChatGPT and Claude write the page, and both drifted off the intent. His fix:

1. Pull the key terms and topics from the pages that already rank.

2. Build the outline first.

3. Feed the AI a knowledge base of real facts about the business. Always.

Do this today

1. Pick your most important service page.

2. Search its source for "noindex" and check robots.txt.

3. Check the topic is in the URL, title, H1 and first 100 words.

4. Make sure menu text isn't tagged as H2 above your H1.

5. Send your form one junk lead and one real test lead.

Related reading

• Check if AI bots can read your site

• Long, specific searches convert 11x better

• Use AI content without getting burned

Sources

• Nathan Gotch - 14 Step On-Page SEO Checklist (for 2027) (2026-10-20)

Don't worry if this seems like it's a pain in the ass for someone who doesn't build websites. That's because it is. The good news: just click the link below, pull the trigger, and we'll take care of the rest.