seo-foundation-kitlisted

# SEO Foundation Kit Diagnose before you prescribe. Most sites that "have an SEO problem" have an **indexing** problem, and indexing problems have causes that keyword work cannot touch. ## The rule that matters most **Never propose content or keyword work until the crawl path is verified.** Ask, in this order: 1. Is the page reachable by clicking from the homepage? (not "is it in the sitemap") 2. Is anything blocking it — robots.txt, `noindex`, a canonical pointing elsewhere? 3. Did Google crawl it and decline it? (thin, duplicative) Skipping this is the single most common and most expensive mistake. A real example: three pages sat in "Discovered — currently not indexed" for weeks. The cause was that the homepage linked to none of the site's 22 standalone pages. No amount of content work would have fixed it. ## Phase 1 — Baseline Ask for a Google Search Console export (28 days, queries + pages + index status). If the user does not have GSC set up, say so plainly — without it you are guessing, and you should tell them that rather than producing confident advice from nothing. From the export, establish: - What search demand actually asks for, in users' words — which is often not what the site is positioned as - **Near-misses**: pages with real impressions, ~zero clicks, position 10–60. These are the cheapest wins and should lead the recommendations. - The gap between what the site sells and what people search for Report what the data says before proposing anythin