Mission Build Your SEO Foundation Checklist

Your task is to produce a single-page SEO Foundation Checklist for your own site (or a site you manage) covering the three pillars, intent alignment, E-E-A-T signals, and the free measurement tools — then complete every item against the real site, not a hypothetical one. This mission is deliberately comprehensive: it's meant to be the reference document you return to for every new project going forward.

For every check record the URL or site scope, evidence source, observation date, result and next action. Use Passed, Needs work, Unavailable or Not applicable with a reason. Missing access or a failed provider request is unavailable evidence, not a successful check or a zero ranking.

Structure it in four sections mirroring this track: Technical & Crawlability, Content & Intent, Trust & E-E-A-T, and Measurement Setup. Choose checks relevant to your site rather than a fixed quota. Write testable statements: 'the sampled checkout URL redirects from HTTP to HTTPS' or 'the authorised Search Console property is verified', not 'the site is secure' or 'tracking is complete'.

Where an earlier lesson gave you a bulleted checklist, borrow directly from it — this mission is explicitly designed to be assembled from material you've already learned, not researched from scratch.

Use available RankAudit findings to investigate technical problems, then inspect the actual URL and retest. A crawl score cannot establish Google indexing, genuine author expertise or working analytics events. Check indexing with Search Console URL Inspection, review trust claims manually and test measurement in the appropriate analytics reports.

Save the dated evidence as a baseline. For each issue name an owner, priority, next action and retest date. If evidence is inaccessible, record the blocker and what access is needed instead of marking the foundation complete.

A completed mission means a reviewable checklist, not a claim that every SEO problem is fixed. Include evidence for passed checks, owned actions for problems, documented blockers and reasons for exclusions. Prioritise issues affecting important customer journeys and verify the result after each change.

Continue into keyword research to turn customer questions and observed search results into a page plan, then use the On-Page SEO track for execution. Keep unresolved foundation work visible rather than clearing it to advance to the next course.

An evidence-based checklist makes unresolved work visible and repeatable. It supports investigation and prioritisation without promising that technical eligibility guarantees indexing or rankings.

Check whether directives are intentional before changing them. Robots.txt controls crawling; a noindex directive must be crawlable for Google to see it. A canonical is a signal, not a guaranteed indexing choice. Investigate important blocked or unavailable customer journeys first, then prioritise remaining work using actual impact and effort.

Build a reviewable checklist in a document or worksheet using the lessons and available RankAudit evidence; do not rely on an unsupported Checklist Builder feature.