Most agencies describe SEO in vague terms. We run a defined, 240-point checklist across fourteen disciplines behind our SEO services, covering everything from whether a page can be crawled at all to whether an AI assistant can quote it accurately. Not every item applies to every business: the scope is tuned by business model, risk, area, and platform. Here's the checklist, discipline by discipline, and it's the same one built into every done-for-you website we ship.
The fourteen disciplines
1.Technical SEO & Crawlability
Thirty items, the largest single discipline, because nothing else matters if a page cannot be found and read. It covers whether the site is indexable, a sitemap that updates itself as pages change, a robots.txt that lets crawlers in without exposing what it should not, clean canonical tags, one consistent URL format, and a check for orphan pages with no internal links. A page that would otherwise rank well but that Google never fully crawls is a page that never shows up.
2.Structured Data
Twenty-one items covering the markup that tells Google and AI assistants, in a format they read directly, who a business is, what it offers, and where it serves: LocalBusiness or Organization schema, a Service entry for each offering, FAQPage markup on pages with real questions, and one entity graph tying the organization to its services and pages. Every piece has to describe something visible on the page. Schema for content that is not there is a policy violation, not a shortcut.
3.Core Web Vitals & Performance
Twenty-one items aimed at three thresholds: how fast the biggest piece of content loads, how quickly the page responds to a tap, and whether anything shifts while it loads. That means next-gen image formats, correctly sized images, fonts and scripts that do not block rendering, and a CDN in front of it all. It is checked monthly because it drifts, and a visitor who has to wait does not become a lead.
4.On-Page SEO
Twenty items that build every page around the exact search it is supposed to answer: a clear heading structure, a title and description that describe the page truthfully, a keyword mapped to real search intent, internal links with real anchor text, and content that answers the question rather than circling it. This is also where cannibalization gets caught: two pages quietly competing for the same search.
5.Content & Landing Pages
Sixteen items covering the pages that capture demand directly: a dedicated landing page or a full lead-generation site for each service and area a business genuinely serves, the same approach behind our contractor and trades websites, kept unique rather than templated, organized into topical clusters, and refreshed on a schedule. Stale content gets pruned or rebuilt, since pages untouched for a year make up a smaller share of what AI engines tend to cite.
6.Local SEO
Twenty-four items, the second-largest discipline, built around the fact that most local searches never leave the map pack: a completed Google Business Profile, the right categories, consistent name, address, and phone details everywhere the business is listed, a review program that asks every customer, and localized pages for each area served. It is the same playbook behind our Stockton-area SEO work.
7.Off-Page & Authority
Fourteen items covering reputation earned off a business's own website: a backlink baseline, a look at competitors' link profiles, outreach for genuinely relevant editorial links, and monitoring for toxic links nobody asked for. Branded mentions are tracked separately, since a business talked about by name across the web correlates with showing up in AI-generated answers.
8.AI-Search Optimization (AEO)
Thirty-two items, the largest discipline in the checklist and the one most competitors have not built a process for: publishing and maintaining llms.txt files, deciding which AI crawlers to allow, writing content as self-contained answers an AI can quote without distortion, enrolling in Bing Webmaster Tools since Bing's index feeds Copilot, and tracking whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews mention the business. It is the subject of our page on AI search optimization, and of what AEO even means if the term is still new.
9.Analytics, Tracking & Reporting
Twenty items that turn all of the above into a number a business owner can look at: Search Console and GA4 configured correctly, call and form tracking tied to source, AI-referral traffic tracked as its own channel, and a monthly report in plain English covering what changed and what is next. Without this, every other discipline is a guess.
10.Monitoring & Maintenance
Seventeen items that watch for what goes wrong quietly: uptime, broken links, an SSL certificate about to expire, a redirect chain from an unrelated change, or a sudden drop in indexed pages. Structured data gets re-validated after every deploy, and a full technical audit runs on schedule. This is the discipline that catches the slow leak before it becomes one.
11.Risk Controls & Policy Compliance
Eight items, the guardrails that make scaling the rest of this safe: no doorway pages, no fake locations or incentivized reviews, no hidden text or schema for content not actually on the page, and no paid link schemes. Every client's risk tolerance is documented up front, because growth that an algorithm update can erase in a week is not worth chasing.
12.Content Governance & E-E-A-T
Five items covering clear authorship, a fact-checking and citation standard for statistics, and a rule that any AI-assisted draft gets a human edit before it goes live. Content that reads as genuinely checked is treated differently, by both Google and AI, than content shipped without a second look.
13.Accessibility & UX
Six items: semantic HTML, labeled form fields, visible keyboard focus, sufficient color contrast, and descriptive alt text on meaningful images. These exist for actual visitors first, and double as quality signals search engines read as evidence of a well-built site.
14.AEO Evidence & Citation Hygiene
Six items, and the newest discipline in the checklist: citing factual claims with sources, dating anything time-sensitive, writing answers that can be quoted without distortion, and periodically re-checking whether AI engines still cite the business, since that visibility shifts rather than staying earned once won.
Why it's a monthly program
Roughly 136 of the 240 items are ongoing rather than one-time. Rankings shift, competitors invest, algorithms update, AI engines change what they cite, and content goes stale, so the work never stops. It runs on a cadence: monthly on the Growth and Complete plans, quarterly on Starter.
Done the right way
Every point follows the search engines' own published guidelines. Growth that a policy update can erase overnight is not growth we build toward. No risky shortcuts, no tricks that win this month and cost you the next.
Frequently asked questions
How does the 240-point checklist turn into ongoing monthly work instead of a one-time project?
The one-time items get finished first: schema, technical fixes, tracking, the first batch of landing pages. From there, the roughly 136 ongoing items move into a recurring cadence, monthly for Growth and Complete, quarterly for Starter.
Is the same 240-item checklist run identically for every client?
No. Not every item applies to every business. The scope is tuned by business model, risk tolerance, service area, and platform, so a single-location business and a multi-city one end up with a different mix of the same 240 items.
Why does AI-search optimization make up more of the checklist than any other discipline?
It is the newest discipline, thirty-two items, and still being defined. Structuring content for an AI to quote accurately and deciding which AI crawlers to allow are things most SEO checklists have not caught up to yet.
Does the checklist itself change as Google and AI search change?
Yes. It is built to be revised, not frozen. Google retired its sitemap-ping endpoint, which is why the checklist now points to IndexNow for notifying Bing and other AI-adjacent search partners of changes.
Does Morton Growth actually run this process on its own website?
Yes. The image optimization, the llms.txt and llms-full.txt files, the entity schema graph, and the clean canonicals and Core Web Vitals on this site are the same items on the checklist, run on our own pages first.
If you'd like this running for your business, get a free consultation →