Liz MooreheadIf you’re searching for a landing page SEO checklist, I already know the headspace you’re in. Something on your landing page isn’t working the way it should. Traffic is slower than you expected. Conversions are barely moving. Sales are stalled. You’re staring at a landing page that looks fine on the surface, but underneath it there’s this nagging feeling that something is off and you can’t quite diagnose it.
So you start looking for help.
You open Google.
You click a few links. And what do you find?
A bunch of recycled 2018 advice obsessing over title tags, H1s, keyword density and other dated basics you already know, but aren’t helping you anymore. It’s shallow. Most of these lists ignore how AI now shapes search results and visibility. They’re not built for the way content is being evaluated and surfaced today.
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You want to understand why your page isn’t performing and what actually matters in 2026 and beyond, so you can fix it without guessing. You want a landing page SEO checklist that isn’t generic and isn’t written to impress a beginner. You want one that reflects how modern search works and how AI and SEO now function as the same system.
And I’ve got good news for you.
I’ve got your back, and this article will help you.
I’m going to walk you through the checklist I use with clients when they need a landing page that performs. And when I say “performs,” I mean a landing page that ranks, shows up in AI, earns trust and drives the action you need with the buyers you want.
By the time you finish this, you’ll know how to:
- Identify the real intent behind why someone lands on your page (this is where all the magic begins, people)
- Avoid the structural mistakes that confuse crawlers and users
- Understand how AI is interpreting your content and what to fix
- Use schema markup correctly without needing to be a developer
- Build internal signals that help your entire site rank
- Confirm your agency partners are doing the work right
- Test your page the same way an AI model will
Most importantly, you’ll be able to look at your landing page and know exactly why it’s struggling and what changes will give you the biggest lift.
Step 1. Start with user intent
Before you write any copy for your landing page, you need to know why someone is landing on this page in the first place. What are they trying to get done? Are they here to buy something or compare options, or are they just trying to understand a topic before they make a decision? That’s the starting point because your entire page depends on matching what they came for.
Let’s have fun with a super meta example, shall we?
Pretend for a moment that you are creating a landing page around the term “landing page SEO checklist.” What does that tell you about your user intent?
- Your user is not casually browsing. They’re either about to launch something and are nervous it’s going to tank or they’ve already launched something and it’s underperforming.
- They’re also probably stressed (like you are right now), because they’re under pressure to show ROI, and they want clarity.
So, if your landing page on this topic does not speak to their reality, their mindset, their goals, they’ll bounce away. It doesn’t matter how pretty your landing page is.
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This is why intent comes first. A transactional page cannot read like a blog. If someone is ready to buy and you hit them with an educational detour, it’s landing page repellent. They’ll bounce because you didn’t deliver what they showed up to get.
And if they’re early in their journey and still educating themselves, pushing them into a fast conversion will feel like a trap.
Step 2. Write for one person, not the crowd
Now, we’re going to go one layer deeper with user intent.
If you want your landing page to actually land, stop writing like you’re presenting to a room of 500 people. The strongest copy comes from talking to one specific person and meeting them exactly where they are. The best landing page feels like a conversation with someone who has a real problem and is trying to solve it right now.
So, when you sit down to write your copy, picture a single user in your head.
Depending on the context, it can be someone you’ve worked with, someone you made up, or even the person you were when you searched for this topic yourself. What matters is understanding what they’re feeling in the moment they land on your page:
- Are they scrambling because their boss is asking questions?
- Are they trying to prove they’re doing due diligence?
- Are they just trying to get information or compare options?
- Are they ready to buy a specific product, so they’re feeling impatient?
When you write this way, your tone changes. You stop sounding like a textbook and start sounding like a human being who actually understands their situation. Your copy becomes clearer because you’re not trying to cover every possible angle for every possible buyer.
Step 3. Treat AI and SEO as one system
A lot of people still talk about AI and SEO like they’re two separate things. They aren’t.
AI is just the evolution of SEO.
The models powering AI overviews still pull from well structured, well optimized websites. If your content isn’t clear, organized and technically sound, it won’t surface in AI any more than it will in traditional search.
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That’s why you cannot ignore the fundamentals. Clean structure, clear intent and strong signals all matter even more now. AI is scanning for patterns. It’s looking for pages that answer real user questions, cover related topics and make it easy for a model to understand what the page is about.
If you skip that work, you’re invisible.
Sure, search behavior has changed, but the foundation hasn’t.
People are still asking questions and still comparing options. They’re just doing more of it inside AI environments. Your job is to make sure your page is structured in a way that both humans and machines can interpret instantly. When you treat AI and SEO as one system, you build content that performs everywhere.
Step 4. Build clean structure into your page
Your landing page has to be easy for crawlers and AI models to understand. That starts with clean structure.
Use a simple, concise URL that reflects the topic without fillers or prepositions. If this page is about a landing page SEO checklist, the URL should literally be landing page SEO checklist (like this page). Nothing cute. Nothing long. Your job is to make it as clear as possible what the page is.
You also need to make sure every indexable page declares itself correctly. That means checking your canonical tags. If you have duplicates or variations of a page, set a primary canonical so crawlers know which one to follow. And even if you don’t have duplicates, you still need a self-referencing canonical on every page.
It’s one of those quiet technical signals that tells crawlers:
“Hey, you’ve found the right page. This is the page we want you to be on.”
All of this might feel small, but these tiny details are what separate clean websites from chaotic ones. When your structure is clear, AI and traditional search systems can classify your content faster and more accurately, which means you’re not creating unnecessary friction before anyone even reads a word.
Step 5. Build paths that keep users and crawlers moving
There used to be this old best practice where marketers stripped every link off a landing page because they were terrified a visitor might wander off and not fill out the form. That made sense a decade ago, but it does not match how people behave now.
In fact, trapping a user on a page with no other links (except the one button you want them to click) is a great way to make them feel suspicious and annoyed. Their b.s. detectors go off and they leave.
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This is particularly true if they are not ready to convert on the first click. Even if they’re at the right buying stage, they still may need more time. Especially if they’re high-funnel visitors who are still educating themselves. They may want to understand who you are, see more context and get familiar with your expertise before they give you anything.
Crawlers operate the same way. They move through your site by following paths.
If your landing page sits in isolation with no way in or out, it becomes an orphan page. That makes it harder for crawlers to find, classify and rank the page. And if they cannot move through your content, they cannot understand how your pages relate to each other or what your site is actually about.
Step 6. Implement schema markup and validate it
Schema markup is one of the most important parts of landing page SEO today, because it’s the fastest way to help crawlers and AI understand what your page actually is. Think of it as a small piece of code that labels the type of page you’re creating.
When that label is missing or wrong, search engines and AI models have to guess. When it’s correct, they know exactly how to classify your content and where it belongs.
What type of schema you need depends on what type of landing page you’re building:
- For product pages, you need organizational schema, website schema, product schema and review or rating schema if those apply. That combination tells crawlers that you’re a real business, that this is a product and that people interact with it.
- For content-driven landing pages, you should start with article schema. Then layer on FAQ schema if you’re answering user questions and how to schema if you’re walking someone through a process. These signals help AI extract and summarize your content accurately.
The biggest mistake people make is assuming schema was added or assuming one global schema tag covers the whole site. It doesn’t. Every indexable page needs the right combination of schema types that match what is visible on the page. If the markup and the content don’t align, you lose trust signals that matter for both rankings and AI visibility.
You can validate your schema in seconds. Tools like schema.org or AI schema generators will show you exactly what’s on the page and what’s missing. If something is wrong or absent, fix it or hand the list to your developer or agency.
Speaking of which…
Step 7. Verify developer or agency work
If you work with a developer or an agency, you cannot assume the technical work is being done correctly. A lot of teams take shortcuts because they think “good enough” is fine.
It isn’t.
I see this constantly. Someone swears everything is set up properly, and when we look under the hood, the schema is wrong, the canonicals are missing or misapplied, and entire pages are left unmarked because they assumed one global tag covered everything.
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Your job isn’t to become a developer. Your job is to know what to ask for and confirm they actually delivered it.
When you see something off, that’s your signal to start a real conversation. Ask why a page only has organizational schema. Ask why a product page has no product or review schema. Ask why a landing page isn’t marked up as an article or FAQ. Ask why a page has no canonical or why duplicates weren’t consolidated correctly.
These aren’t “gotcha” moments. They’re your responsibility, because you’re the one who pays the price when the technical foundation is sloppy. And hey, maybe you’ve got a good partner, and they’re doing all of the right things. You’ve still got to check.
Step 8. Yes, the basics still matter
A lot of people treat metadata, H1s and keyword work like outdated SEO chores, but these fundamentals still play a real role in how your landing page performs. They don’t matter in the old 2018 way, but they do matter in the way users and crawlers understand your content today.
- Start with your meta description. It influences whether someone even clicks. Write it for people first, not robots. If it reads like a pile of keywords or doesn’t tell anyone what they’re about to get, your click through rate will tank before they ever land on the page.
- Then fix your headers. You get one H1. One. It defines the structure of the page. If you have multiple H1s, crawlers get confused and users get disoriented. Keep a clear hierarchy and make it easy to scan.
- And stop obsessing over keyword density. That’s not how modern search works. What matters now is semantic coverage. In plain language, that means covering the related topics someone would naturally expect when they search for your subject. When you do that well, AI systems and search engines can classify your page correctly and understand the full context of what you’re offering.
These basics aren’t glamorous, but they’re simple wins.
Step 9. Test your page in AI environments
This is one of my favorite tricks.
Once your landing page is built, you need to see how a machine interprets it. Take your URL and drop it into an AI tool. If the model cannot tell you in one clear sentence what your page is about and why it exists, that means the content is not clear enough for humans or for AI.
This step is fast and exposes issues you would never catch by skimming your own copy. If an AI model struggles to summarize your page, your structure is off, your intent is unclear or your semantic coverage is too thin. Fix that now instead of waiting for performance problems later.
This is the easiest way to check whether your content communicates the way you think it does. When AI understands your page cleanly, users and crawlers will too.
You’re already ahead of the landing page game
If you made it this far, you already know more than most people publishing landing pages right now. You understand intent. You understand structure. You understand how AI is interpreting your content. And you understand that SEO today is less about box checking and more about clarity, accuracy and technical alignment.
None of this is complicated, but it does require intention.
Modern search rewards pages that are built with purpose, not pages that were thrown together at the last minute with a few keywords sprinkled in. When you follow these steps, you create landing pages that actually work. Pages that earn visibility, show up in AI, keep users moving and make it easy for someone to trust what they’re reading.
And that’s the whole point.
You’re trying to build a landing page that does its job. A page that performs in every environment where your buyers are searching. A page that feels clean, confident and clearly aligned with what they came for.
So take this checklist, apply it to your next landing page, and see how much cleaner everything becomes. The guesswork disappears. The confusion drops. The performance lifts. When you build with clarity, everything else falls into place.
