SEO content strategy: an on-page and audit checklist, sourced from Google

What the specialism owns

An SEO content strategist is a content strategist whose distribution argument is search. The responsibilities, audiences, decisions and measurement, are covered in what a web content strategist does, and the role's place among the others in web content roles. What changes in this specialism is the evidence base, and the folklore load.

Search work carries more unsourced statistics than almost any other corner of marketing: character counts, percentage lifts, optimal cadences. This page does the opposite. Everything below is either Google's own documented guidance, quoted and linked, or stated reasoning with no number attached.

What Google documents, versus what circulates

The quotations in this section come from Google's SEO Starter Guide.

The claim that circulates	What Google documents
Titles must be 50 to 60 characters, and lift click-through by up to 20%	"a good title is unique to the page, clear and concise, and accurately describes the contents of the page." No character count, no percentage.
Meta descriptions must be 150 to 160 characters and raise click-through by 5.8%	Snippets are usually drawn from page content; the meta description is used "occasionally". Google's standard: "A good meta description is short, unique to one particular page, and includes the most relevant points of the page."
Longer articles rank better	"The length of the content alone doesn't matter for ranking purposes."
Headings must follow strict keyword order for ranking	Semantic heading order is "fantastic for screen readers", and Google states it "doesn't matter if you're using them out of order" for ranking. Structure headings for readers.
Long-tail keywords are 70% of all searches	No checkable source exists. The useful part of the idea, that specific queries signal specific intent, stands without the number.
Audit every 6 to 12 months	"Check in on previously published content and update it as needed, or even delete it if it's not relevant anymore." Cadence should follow traffic decay and site events, not a fixed interval.

Google is also blunt about the ceiling on all of it: "There are no secrets here that'll automatically rank your site first in Google (sorry!)." Anyone selling a formula Google has not published is selling folklore or worse.

The on-page checklist

Check	What good looks like
One page, one purpose	The page exists to answer one identifiable need, and its title states it
Title	Unique to the page, clear and concise, accurately descriptive
Meta description	A short, page-specific summary of the most relevant points, treated as a suggestion Google may not use
Headings	Structured for a reader: an H1 for the page topic, then a logical outline
Language	Anticipates the words a searcher would use, without stuffing; keyword stuffing violates Google's spam policies
Content	Unique rather than rehashed, current, and written for people first; Google's language matching understands pages beyond exact-match strings
Links	Internal links with descriptive anchor text; URLs that are readable words
Images	Descriptive alt text, because it is how search and screen readers see the image

The audit checklist

Step	The work
Inventory	Crawl or export every indexable page, with its URL, title and last-updated date
Performance	Pull each page's queries, impressions and clicks from Search Console
Intent match	For each page, ask whether it answers the queries it actually earns; the gap is the work
Cannibalisation	Find pages competing for the same query and decide which one owns it
Decide	Per page: refresh, consolidate or retire. Google's guidance licenses deletion: content no longer relevant should be deleted, not left to decay
Record	Log the decision and date, so the next audit starts from evidence rather than memory

Run the full audit when something triggers it: sustained traffic decay on pages that matter, a site migration, or a change in what the organisation sells. Between audits, keep a light quarterly pass over the pages that carry the business.

Keywords without folklore

Keyword research survives the loss of its fake numbers. Specific queries signal specific intent, and a page that answers a specific question competes against fewer, better-matched pages. Write for the reader behind the query rather than the exact string, because Google's matching is sophisticated enough to reward that.

The best keyword data source is Search Console's own query report: the actual queries your pages earn today. Commercial tools add competitor estimates and volume, useful and imprecise in equal measure.

What to measure, and when to expect movement

Search Console first: impressions, clicks and position for target queries, because it is Google's own record of how search sees your site. Then conversions from organic visits on the pages that matter. Rankings without a conversion connection are a dashboard, and dashboards without decisions are decoration.

Timing expectations come from Google too: "Some changes might take effect in a few hours, others could take several months. In general, you likely want to wait a few weeks to assess whether your work had beneficial effects." Plan reviews in weeks, and do not judge a page on last Tuesday.

Check what your pages actually earn

Open Search Console and pull the queries for your 10 most important pages. For each, ask one question: does this page answer the query it actually earns? The distance between the query you wanted and the query you got is your work list, and every item on it maps to a row in the checklists above.