What this SEO checklist for Nepal covers
This SEO checklist for Nepal websites condenses the technical and on-page checklists on this site into 25 checks you can run yourself with free tools. Work through the on-page items first, then the content, technical, and internal-linking checks, in that order. Every item you cannot tick is the next thing to fix.
An SEO checklist is a fixed, repeatable list of on-page, content, technical and linking checks that you run on every page before you publish it, and again after any redesign, migration or ranking drop. It turns auditing from a one-off project into a routine.
Over 78% of Nepal's internet traffic comes from mobile devices, so run every speed and mobile check on this list against a phone-sized viewport first and treat desktop as the secondary view. Google has used mobile-first indexing since 2023, which means the phone version of your page is the version it ranks.
The full instructions behind each area sit in the two checklists this page consolidates, the technical SEO checklist and the on-page SEO checklist. A printable one-page version of all 25 items is available as a one-page PDF checklist. Re-run the audit quarterly. If the technical half is more than you want to carry, my technical SEO service takes that side.
The 25 checks at a glance
The checklist splits into four areas. This table shows what each area verifies and the free tool that does most of the work:
| Area | Items | What you are verifying | Free tool |
|---|---|---|---|
| On-page SEO | 1-7 | Titles, meta descriptions, headings, keyword placement, images, E-E-A-T | Browser view-source |
| Content | 8-11 | Intent match, scannability, freshness, original value | Google search results |
| Technical SEO | 12-20 | Crawlability, indexation, speed, mobile, HTTPS, schema, redirects | Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights |
| Links and URLs | 21-25 | URL hygiene, internal links, orphan pages, 404s, hreflang | Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs) |
On-page SEO checks (items 1-7)
These are the checks you control page by page, taken from the on-page checklist. The single highest-impact item is the title tag, because it is both a ranking signal and the text that wins the click in search results.
- Title tag: primary keyword near the front, under about 60 characters, unique across the site
- Meta description: 150-160 characters, keyword included, written as a pitch with a call to action
- H1: one per page, containing the primary keyword and matching the page's topic
- Heading hierarchy: H2 and H3 nested logically, no skipped levels, descriptive wording
- Keyword placement: primary keyword present in seven places - title tag, H1, URL, first 100 words, one H2, image alt text, meta description
- Images: descriptive alt text under 125 characters, width and height set, WebP or AVIF format
- E-E-A-T signals: author byline with credentials, first-person experience, visible publish and update dates
Content checks (items 8-11)
Content checks decide whether the page deserves the rankings the other checks make possible. They take the longest because they involve reading rather than tooling, and they are where most self-run audits stop too early.
- Search intent: content matches the intent of the target query - study the top five ranking results before writing
- Scannability: paragraphs kept to 2-4 sentences, with lists and headings breaking up the page
- Freshness: statistics and examples current, outdated sections pruned rather than left to age
- Original value: your own data, examples or analysis, something the ranking competitors do not have
Technical SEO checks (items 12-20)
These come from the technical checklist, and they are where Nepal websites typically lose the most ground. Google's Core Web Vitals thresholds for a good score are LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds, and CLS under 0.1, and three of the nine items below exist just to enforce them.
- Robots.txt: exists, blocks only admin and staging areas, and declares the XML sitemap
- XML sitemap: contains only indexable URLs and is submitted in Google Search Console
- Canonical tags: self-referencing on every indexable page, on the HTTPS domain version you chose
- No stray noindex: no staging noindex tag left behind after launch - the most common launch-day mistake on Nepal sites
- HTTPS: on every page with no mixed content, and 301 redirects from the HTTP version
- Core Web Vitals: LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds, CLS under 0.1
- Mobile rendering: responsive layout, tap targets at least 48x48 pixels, 16px base font, no horizontal scroll
- Schema markup: present and validating - LocalBusiness or Service, BreadcrumbList, Article
- Redirects: every 301 resolves in one hop, with no chains or loops anywhere on the site
Links and URL checks (items 21-25)
The final area covers how pages connect. Internal links are how Google discovers and weights pages, and URL hygiene is how it confirms what each page is before it even loads.
- URL structure: short, lowercase, hyphen-separated, at most 3-4 directory levels deep
- Click depth: every important page reachable within three clicks of the homepage
- Internal links: no orphan pages, and roughly 3-5 internal links per 1,000 words with descriptive anchor text
- Broken links: no internal links pointing to 404s, and a custom 404 page returning a proper 404 status
- Hreflang: bilingual Nepali-English sites carry hreflang tags with ne and en codes plus x-default, reciprocal on both versions
How to run this SEO audit checklist in Nepal
A checklist only pays off if you run it in an order that surfaces the big failures first. This is the sequence:
- Crawl the site with Screaming Frog's free tier (up to 500 URLs): one crawl exports broken links, redirect chains, missing canonicals and duplicate titles.
- Read Google Search Console: open the Pages report and list every exclusion - noindex, redirect, duplicate without user-selected canonical.
- Run PageSpeed Insights on your ten most-visited pages, mobile scores first.
- View-source your five money pages and tick items 1-7 by hand.
- Test from Nepal: a page that loads in 1.5 seconds from a US server can take five or more for Kathmandu users, so test through a VPN set to Kathmandu or have someone in Nepal load it.
- Fix in impact order: indexation blockers first, then speed, then schema, then everything else.
Three Nepal-specific failure modes account for most of what this process finds: budget shared hosting (the NPR 500-1,500 a year plans) producing slow server response, which the free Cloudflare CDN partly offsets; WordPress sites running 20+ plugins where 8-10 would do, which drags INP; and the staging noindex tag from item 15 that ships live by mistake after launch.
Frequently asked questions
The short version
Run all 25 checks quarterly, and immediately after any redesign, migration or plugin change. Tick what passes, fix what fails in the impact order above, and record the date. That routine, not any single tool, is what an SEO checklist for Nepal websites is for.
If you would rather have the 25 items handed back to you as a prioritised action plan with the fixes scoped, that is exactly what a professional audit covers.