SEO QA (quality assurance for SEO) is the systematic check of changes to a website for effects on search visibility. It usually runs before a release and is repeated after go-live.
What is checked?
The scope depends on the project. Practice articles commonly list these areas.
- crawlability and indexability: robots.txt, meta robots and canonical tags, status codes
- titles, meta descriptions, headings and other content changes
- internal links and navigation
- the XML sitemap
- structured data
- rendering on JavaScript sites
- mobile parity and tracking code
Teams often assign severity levels, and critical findings stop a release (example from checklists, not a standard). Checks run on a staging environment first, covering key pages and templates.
Why check after go-live?
Errors also arise later, through new releases, configuration changes or plugin updates. A single check before launch does not catch these, so some teams add regular crawls or monitoring.
Example
A test noindex stays on the product pages by mistake. According to Google, the tag removes a page from search results, but only if the page is not blocked by robots.txt, because otherwise the crawler never sees the tag. The example is invented.
Sources
- Block indexing with noindex - Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
- Defining your website's SEO quality assurance suite - The Gray Company (secondary)thegray.company
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