The core five
One: title tag, under 60 characters, keyword-forward, unique across the site. Two: meta description that earns the click — a CTR asset, not a ranking one. Three: a single H1 matching search intent. Four: URL that a human could guess the topic from. Five: the first 100 words actually answer the query.
These five decide whether your page deserves to exist in the SERP at all.
Structure checks
Heading hierarchy that reads like an outline, not decoration. Internal links to and from related pages. Images with real alt text — this is both accessibility and entity signal. Tables and lists where the data suits them; they're snippet fuel.
Then depth: every money page within three clicks of the homepage, or the crawl budget math quietly works against you.
Quality checks
Word count appropriate to the intent — not padded. E-E-A-T visible: author, credentials, sources, dates. And something genuinely better than position two; if you can't name it, neither can Google.
Thin pages linked from strong pages waste both. Consolidate or cut before building links to the cluster.
The technical pairing
Fast loading, mobile-first rendering, working schema — the boring layer that decides whether the interesting layer gets crawled properly. Core Web Vitals won't rank you alone, but they leak conversions and crawl efficiency when bad.
Run the full fifteen before ordering links. Link campaigns on broken pages are how budgets die quietly.
Frequently Asked Questions
No. Natural coverage of the topic beats any density target. Write for the question, not the counter.
Money pages quarterly, content pages when they lose positions. Audit-on-decline beats audit-by-calendar.