An SEO checklistfor a smallbusiness site
An SEO checklist for a small business site: what is worth checking before you publish and during the first month afterwards. No link buying and no “top three in a fortnight”: the technical base first, then copy written around the questions your customers actually ask, then patience. It reads the same on a subscription site from 12,800 ₸ a month and on a bespoke build from 1,500,000 ₸.
10
items closed before you publish
6
things not worth doing in month one
12,800 ₸
a month — speed and mobile layout already configured
3–6 months
before search traffic becomes noticeable
Ten items to close before anyone sees the site
The order is not arbitrary: first what stops a search engine reading the site, then what stops a person staying on it. Every item is checked by hand, with no paid tools — if a check needs a subscription, you do not need that check in month one.
Do before launch
One evening's work if the site is already built
- Every page has its own title and description — not “Home” and not an empty field
- Exactly one h1 per page, with h2 → h3 for structure rather than font sizes
- Readable page addresses: /services/teeth-cleaning, not /page?id=27
- The site opens on a phone with no sideways scrolling and no pinch-to-zoom
- The home page loads in a couple of seconds on mobile data, not ten
- Every photo is compressed and has an alt — that is both speed and image search
- sitemap.xml and robots.txt are served at their own addresses and block nothing wholesale
- Organisation markup is in place: name, address, phone, opening hours
- Phone, address and hours match on the site, in 2GIS and on the maps — down to the formatting
- Every page has a form or a button that leads to an enquiry
Not needed in month one
Not “bad” — simply no effect this early
- Buying links: on a young site that is wasted money and added risk
- Writing forty pages of text “for volume”
- Installing five analytics systems at once
- Picking keywords by search volume without ever talking to your own customers
- Chasing 100/100 in PageSpeed when the site already loads in two seconds
- Expecting rankings after a week and rebuilding the site when they do not appear
1
h1 per page
Not zero and not three. The most common mistake in heading markup.
60 chars
the practical ceiling for a title
Past that the search engine truncates the line and writes its own ending.
3
language versions of the site
Each is indexed separately, so each needs its own title, description and copy.
2
files the crawlers read
sitemap.xml and robots.txt. One line in robots.txt hides the whole site.
What to do week by week so you are not doing everything at once
Sequence matters more than speed. Writing copy before the site is indexed is pointless; rewriting it before search data arrives is equally pointless. Each step produces the thing without which the next one becomes guesswork.
Publication day: open the site to crawlers
Confirm robots.txt does not forbid indexing — when a site moves off its staging address, the block travels with the file. Serve sitemap.xml and add the site to Google Search Console and Yandex Webmaster.
The site is visible to search engines
Week one: directories and maps
A business listing on Google Business Profile and 2GIS: the same category, the same phone and address as the site, your own photographs. For a business with a street address in Almaty this brings the first enquiries sooner than organic search does.
The first arrivals from maps
Week two: check what actually got indexed
In Search Console, look at which pages were accepted, which were rejected and why. Close duplicates, empty drafts and utility addresses now, while there are ten of them rather than a hundred.
A list of problem pages
Weeks three and four: copy for what people ask
Write down the questions customers ask in messages and on the phone, and answer them on the service pages. Those are your search queries — phrased by people rather than by a keyword tool.
Pages that answer real questions
End of month: read the report and rebuild nothing
By now Search Console shows the first impressions and the first queries. There are few of them; that is normal. The month's job was never to rank — it was to gather the data that tells you what to write next.
Data instead of guesses
How real people phrase a search
Six things that most often break your listing
None of them is about “algorithms”. They are the places where a search engine simply cannot work out what your page is, and shows somebody else's instead.
The title in the results is the only advert you get there
The title answers “is this the thing I am looking for?”; the description answers “is it worth a click?”. Write them separately for every page and start with the substance: “Air Flow teeth cleaning in Almaty — 40 minutes” beats “Home | Our company” every time. If the description is missing, search engines assemble one from a random piece of the page, usually the menu.
Headings are a table of contents, not a font size
One h1 per page, h2 for sections and h3 inside them. A subheading made by bolding a line does not exist as far as a crawler is concerned — the page's structure stays flat to it.
Two seconds on mobile data
The bottleneck is almost always the same one: uncompressed photographs weighing several megabytes. Compress the images and drop the surplus scripts before you go looking for a deeper cause.
Test on a phone, not in a narrow browser window
Do not ask whether the layout survived; ask whether one thumb can get from the headline to a submitted enquiry — are the prices readable, does the finger land on the button, does a pop-up cover the form. Customers open the site on a phone and rarely give it a second try: awkward means gone.
Two files nobody ever opens
sitemap.xml lists the pages, robots.txt says where not to go. The classic accident: a site moves off its staging address together with the robots.txt that blocked everything, and goes a month without being indexed. On the subscription both files, the canonical control and the analytics tab are handled by the SEO Advanced module — 4,900 ₸ a month, with nothing to edit by hand.
Address and phone, machine-readable
Organisation markup hands search engines the name, address, phone and opening hours explicitly. That is what the business card beside the result is built from — the one that says “open until 20:00” at a glance.
One list, three different ways to close it
There are three ways to close the technical half of this checklist, and they do not cost the same. An INIT subscription closes the technical work on publication day — from 12,800 ₸ a month: speed and mobile layout are already configured, and sitemap, robots and canonical control come with the SEO Advanced module at 4,900 ₸ a month. A builder from scratch hands you a blank canvas and every technical setting to configure by hand. An unusual catalogue or an integration is work we do ourselves, bespoke from 1,500,000 ₸ — no need to change supplier.
| INIT site on a subscription | Builder from scratch | Bespoke build by INIT | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost to start | from 12,800 ₸/mo | subscription + a designer's fee | from 1,500,000 ₸ |
| A page structure built for your trade on publication day | |||
| Speed and mobile layout are the platform's job, not yours | |||
| Three language versions, each with its own copy and metadata | |||
| Title and description edited from the admin panel in a minute | |||
| Sitemap, robots and canonical under your control | SEO Advanced module, 4,900 ₸/mo | ||
| A blog for pages built around individual queries | Blog module, 1,900 ₸/mo | ||
| Keyword research and new copy every month | your work | your work | agreed separately |
| An unusual catalogue and integration with 1C or a CRM | INIT development, from 1,500,000 ₸ |
A dash means “depends how much you are willing to configure by hand”. No column does the keyword research or the regular writing for you: that stays with whoever knows the business. The subscription closes the technical work on publication day, with sitemap, robots and canonical handled by the SEO Advanced module: a landing page is 12,800 ₸ a month, a corporate site 14,700 ₸, the SEO Advanced module 4,900 ₸, the blog 1,900 ₸. Bespoke work: a landing page from 1,500,000 ₸, a corporate site from 3,000,000 ₸, an online shop from 5,000,000 ₸. What each plan includes is on the pricing page.
SEO does not pay out in a week. The first reliable data arrives after a month; noticeable traffic after three to six.
Anyone promising the top three in a fortnight is selling you either links or a query nobody searches for anyway. The checklist above does not speed search up — it removes the reasons a site fails to grow at all. While that time passes, maps, directories and direct visits are what work, which is exactly why they sit in week one of the plan and not the last.
For a business with an address, maps matter more than rankings
Someone who needs a garage or a dentist searches for one “near me” — and lands in a map, not in ten blue links. This part of the checklist pays back fastest and needs neither a budget nor a contractor.
Pages built around queries, and internal linking without the zealotry
Copy is the one part of the checklist no setting can close. In exchange there are only four rules, and common sense checks all of them.
One page, one query
“Teeth cleaning”, “whitening” and “implants” are three pages, not three paragraphs on one. Otherwise the search engine picks which query to show the page for, and it usually picks the wrong one.
Write what people actually ask you
Open your customer messages and copy the questions out verbatim. “How long does it last”, “does it hurt”, “are you open at weekends” — those are the queries. A keyword tool will show you the same ones later and without the context.
Link by meaning, not by list
From a service page, link to prices and to the neighbouring service. From an article, link to the page that solves the problem described. A “read also” block of ten random links helps neither the reader nor the crawler.
Do not breed near-duplicate pages
Two nearly identical pages for “fridge repair” and “cheap fridge repair” compete with each other and both slip. One page that answers both questions is better.
Values you can see with your own eyes, and tools that cost nothing
The figures below are reference points, not thresholds: a page with a 65-character title will not drop out of search. But if you miss all of them at once, the problem is usually not SEO — it is that the page was never finished.
Metadata and headings
Technical files
Connect in week one
What people ask once the checklist has been read
Five questions about timelines, budget and what you can close yourself.
Run the checklist against your site — or build a new one and close it straight away
A 3-day trial, no card. A technical address is issued immediately, and speed and mobile layout are already configured. After that a landing page is 12,800 ₸ a month, a corporate site 14,700 ₸, and sitemap, robots and canonical control come with the SEO Advanced module at 4,900 ₸. Need an unusual catalogue or an integration with 1C? We build it: a landing page from 1,500,000 ₸, a corporate site from 3,000,000 ₸.
- A your-name.shardit.app address is issued immediately
- Titles, descriptions and headings are edited from the admin panel, no developer needed
- No card during the trial and nothing is charged
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