What is an SEO Checklist?

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the process of making your website “visible” on Google’s search engine.
All “free”, “organic” and “natural” traffic to your website is a result of a good SEO. An SEO Checklist consists of a list of do’s and don’ts that must be followed to help in ranking your keywords on the search Engine.

Why is an SEO checklist imperative?

To begin with, focusing on your brand’s SEO is imperative to increase it’s awareness online and draw attention to your page. This SEO, however, comes with a series of redundant steps to follow. If you’re new to Search Engine Optimization – it’s best to start with a checklist of “what to do for SEO?”. This saves times and effort.

What consists of an SEO checklist?

Given below are the list of steps that one ought to focus on while building his/her brand’s website.

1. Have you analysed your Business Model and matched it with Google’s guidelines?

The business model analysis includes the following.

• Website Analysis – Analysis of keywords, metatexts, visible texts and their positioning on your website.
• Competitive Analysis – Analysis of content keywords and current ranking of your competitor websites in the search engine.

2. Build your Social Media profiles?

Social Media forms a major part of building your website traffic. Create your brand’s profile on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and other relevant sites to encourage comment engagement and build brand awareness.

3. Have you Linked to Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is predominantly used for constant measurement of results. In fact, the SEO reports in Analytics show the following: [as taken from Google Analytics official guide]

• Queries users typed to reach your site.
• A number of impressions of your website’s URLs in search results pages.
• The number of clicks on your website’s URLs from search results pages.
• The ratio of clicks to impressions for your website’s URLs.
• The average position of your website’s URLs in search listings.
• The pages users landed on when clicking on search results listing your site.

4. Set Up a Webmaster Tools Account for Google and Bing

Webmaster tools are one of the most useful tools to build your website’s SEO. Google’s webmaster tool-set allows you to communicate with Google and adjust various aspects such as:

• How Google sees your site.
• What is the list of the external and internal links to your site?
• What is your site’s crawl rate?
• What keywords do users type to land on your site?
• Monitor your site’s statistics.

5. Review Mobile Usability Issues

Migration to mobile is like to dominate the desktop world. Hence, it’s important to ensure that your website is compatible with the mobile phone too.

Largest CTR study reveals that mobile rankings are 3 times more valuable than desktop.

6. Have you used optimized images to improve Site Speed and Performance?

Optimize the images used on your website to increase your site’s performance. To analyze your website’s loading time, check Google’s PageSpeed insights. Alternatively, you can also use GTmetrix.com.

7. Do you have SEO friendly URL?

Ensure that your site’s URL is short and keyword rich. Avoid ugly, non-SEO friendly URLs and long tail URL. To get the best out of SEO, it’s imperative to main a crisp URL with keywords reflecting your brand!

8. Have you used H1 Tag?

Wrap your keyword rich title in the H1 tag. The “heading tag” must be dominated with keywords to ensure your site is ranked through SEO.

9. Do you have internal link building?

The idea of internal link building is to keep your users occupied and make them move around “your website” only! Internal linking can be done by:

• Using keywords (at least once) in H2 and H3 tags.
• Optimizing your images by attaching keywords.
• Linking another webpage to a keyword/text to navigate around.

10. Have you decided your Website’s Content Strategy?

Search Engine Optimization is nothing but the practice of optimizing your site’s content to rank in search engines. Therefore remember to pay attention to keyword usage, keyword placement, readability, image usage, URL optimization and more.

Google’s Keyword Planner is an extremely effective tool to start with building relevant keywords for your website. Best practice would be to with lower-volume keywords first.

11. Started collecting your reviews?

Last but not the least – stick to obtaining reviews on your website. Online reviews increase your conversion rate and with a higher conversion rate / lesser bounce rate – your website’s traffic increases predominantly.

To make things easier – take a look at the infographic below.

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