SEO Checklist for Indie Hackers

SEO for indie hackers is about 80% mechanical: fifteen checks you do once, then you stop thinking about SEO and start writing useful content. The other 20% is one ongoing habit — publishing — and that's where most solo founders quit too early. This is the full checklist, in order, written for someone who ships products instead of reading SEO blogs.

The startup SEO basics haven't changed much in years. What has changed is that you also need to be visible to AI assistants — and mostly the same work covers both.

Foundations (checks 1–5)

The foundations are five tags and files that take under an hour total, and they determine whether Google and AI crawlers can understand your site at all.

1. Title tag on every page. Unique, under 60 characters, with the main keyword near the front. Your homepage title should say what the product does, not just the brand name. Details in our title tag guide.
2. Meta description. It doesn't rank you, but it's your ad copy in the search results: under 155 characters, one clear promise, written to earn the click. See the full breakdown on meta descriptions.
3. One H1 per page. Exactly one h1 element that matches the page's actual topic. Not your logo, not an empty tag, and not three H1s because your template felt like it.
4. Indexable. Check robots.txt for a stray Disallow: /, and check your pages don't carry a noindex meta tag left over from staging. This kills more indie launches than any other single mistake.
5. Sitemap. An XML sitemap at /sitemap.xml listing every page you want indexed. Every framework and CMS can generate one automatically — turn it on once and forget it.

Speed and mobile (checks 6–8)

Speed and mobile are pass/fail gates: you don't need to be the fastest site on the internet, you just need to not be slow enough to get filtered out.

6. Core Web Vitals basics. Google measures three things: how fast the main content loads (LCP, under ~2.5s is good), how fast the page reacts to input (INP), and whether the layout jumps around while loading (CLS). Run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights once and fix whatever is red.
7. Image weight. The single most common speed problem on indie sites. Convert images to WebP, resize them to the size they're actually displayed at, and lazy-load anything below the fold. A 3 MB PNG screenshot is not a personality trait.
8. Mobile layout. Google indexes the mobile version of your site first, and most of your visitors are probably on phones. Open your site on your phone: if text requires zooming or buttons overlap, fix that before anything else on this list.

| Check | Tool | Passing looks like | | --- | --- | --- | | Speed | PageSpeed Insights | LCP under ~2.5s, no red scores | | Images | Browser dev tools, Network tab | Largest image under ~200 KB | | Mobile | Your actual phone | Readable without zooming, no overlap |

Getting indexed (checks 9–10)

Getting indexed means telling search engines your pages exist instead of waiting weeks for them to notice.

9. Google Search Console. Free, non-negotiable, takes ten minutes. Verify your domain, submit your sitemap, and use "URL Inspection" to request indexing on new pages. It's also where you'll see which queries already bring you impressions — free keyword research from your own site.
10. Instant indexing. Bing and several other engines support IndexNow, a one-line ping that tells them a URL is new or updated the moment you publish. Google doesn't use IndexNow, but Search Console's request-indexing covers you there. If your platform supports it, turn it on once.

AI visibility (checks 11–13)

AI visibility means ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity can crawl your site, understand what you do, and quote your content when someone asks about your category.

11. AI crawler access. Many sites block AI bots without knowing — often through a CDN default or an over-eager robots.txt. Check that GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot can read your pages. If your content only appears after JavaScript runs, many AI crawlers never see it, so server-render your important pages.
12. llms.txt. A plain text file at /llms.txt that tells AI models who you are, what you do, and which pages matter. It's an emerging convention, not a guarantee, but it costs fifteen minutes and removes ambiguity about your product.
13. Direct-answer formatting. Structure key pages so the first sentence under each heading directly answers the heading's question. Models lift quotable, self-contained chunks; walls of context-dependent prose get skipped. Our guide on how to get cited by AI assistants goes deeper on this.

The one ongoing habit (checks 14–15)

The only SEO work worth repeating is publishing one genuinely useful page per week and tracking whether it works.

14. One useful page a week. Not a changelog, not a feature announcement — a page that answers a question your potential users actually type into Google or ask an AI. One good page a week beats ten thin ones, and it compounds: a page published today can still bring traffic in two years.
15. Track rankings and mentions. Once a week, not once an hour. Check Search Console for impressions and average position on your target queries, and check whether AI assistants mention you for buyer-intent prompts in your category. If you want both in one pass, scan your site free and get your SEO and AI-visibility score in about a minute.

What to skip as a solo founder

Most SEO advice is written for teams with budgets, and following it is how indie hackers burn months on work that doesn't move the needle.

• Link schemes. Buying links, mass guest-posting, and "link exchange" outreach. Low-quality links do nothing at best and get you penalized at worst. Your best links come free: launches, niche directories, and being useful in the communities where your users hang out.
• Keyword tool overload. You do not need a $129/month subscription to find what your users search for. Search Console data, Google autocomplete, and the actual questions people ask in your support inbox are better sources because they're real.
• Daily analytics checking. Weekly checking is enough — daily graphs just convert anxiety into lost building time.
• Chasing algorithm updates. If you do the 15 checks above and publish useful pages, core updates are background noise. Panic-rewriting your site after every announcement is how you break things that were working.

FAQ

How long until I see traffic from SEO?

Expect 3–6 months before a new domain gets meaningful search traffic, with the first impressions often appearing within a few weeks. This is the honest range — anyone promising faster for a brand-new site is guessing or selling something. AI visibility often moves faster.

Do I need paid SEO tools?

No. Everything on this checklist is covered by free tools: Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, your browser's dev tools, and a free SuperSEO.sh scan for the technical and AI-visibility checks. Paid tools become useful much later, when you're managing hundreds of pages or doing competitive research at scale.

Is AI-generated content okay for SEO?

Google's stated position is that it rewards helpful content regardless of how it's produced, and penalizes content made at scale purely to manipulate rankings. In practice: AI-assisted drafts that you edit, fact-check, and add real experience to are fine; mass-published unedited output tends to stall. For AI visibility specifically, original data and firsthand detail are what make you worth citing.

How do I build links as a one-person team?

Skip outreach campaigns and earn links from places solo founders actually get them: launch platforms, niche directories, open-source projects, and pages useful enough that people reference them on their own. Ten relevant links beat a hundred directory-spam links.

When should I hire an SEO person or agency?

Only when you have proven organic traffic worth scaling — typically after you're ranking for real queries and publishing is your bottleneck, not knowledge. Before that point, consistency beats a retainer, and most early-stage agencies will sell you the busywork in the "skip" section above.

SEO for indie hackers is not a discipline, it's a setup task plus a habit. Run the fifteen checks, fix what the scan flags, then go back to building — and scan your site free to confirm the checks still pass.