Most SEO advice hands you a list and leaves you to work out how to do any of it. Every check below has a free tool on this site that runs it for you, and they are ordered so the problems that stop a page ranking at all turn up before the ones that fine-tune it.
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Run these in sequence and a broken site fails on check one instead of check eight. A page carrying a noindex directive cannot rank however fast it loads, so speed work on that page is time spent on nothing. The order below goes from the failures that remove a page from search entirely, through the ones that decide whether it deserves to rank, to the ones that improve how it appears once it does.
Work through them on one important page first. The same 8 checks then apply to any page on the site, and you will know which ones your site tends to fail.
A page carrying a noindex directive cannot rank, whatever else is right about it. The directive hides in four places, and most checkers read only the meta tag. The other three are the X-Robots-Tag header, the canonical pointing elsewhere, and a robots.txt rule that stops Google seeing the page well enough to read any of them.
Why it is number 1: This is first because it is binary. Everything below it is wasted effort on a page Google has been told to ignore.
Run the Noindex CheckerA single Disallow line can remove a whole section of a site from search. Rules are matched longest-first, so a broad block deeper in the file quietly beats the narrow Allow above it, and the file reads as though the page is permitted.
Why it is number 2: Robots mistakes are silent. Nothing errors, traffic simply never arrives for the blocked paths.
Run the Robots.txt TesterBlocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot removes you from the answers those assistants give. Many sites block them by accident, through a security plugin or a copied robots file, and never see it because nothing about the site looks broken.
Why it is number 3: AI search is where the audience moved. A block here costs visibility that no ranking report shows.
Run the AI Crawler Access CheckerContent that only appears after JavaScript runs is invisible to most AI crawlers. Googlebot renders JavaScript. Most assistant crawlers do not, so a page that looks complete in a browser can arrive at them nearly empty.
Why it is number 4: This is the most common cause of a page that ranks in Google and never appears in an AI answer.
Run the Can AI See Your PageSpeed matters at the threshold, not on a score out of 100. Core Web Vitals are pass or fail against three specific numbers, and a page comfortably inside them gains nothing from going faster. Most speed work is spent on pages that already pass.
Why it is number 5: It tells you whether to spend the engineering time, which a score alone never does.
Run the Page Speed ScoreGoogle looks for the words and word pairs a query implies, and it weighs where they sit. The system is named in Google's own trial documents: terms that should appear prominently on pages relevant to that query. A page can mention the topic and still never say what it is about in the first screen.
Why it is number 6: It separates a page that is off-topic from one that is on-topic and buried, which need opposite fixes.
Run the Is My Page Worth RankingPages that restate what already ranks get demoted, regardless of how well they are optimised. Stock phrases, hedging and unsourced claims are the surface symptoms. The real problem is a page with no information the index does not already hold.
Why it is number 7: It scores the two things that matter separately: how much filler is present, and how much genuinely new information the page adds.
Run the AI Slop Content CheckerInvalid schema wins no rich results and can be ignored entirely. Google reads structured data to understand what a page describes, and a single malformed property drops the whole block rather than the one field.
Why it is number 8: Rich results are the cheapest visible win in search, and they fail silently when the markup is wrong.
Run the Schema ValidatorA page that passes all 8 is technically sound and on-topic, which is the starting line rather than the finish. From there the work splits in two directions, and the free material on this site covers both.
