Start with the crawl
Before you chase rankings, make sure a crawler can reach and parse your most important pages. Fix blocking rules and rendering issues first.
The checklist
- A complete, current sitemap.xml
- Clean, descriptive URLs and title tags
- Schema markup on core pages
- Fast, mobile-first pages with no render-blocking offenders
- Canonical tags and sensible internal linking
Where to spend the hour
For most mid-market sites, a clean crawl, fast pages, and clear titles outrank marginal on-page tweaks. Measure, then iterate.