A checklist for effective SEO QA

Engineering teams usually have a quality assurance (QA) process.

Without it, they risk releasing work that hurts the user experience and creates unforeseen technical issues – including major SEO problems.

That’s where SEO QA comes in. Adding SEO-specific checks to existing QA protocols helps teams catch and fix issues before they go live.

But this step is less common than you’d think. Too often, it’s overlooked.

This article outlines what it takes to build an effective SEO QA discipline and provides a checklist SEOs and QA engineers can use to cover their bases.

Why SEO QA gets overlooked

Unless SEO is fully integrated with engineering, SEO-specific QA often gets overlooked.

As a result, SEOs may not flag problems until a tech audit – or worse, when they show up as organic KPI declines. 

This is especially common when SEO teams sit under marketing instead of product or engineering, since they’re excluded from regular milestones and lifecycle meetings. 

That makes it harder to communicate SEO’s importance, win buy-in, and establish it as part of everyday development.

Having a QA team within engineering is also no longer a given.

In agile environments, some teams prioritize speed over fully clean rollouts.

Others rely on AI tools to automate QA or monitor for technical issues, instead of employing dedicated QA engineers.

In short, there are plenty of reasons many teams lack a well-developed SEO QA practice.

What are the benefits of SEO QA?

For SEOs to be able to proactively find and resolve issues before they go out into the world, they need two things on a regular basis:

• Opportunities to view upcoming engineering tickets and flag any that may have potential SEO impact. (A great reason for an SEO representative to be a part of sprint planning meetings.)
• A chance to QA any of the flagged tickets before they hit production.

This has a few key benefits for the business:

• Minimize the chances of deploying code that hurts SEO.
• Catch and correct errors that hit production before they register with search engines.
• Capitalize on SEO opportunities related to engineering work that’s already slotted for development.

The last bullet is just as much of a reason to implement SEO QA as the first two. 

It’s not just about catching bugs, it’s about maximizing value while minimizing resources. 

When SEOs have a chance to see what’s coming up, it allows them to connect the dots between SEO roadmap items and upcoming engineering initiatives to find potential areas of overlap. 

In turn, the business reaps the SEO benefits of work that’s already in motion, rather than spending additional resources to achieve the same goal later. 

Best practices: The 4 Ws of SEO QA

Alright, now that we’ve established why brands need SEO QA, let’s get into the logistics.

Who should perform SEO QA?

Ensure QA is performed by:

• A technical SEO.
• Or an engineer equipped with clear criteria shared by an SEO.

What should they check?

Define a checklist of core, critical SEO items that should be a part of QA for any ticket flagged as having potential SEO impact.

• Refine this checklist on an ongoing basis, tailoring it to the nuances of your web stack, so no one makes the same mistake twice.
• Automate “always-on” checklist items as much as possible to ease the resource burden over time. 
• Supplement your checklist with any additional, project-specific SEO considerations outlined in product requirements documentation. 
• Always check tracking, so no data is lost if GA4 or GTM issues arise.

When should SEO QA happen?

The cadence for SEO QA should mimic the site’s development release cycle and existing engineering QA processes. 

For instance:

• If your site deploys code on two-week sprints, SEO QA should follow the same cadence.
• After each release, run a crawl with JavaScript enabled.
• Sites on platforms like Shopify or WordPress may release – and QA – less often.

Where should QA happen?

Test in staging before anything goes to production. 

Some elements might need to be tested in production if they affect indexing or crawlability of content. 

• Example: The staging site might have the robots.txt set to disallow all URLs, since you don’t want staging to get indexed.

Implement monitoring tools as a safeguard that helps catch any errors that somehow make it to production.

• Google Search Console: Make sure your account is set up, notifications are coming through, and check for issues weekly. 
• Third-party crawlers: Set up a weekly crawl in any SEO tool, such as Semrush, Ahrefs, or Sitebulb.
• Dedicated SEO monitoring toolsets: If you have the budget, certain third-party tools provide real-time auditing and monitoring. 

Building an SEO QA checklist

When SEO requests development work, they write the acceptance criteria in the product requirements and review the work before release.

But not all tickets that affect SEO go through that process, which makes an SEO QA checklist essential.

The checklist can be used by any SEO or QA engineer on any release flagged for SEO impact.

It’s a comprehensive list of core items, organized by category, to ensure issues don’t reach production.

Crawling

For pages to get indexed, search engines need to access URLs, crawl the content, and use it as context. 

That’s pretty fundamental to SEO, and a big reason we start here.

Note: Crawl issues often impact large swaths of the site because changes can occur across an entire page template or subfolder.

• Robots.txt: New or removed disallows that might impact URLs you do or don’t want crawled.
  • Are crawlers blocked from the site?
  • Are there any subfolders or parameters blocked that shouldn’t be? 
  • Are images or resources like JavaScript blocked?
• Meta robots tags: Unintended changes from index to noindex, standard to nofollow, or vice versa.
• Canonical tags: Were canonical URLs added, removed, or changed in ways that will cause issues?
  • For example:
    • Did Page 2+ of paginated listing pages canonicalize back to Page 1? 
    • Are filtered URLs properly canonicalized based on whether you want them indexed?
• HTTP status codes: 3{xx} (redirect), 4{xx} (not available), or 5{xx} (server) errors resulting from changes
• URL path: Changes to existing URLs that were not previously discussed with the SEO team.
• Redirects: Are new redirects working properly, or did something break existing redirects?
• Internal links: Are they coded using an <a href> tag, so crawlers can identify them?

Content changes

Are all of the following still available and correct?

• Navigation and footer.
• Breadcrumbs.
• SEO titles.
• Meta descriptions.
• Headings and other on-page copy.
• Internal and external links.
• Images, videos, and other media.
• Related and recommended items widget.
• User-generated content (especially reviews).
• E-E-A-T signals, including author bylines and bios.
• Hreflang and internationalization features.
• Structured data: Is it crawlable, parsable, accurate, and reflecting visible information on the page? (Note: Google’s Schema Markup Testing Tool won’t work on staging URLs since crawlers are (hopefully!) blocked.)

JavaScript and CSS

You can see CSS issues because they visually impact the page. 

For JavaScript issues, you’ll need tools to understand whether crawlers can access critical content. 

Unless you’re already running a sitewide crawl with JavaScript enabled, test one or two pages from the affected template (i.e., blog, listing, product detail) using a tool like Rendering Difference Engine.

• Page elements applicable to the template are available and functioning as intended, including pop-outs, filtering, sort function, and pagination.
• Any page content that loads after a user interaction is available in HTML that search engines can crawl.
• If the site serves source HTML, are key elements of the page different in the rendered HTML, such as:
  • Meta robots.
  • Canonicals.
  • Titles.
  • Meta descriptions.
  • Page copy.
  • Internal links.
  • External links.

Mobile

Google crawls mobile-first. So if you’re only checking on desktop, you’re skipping SEO QA.

• Does it look and function as it should? 
• Are there any accessibility issues on a smaller screen? 
• Is there consistency between the desktop and mobile versions of the site?

Tracking

If it’s not part of QA, broken tracking is a recipe for panic. 

The team will not find the issue until they see KPIs like organic traffic decline. 

Even worse, until it’s fixed, that’s historical data that you won’t get back. 

Before launch on staging, check if:

• All pages and templates have tracking code available.

The day after launch, verify that:

• Internal analytics platform doesn’t show significant declines in KPIs or discrepancies with external reporting tools (e.g., GSC).

Optional: A/B testing

Not all A/B testing tools distinguish the control and variant for crawlers. 

They’re usually served one or the other version of the page randomly, which means your variant could impact SEO.

• Aside from the variable, the pages should be identical to a crawler.

Refine over time

With every round of QA, engineers and SEOs will learn nuances and find new connections. 

You’ll discover that certain types of updates are more likely to cause certain types of SEO issues, certain plugins are linked to certain types of problems, etc.

Your SEO QA checklist is a living, breathing document and a place to document all of this to make SEO QA more effective – and avoid repeating mistakes – no matter who’s carrying it out. 

Start with the list below and make it your own over time.