SEO guide · 9 min read

The 2026 SEO Checklist, Taken Straight From Google's Own Guidance

Forget the tricks. Google publishes what it wants, in plain English. Here is that guidance turned into a checklist you can work through in an afternoon.

Most SEO advice aimed at small businesses is either a decade old or invented to sell something. Google, meanwhile, publishes what it actually wants and updates it. This checklist is that guidance, translated into work you can do, in the order we would do it for a client.

Google's helpful content documentation contains a list of questions to ask about your own pages. Answer them honestly about your top five pages before writing anything new.

Google assesses experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust. Small businesses usually have plenty of the first and show almost none of it. If you have fitted three hundred kitchens or run social accounts for forty restaurants, that is the raw material: photographs of your own work, the mistakes you see repeatedly, what a job really costs and how long it really takes.