Looking for a comprehensive SEO checklist to help you increase organic traffic and rank on Google? Don’t look any further.
We’ve compiled the ultimate checklist for driving SEO success, covering best practice points and tasks that you should be aware of.
Use this as your go-to resource for everything from SEO fundamentals to must-knows
Best Way to Use This SEO Checklist:
We’ve broken this checklist down into sections that cover the main focus areas of SEO:
- SEO basics Setups
- Keyword Research
- Technical SEO
- On-page SEO
- Content
- Off-page SEO
Simply focus on all elements of the SEO Checklist, if you have started a new website then follow and implement all necessary task step by step. Even if you have already done with few tasks, it’s better to make sure about it.
- SEO basics Setups Checklist
Are you still trying to figure out what SEO is? If you don’t cover the fundamentals, your site may struggle to rank for competitive terms.
The following points are primarily housekeeping tasks, but they are the foundation for implementing a successful SEO strategy.
1. Set Up Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools
Google Search Console is an essential tool that provides you with invaluable insights into the performance of your site as well as a wealth of data that you can use to increase your site’s organic visibility and traffic.
Google Search Console is a free service provided by Google that allows you to monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot the visibility of your website in Google Search results. You don’t have to sign up for Search Console to appear in Google Search results, but it can help you understand and improve how Google perceives your site. Bing webmaster tool is also a necessary tool for Search engine optimization.
Both are -important tools that allow you to view the search terms and keywords that your site gets on the SERPs also these are helpful for submitting sitemaps, identifying crawl errors, and much more.
Just make sure you have done all this in the right way.
2. Set Up Google Analytics
Do You Need Google Analytics? You must have some form of analytics on your website. You can’t draw conclusions about how people use your site unless you have analytics. You can’t make improvements to your business or brand unless you have data.
Google Analytics includes tools to assist users in identifying trends and patterns in how visitors interact with their websites. Data collection, analysis, monitoring, visualization, reporting, and integration with other applications are all possible thanks to the features.
Google Analytics gives you the power to understand how users, visitors, and customers interact with your websites. Having behavioral data can significantly improve the performance of your online business. It is impossible to optimize a website’s performance without behavior data.
3. Generate and Submit a Sitemap
A sitemap tells Google which pages and files on your site you believe are important, as well as provides valuable information about these files. For example, when was the page last updated, and if there are any alternate language versions of the page.
Google supports a number of different sitemap formats, but XML is the most commonly used. You will usually find your site’s sitemap at https://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml.
4. Create a Robots.txt File
Simply put, your site’s robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which pages and files they can and cannot request from your site.
It is most commonly used to prevent specific sections of your site from being crawled and is not intended to be used to de-index a webpage and prevent it from appearing on Google.
The robots.txt file for your website can be found at https://www.domain.com/robots.txt.
Check to see if you already have one.
If you don’t have one, you should make one—even if you don’t need to prevent any web pages from being crawled right now.
5. Check Search Console for Any Reported Issue.
Keep a clean watch of Search Console warnings and reported issues, as that might cause a big impact on your site SEO.
Sometimes manual actions happen and are detected on the search console as a violation of webmaster policy due to user-generated spam, structured data issues, unnatural links (both to and from your site), thin content, hidden text, and even what is referred to as pure spam.
Try to resolve this as earliest as possible and report fixing on the search console.
6. Make sure about site indexing
Making sure your site can be indexed by Google is part of having your SEO basics covered. It is not as uncommon as you might think that a website cannot be indexed by Google.
In fact, you’d be surprised how often developers leave no-index tags in place when moving code from a staging environment to a live one, resulting in a sudden de-indexing of a site.
The Site Audit Tool can help you ensure that your website can be crawled and indexed.
Organize a Site Audit for your project. After completing the audit, you can access the Crawl-ability report for more information. Keyword Research Checklist
It will be difficult to rank for the right terms without a solid keyword research process. If you’re not ranking for the right terms, your traffic won’t convert as well as it could.
Here is a checklist of the key keyword research tasks you must complete in order to see success in your SEO efforts.
7. Identify Your Competitors
Finding the terms that are working for your competitors is one of the quickest ways to get started with keyword research (i.e., competitor keywords).
We believe that no time spent on competitor analysis is wasted time.
Run your own domain (and the domains of your key competitors) through the Semrush Domain Overview tool to quickly identify competitors who are competing in the same space as you and how your visibility compares.
8. Find Main “Money” Keywords
You must be aware of your primary “money” keywords. If you haven’t already guessed, these are the ones that will drive you leads, sales, and conversions.
These are also referred to as head terms and pillar page keywords.
In general, these are the high volume, high competition keywords that best summarise what you have to offer, either at the topic or category level. Take, for example, the term “NFL Jerseys”—which, FYI, is considered a head term.
You can use the Keyword Overview tool to conduct keyword research and identify your key terms for your products and services.
9. Find Long-Tail Keyword Variations
A keyword strategy that does not include long-tail keywords is not a keyword strategy.
In fact, despite having a lower volume than head terms, long-tail keywords have a higher conversion rate.
You must ensure that your SEO strategy targets both long-tail keyword variants and head terms.
It can be beneficial to begin by determining which head term you intend to target, then focusing on more specific long-tail keywords that are more likely to generate conversions.
The Keyword Magic Tool can assist you in locating long-tail keywords.
Simply enter your main keywords and select your country, and the tool will return a list of keywords that you can refine by broad, phrase, exact, or related keywords.
10. Create a Keyword Map
Once you’ve identified your target keywords, you must “map” or pair them to pages on your site, as well as identify any gaps.
It’s critical that you invest the time necessary to ensure that you’re targeting the right pages with the right keywords, and the process outlined in the guide can assist you in getting this right the first time and using it to power your strategy.
11. Analyze the Intent of Pages That Rank
You must ensure that the content of your page corresponds to the searcher’s intent.
This entails spending time analyzing the pages that rank for your target terms and ensuring that your content is consistent.
Assume you want to target a term on a national scale. You may have identified a high search volume and a reasonable keyword difficulty, but if the SERPs return local results, you will not rank prominently.
You won’t be able to ensure that your content aligns with Google’s if you don’t understand the intent of the content that Google is ranking.
Technical SEO Checklist
12. Make Sure You Are Using HTTPS
Simply install the SSL certificate on your domain and your site will be on SSL encryption.
for end users, this is a clear sign of trust and authority and hence HTTPS is a ranking factor for Search Engines.
13. Check for Duplicate Versions of Your Site in Google’s Index
Whether you choose a non-www or www version is up to you, but the most common one is https://www.domain.com.
Just finalize which version you would like to confirm for crawling and indexing. at the same time simply redirect all other versions to the main version.
http://www.domain.com.
https://www.domain.com.
http://domain.com.
https://www.domain.com.
14. Find and Fix Crawl Errors
This is an absolute necessity. immediately identify which pages are having an error or warnings and try to resolve them ASAP. Also never forget to re-crawl the same pages in the search console.
15. Improve Your Site Speed
This is really crucial and highly related to user experience. and you know very well that cream User Experience is again a highly rated ranking factor.
Forget about google ranking factors, if your site takes time to load, no one going to wait for it. these increases bounce rates and you lose potential users right then and there.
You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to gauge page performance and Core Web Vitals stats.
16. Fix Broken Internal and Outbound Links
Another sign of a bad user experience is broken links. Nobody wants to click a link and discover that it doesn’t lead them to the page they were hoping for.
Your Site Audit report contains a list of broken internal links, and you should fix any issues found thereby changing the link’s target URL or removing it.
17. Use an SEO-Friendly URL Structure
An SEO-friendly URL structure means simply URL structure. So search engines easily crawl your pages and understand what they are about. Your page URLs should be simple and descriptive for users as well.
Here is what an SEO-friendly URL looks like:
https://www.domain.com/red-shoes/
As opposed to a query string that isn’t descriptive:
https://www.domain.com/category.php?id=32
Do use hyphens in your URLs to separate words; don’t use underscores.
Do keep URLs as short as possible
18. Integrate structured data
Structured data markup gains importance as Google continues to create a more semantic web.
If you aren’t using structured data already, you should start.
The Schema.org vocabulary actually includes formats for organizing data for individuals, groups, organizations, small businesses, reviews, and much more.
In the example below, you can see how review stars and price help your organic listings stand out on the SERPs thanks to structured data.
19. Find, Check and Fix 302 Redirects, Chains, and Loops
Redirects with a 302 status code are temporary, while those with a 301 status code are permanent.
Although Google has confirmed that 302 redirects pass PageRank, it is still necessary to update a 302 redirect to a 301 if it is anticipated that it won’t be removed at any point in the future.
Any 302 redirects are prominently highlighted in the Site Audit report as being on pages with temporary redirects.
Multiple redirects damage site structure, so make it clean.
On-Page SEO and Content Checklist
20. Find and Fix Duplicate, Missing, and Truncated Title Tags
Optimized title tags are a crucial component of SEO fundamentals. In order to help a page rank, they are frequently the first thing an SEO would look at.
Title tags help search engines understand the content of a page and determine whether or not a user will click on your link.
Avoid using duplicate title tags; ideally, your website shouldn’t contain duplicate content. Title tags should also be sufficiently descriptive so that users can determine the type of page they are about to land on.
Additionally, keep your title tags short. If they are too long, the SERPs may crop them (you will see three dots after the title tag and part of it missing). Over 70 characters in the title tag will be trimmed off.
Same Find and Fix Duplicate, Missing, and Truncated Meta descriptions
21. Improve Title Tags, Meta Tags, and Page Content
You are passing up an opportunity to rank for keywords other than your primary keywords if you aren’t properly optimizing your page titles and meta tags.
Locate the keywords on each page that have a high number of impressions but few clicks and a low average position by going to the performance report in Google Search Console.
This typically means that while your page is appearing in search results in some capacity and is deemed relevant for the queries, you have not optimized the page by using these variations in your content or tags.
Remember that adding keyword mentions alone won’t have much of an impact. Consider these extra keywords as subjects for extra H2s or subsections.
22. Verify that images have Alt tags
Image optimization is always a priority. It is a part of SEO that is frequently overlooked, from giving images the proper file names using a descriptive naming scheme to optimizing the size and quality.
You should at the very least make sure that the main images on each page of your website have alt tags that accurately describe the information on them.
Alt tags are helpful for people who are blind as well as search engines because they help them recognize images.
23. Strengthen internal linking
Undoubtedly, one of the most under-utilized link-building strategies in SEO marketing is the use of internal links. The internal linking strategy of your website can be improved and yield results fairly quickly.
Even one or two internal links from trustworthy pages on your website can help some marketers see quick results.
24. Ensure Your Site’s Content is Up to Date
Content naturally ages and becomes outdated, a simple rule. You need to keep updating content so your users get fresh and newly added content every time.
Find New Link Building Opportunities (Off-Page SEO checklist)
There are always fresh link-building opportunities that you can investigate and take advantage of, but doing so frequently requires time.
Building a high-quality backlink profile is important, and finding these opportunities can be a little bit simpler when you use the right SEO tools.
For instance, the Link Building Tool is an easy and direct way to see a constant stream of new opportunities that you can investigate and websites that you can contact.
You can put in place a sound strategy to significantly outperform the competition in minutes and take advantage of a plethora of new opportunities.
Improve Your SEO Presence Today
here is an SEO checklist that both beginners who may just be learning SEO and more advanced SEOs can follow and hopefully find at least a few ways to improve their SEO. SEO success doesn’t come from simply following a checklist.
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