If you are wondering what does SEO checklist looks like?

Then this is the best place to learn that.
We have made a checklist for SEO that will help in increasing your business ROI online.
The following checklist will focus from SEO basics to steps in driving better traffic on your site and get you Higher rankings in Google.

We will be covering the following topics in this guide :

Seo basics checklist
Keywords research checklist
On-page SEO checklist
Technical SEO checklist
Off-page Seo Checklist

How to Use this Seo checklist

We have further elaborated this guide into sections that will focus on the main areas of SEO; the basics, Keyword research, On-page Seo, Technical Seo, Content, and Off-page Seo factors.
These factors will surely help in boosting visible traffic to your site increasing SEO performance,
However, You don’t need to implement everything on this checklist but always remember that all websites have opportunities to improve and we are sure you will discover probably some best-practice zones that you have ignored.
The more you follow these best practices the more traffic you will get.

SEO Basics Checklist

To gain proficiency with the SEO basics you should gain proficiency with the tools and plugins you’ll have to rank in search engines.

1.Setup The Google Search Console

Google Search Console is an important tool that gives you invaluable insights into your site’s performance also as a wealth of knowledge that you simply can use to grow your site’s organic visibility and traffic. Search Console is meant to assist you to track your site’s performance in Google search. That’s why it’s full of useful features, like:

See which keywords bring you the foremost traffic
Submit a sitemap
Fix website errors
Receive messages from the Google search team
Much more

In short: if you’re serious about SEO, fixing the Google Search Console may be a key initiative.

2.Setup Bing Webmaster Tools

Next, arrange Bing Webmaster Tools.

Is Bing as well known as Google? No. However, up to a third of all pursuits are done on Bing. So it merits advancing for.

Also, Bing Webmaster Tools has some clever highlights, sort of a built-in keyword research tool.

3.Setup Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the BEST method to perceive how individuals find (and use) your site.
Its various helpful features include:

See what proportion of traffic you get from Google
Find the pages on your site that bring you the foremost traffic
See if your traffic is increasing (and by how much)
Identify other sites and search engines that send you traffic
Your average bounce rate, page views, and time on site

4.Introduce and Configure A SEO Plugin (If You Are Using WordPress)

If you’re using WordPress as your CMS (which there’s a reasonably good chance that you simply are, as long as it now powers 35% of the web), you ought to install and configure an SEO plugin to supply the functionality and features that you simply got to properly optimize your site.

Yoast Seo is the hottest SEO plugin on the earth.

Yoast guides you with super easy instructions to optimize your WordPress site for search engines.

5.Make Sure you Submit Sitemaps and Robots.txt files

The purpose of a sitemap is to assist search engines to decide which pages should be crawled and which the canonical version of every is. It is simply an inventory of URLs that specify your site’s main content to form sure that it gets crawled and indexed. Make sure to check for crawl errors on your site. The above plugins like Yoast can easily help you with creating and submitting sitemaps and robots txt file (txt file) as a standard procedure so you don’t have to worry about such technical stuff.

Keyword Research Checklist

For able to rank for the right terms proper keyword research is essential, if not done properly you could be losing a lot of potential traffic, that you could get from using the right terms.

1.Find Long-Tail Keywords Variations with help of “Google Suggest” or keyword magic tool.

Just enter your keywords you want and choose your country, and the tool will return a list of keywords where you can modify the match type by broad, phrase, exact, or related keywords.

2.Use Google Keyword Planner to find solid keywords..

Google has its own official keyword research tool called The Google Keyword Planner.
Its mainly designed for Google Adwords but still very useful for doing Keyword research for Seo
Also finding the Primary keyword can be done with this.

3.Know what your competitors are doing for keywords and SEO

Your competitors would already be ranking good and you could identify and analyze the keywords they use with help of the SEMrush Domain Overview tool.
You will get a glimpse of those competitors who are competing in the same space as you are and even compare your visibility with those of competitors.
KWFinder is a Free keyword research tool, its so unique that it helps you find low competition keyword ideas and provides you with lots of data on each keyword.

4.Identify “Question Keywords” With ATP(Answer the public)

For Blog posts and articles Question, keywords can be very helpful. The majority of people ask questions for example “how to make a donut?” on search engines and various sites.
you can easily find such question keyword ideas on Answer The Public.

This free tool displays what people search online and so you can answer these questions with your content.

You can use the SEMrush keyword overview tool where you enter keywords and get questions related to keywords, it also displays the monthly search volume of these question keywords.

Bonus: AlsoAsked.com is one more tool that scrapes and returns ‘People Also Asked’ results to find more ideas and questions that you can answer with your content.

On-Page SEO Checklist

A properly optimized site and the content will not just look good but also help in ranking too.

Let’s check out what we can do with On-page Seo techniques :

Run a Website Audit with an online tool like a Screaming frog, or Seoptimer.com
Find and fix errors with Title tags like duplicates, missing, title length, etc.
A title tag informs search engines what a page is about and should be unique and there should be no errors in the title tag.
Find and fix errors with Meta Descriptions
A meta description encourages a user whether to click on your listing over someone else’s and your organic CTR can get affected either positively or negatively accordingly.
Find any errors with Meta descriptions like length, duplicacy, missing, etc., and fix them immediately.
Find and Fix Errors with H1 Tags
A page’s H1 tag is your content’s primary heading, and there should just be one setup per page. H1 tag should have your page’s main target keyword. Also check the errors like length, multiple H1’s, Missing, etc.
Improvisation in Title Tags, Meta Tags, and Page Content Find and fix any errors in Title tags, Meta Tags, and page content and rework it till you achieve your desired result and this way it will eventually help in better ranking in long run.
Check if Images have ALT Tags Image optimization is something that is often neglected, make sure the images are optimized for size and they have a proper description and ALT tags where ever needed.
Check URL’s
Including keywords in the URL can improve your Organic CTR. also it tells search engines what your page is about.
Content Analysis and Writing
Content is the most important factor in SEO, it helps search engines to determine whether the information a user is searching for is relevant on your site, Google gives utmost preference to relevant and original unique content. Make sure to find out duplicate content with online plagiarism checker tools, check if the content is unique and relevant to the products or services you offer. If you are writing content for blog posts you can use tools like Surferseo to make the best content so google can easily find relevancy and thus improve your rankings. Good content always drives more organic traffic and everyone likes reading good content thus increasing user experience too.
Check for Broken links and abandoned URLs
Find and fix broken links and abandoned URLs on-page on your site. There should be enough internal links on your website.

Technical SEO Checklist

1.Site speed and performance

No one likes slow websites it just wastes users’ time. You can check your website performance with the google page speed insights tool or on GTmetrix.com. Also, you can use various plugins like W3 total cache, Wp super cache, Autoptimize for increasing your site speed and performance by installing them in your WordPress.

2.Mobile friendly

Most of the users nowadays use smartphones and tablets to search for information, products, or services on google search, so having a mobile-friendly website can be very good for your business. Google also gives a lot of importance to mobile-friendly websites and indexes them separately. For checking mobile-friendliness, you can use Google’s mobile-friendly test tool or Mobile test online.

Off-Page SEO Checklist

1.Link building

To get a good ranking, it is important to have relevant links, relevant links look natural. Relevancy in regards to contextual, topic, local relevance.

2.Organic traffic

Check the organic traffic of the website from which you are going to get the link, websites with low traffic have low authority and are of no use for link building. You can check their history of Organic traffic to know if they have been penalized in the past. How they have been hit by Google Algorithm. You can do so with the Ahref.com tool.

3.Authority

Different websites have different authorities. Make sure to get links from websites that have good Authority this will also help Google understand that you are following good practices and your website is not spammy.
You can check the authority of the website with tools like Ahrefs or Moz for measuring Domain Authority and Domain rating.

4.Check backlink profile

Getting links is like hiring someone for a job, you can do background checks like what type of websites they are linked to?, Have they done anything spammy? and what they have done in the past.
Always keep your backlink profile clean so it does not look suspicious and avoid problems in long run.

5.Check Dofollow and Nofollow

Before getting any links make sure to check if they are Dofollow or Nofollow.
Nofollow links do no good so it’s better to avoid Nofollow links as they don’t help you to rank.

6.Content Quality

Check the Content Quality of the website you are getting links from, If the Content of the website is not relevant to your site it can lead to getting a penalty from Google. It should create value for the reader and look natural.

7.Anchor Text

The anchor is simply words you click to get from one site to another via the link.
Do not over-optimize the Anchor text. Google penalizes Anchor texts that look Spammy and Unnatural. Try to use different Anchor text for every backlink. Let Webmaster help you decide.

SUMMARY

So there it is the basics and advanced SEO Checklist which you can follow and it does work and will improve your Seo efforts.
If you have any questions you can reply in the comments below, also you can share your Checklist ideas that are different than what we use.

Thank you.

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Ravi Chauhan

Ravi Chauhan
FOUNDER & STRATEGY DIRECTOR
Local SEO Services

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