A complete SEO Checklist: All you need to glorify in SERPs.
Are you looking for a complete SEO checklist to glorify in SERPs? If so, you have landed right.
This guide covers all the essential aspects anyone will require to work on to boost their SEO success. This ultimate SEO checklist can help you improvise your search presence, boost your SERP ranking, and entice traffic to your site.
The SEO checklist
We have split this list into sections that wrap the main SEO focus areas.
- SEO basics
- Keyword Research
- On-page SEO
- Content checklist
- Technical SEO
- Link Building Checklist
You need to focus on all the above aspects to cover the holistic SEO strategy. You can stick to the above checklist to follow the best SEO practice. These can help increase your chance of SEO success.
# SEO Basics Checklist
Your site might struggle to rank for competitive terms if you do not cover the basics of SEO. This step will help you to dive into the SEO fundamentals.
The following things are easy to use and implement in your SEO strategy. These tools and plugins can help you to rank in search results.
1. Set Up Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a powerful and essential SEO tool that is a must. It gives you insights into your website performance and rich data that you can use to boost your site’s appearance in search results and traffic to your site.
Also, it can help you to find out the most potent keyword that brings the most traffic to your site. It can help fix website errors, optimize your site, and much more.
If you want details on the Google search console, you can go through our Google search console post. It will answer you what it is and how to submit your WordPress site to the Google search console.
2. Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing Webmaster Tool is another similar SEO tool that provides insight into your website and provides related data for their search engine.
It helps you get the data on your site performance. It can let you explore your site, analyze your website’s backlinks, manage keywords, and much more to improve your website presence and ranking. Moreover, it can help you submit a sitemap, identify errors on your site, etc.
Although it is not as popular as Google, it receives significant traffic monthly. Therefore it is worth optimizing your website for Bing.
3. Set Up Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the tool that can help you to make the right decisions for your website. It is a free marketing analytics tool that provides rich data on your website.
Google Analytics is a must tool if you are planning a robust SEO strategy. Using it, you can find out how people find and visit your site and how they interact with it.
It can provide details about your website traffic, your website’s most popular keyword, and the most important page. In addition to this, the average bounce rate of your pages, page views, dwell time, and much more rich data that can help you analyze your site to improve your search ranking and traffic.
Note: Google Analytics and Google search console work best when linked together. They can provide you with valuable SEO information inside your Google Analytics account.
If you want to learn more details about it, you can visit our post on Google analytics. If you are willing to install it on your WordPress website, you can see its details on installing Google Analytics in WordPress.
4. Install Yoast SEO (WordPress Users Only)
If you use WordPress, you should install any popular SEO plugin that can help you to optimize your WordPress site.
We recommend Yoast SEO plugin, which is the most popular among all. It is easy to use and easily lets you manage and optimize your WordPress site for search engines.
It also has additional features such as technical SEO that can help you with robots.txt and sitemaps.
5. Generate and Submit a Sitemap
A sitemap is the map of your site where you feed details of your website, such as webpages, videos, and other files and the connection between them. This sitemap is submitted to the Google search console so that the crawlers crawl your website more efficiently.
The URLs on the sitemap help Google to crawl and index your website easily.
Google supports many sitemap formats. The XML format of a site map is mostly used, but you can go with what you want. Yoast SEO plugin and other plugins also let you create the sitemap of your site, and there are other tools too that are specific to creating sitemaps.
If you are interested in checking your sitemap, you can check it using the given link.
https://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml.
After creating the sitemap of your website, ensure to submit it to the Google search console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
# Keyword Research Checklist
Keyword Research is a necessary element of SEO. In this keyword research checklist, we’ll help you research the keywords and suggest ways to find out the ones people are searching for.
We have also covered details on keyword research and keywords research tools.
Let us give you a brief of some here:
1. Google suggest- Find the long-tail keywords using Google
If you want to find out the long-tail keywords to cover in your content, you can take direct suggestions from Google. It can suggest what people actually search around your seed keyword.
You need to enter your seed keyword in Google and wait for the suggestion without proceeding further or pressing the enter button. It will display a list of keywords that you can use. These are called the “Google Suggest” keywords.
2. The Google Keyword Planner
Google actually designed this tool to search keywords for Google ads; however, you can still use it to research keywords for SEO. It’s a free tool that can suggest keyword ideas for your content. The suggestions are directly from Google that you can trust and use.
3. Online Communities and forums
Online forums and communities like Quora, Reddit, etc., can give you insight into what people related to your niche are talking about and are interested in. You can get keyword ideas from there and create content that people are actually looking for.
4. Use KWFinder to find out Low Competition Keywords
KWFinder is a free tool that can provide a lot of data related to your keywords that other tools offer in their premium tools.
It can display the data on Search volume, Keyword difficulty, CPC, Trends, Estimated visits, and much more.
This will help you to find out the low- competition keywords that are easy to rank on SERPs.
5. Use Answer The Public to get question keywords
Answer The Public is a tool that can help you find out the question keywords for your seed keywords that you can answer in your post.
It provides a lot of questions related to your seed keyword from which you can find the ideas you can cover in your post.
If you want to learn more about these tools, we have a complete article covering keyword research tools that can help in your SEO.
# On-Page SEO Checklist
After covering the SEO basics and keyword tools, now we will cover the On-Page SEO checklist. It includes different on-page factors that you need to focus on while focusing on your SEO strategy.
Let’s get started-
1. Include Your targeted Keyword In Your URL
Google analyzes your page URL to understand what your web page is all about. It is also helpful in improving your organic click-through rate.
That is why you should include your targeted keyword in your URL. It will help Google as well as your site’s ranking.
There is nothing much to do this.
For example: Suppose we have created an article for an ‘SEO checklist’. So will include this in our page URL like this- Hostkicker.com/blog/seo-checklist/
2. Make your URLs short
Make sure you do not stuff or lengthen your page URLs. Put them short.
A study has revealed that in Google, short URLs rank best compared to longer ones.
3. Use your targeted keyword in your title.
We hope you knew this way before we mentioned it here. It is the basic everyone should practice with their blog post. If not, Make sure you include your targeted keyword in your post title. Additionally, you should also make your title short and catchy. The place of the keyword in the title also matters. You should use the keyword at the start of the title whenever possible.
4. Use Title Tag Modifiers
The Modifiers are words and phrases that you can add to your title. It can help you rank for different long-tail keywords.
These modifiers can boost your organic traffic as the organic traffic comes from long-tail searches.
Some examples of modifiers are: ‘best’, adding ‘the current year’, ‘guide’, ‘checklist’ etc.
5. Use Your targeted Keyword within the First 100-200 Words
Google analyzes the starting paragraphs of the articles to find out what the content is all about. You must include your targeted keyword within the first 100-200 words to clarify Google the context of your content.
6. Use Your targeted Keyword in H1, H2, or H3 Tags
Along with your title, URLs, and starting paragraph of your article, you must include your targeted keywords in your H1, H2, or H3 tags.
This strongly signifies to Google that your content discusses the keyword you mention in your article.
It can help you to raise your ranking in SERPs for that particular keyword.
Although it did not majorly impact your search ranking, it does make a count when it comes to search engine optimization.
7. Optimize Images
Images are a way to engage users on your site that can affect your search ranking. It makes it more clear to users what you want to convey.
Sadly, Google can not interpret the images on your pages as humans can. Therefore, you need to optimize your image alt tags and file names to help Google understand what the images are about. It also helps you rank in image searches.
To optimize your images, you need to specify a name that describes what the image is. for example, you can name an image of a spinach omelet like- spinach_omelette.png
And when you upload this image to your webpage, you can add a descriptive alt tag to it. That’s it.
8.Use Synonyms and LSI Keywords
Previously, keyword stuffing worked well for the search ranking, but now Google is smarter than before.
It can detect keyword stuffing and is considered spam, and you may even get penalized for it.
Instead of stuffing your content with keywords, you can use synonyms and LSI keywords.
For example, Suppose you want to create a blog and want to rank for the keyword “how to start a blog”.
Instead of repeating the same keyword, you can use the synonyms like ‘How to create a blog,’ ‘Starting a blog’, ‘How to launch a blog’, and ‘How to set up a blog on WordPress.’
You probably have got the idea of it.
Now, let’s talk about the LSI keywords. These are the terms/words that add up to your seed keyword.
You can use this site LSIGraph.com to find LSI keywords for your keywords.
You can add some LSI keywords and some synonyms for your keyword, and you are done.
9.Use External Links in your content
External links are the links to authority sites that cite your source or give reference to your readers, where they get complete details related to their query. You should include a few external links to your content.
These suggest to Google that your content is trustworthy and well-referenced, which can help you with your ranking.
10.Use Internal Links In your content
Internal links are the links to your own web pages. You should link your new content with your previous similar content that will help your readers and Google as well to navigate to your site. Otherwise, your content will be orphaned, and Google will take time to crawl and index it.
Note: You can also use keyword-rich anchor text in your inbound links.
This will help Google to understand where you are linking.
# Content Checklist
Content is the forever king.
No one can deny that to rank higher on Google, you must publish great rich and unique content. That is why content is a major part of the latest SEO strategy. This Content checklist will give you tips for creating content that will rank higher in search results.
1.Create Exceptional Content Using ‘Skyscraper Technique.’
As we said, your content should be the best of all present on the web. You can use the Skyscraper Technique to create excellent content.
This technique is an effective formula for creating solid content.
It involves the four basic and simple steps that can help you give a hit.
These steps are:
- Select a targeting keyword related to your niche
- Identify the most popular content for it in your industry
- create more better and detailed content
- Lastly, promote your content
Simple. Stick to these steps and bang.
2.Create content with great Readability
Google prefers content that provides a great user experience. Content should be pleasing to read.
Nobody likes to read continuous and giant walls of text. Instead of reading it, readers ran away from it, leaving your site early. This will affect your SEO.
You need to create content with breaks and paras to make them stay. Include headings and subheadings to give structure to your content.
Use shorter and simple sentences, use images and transition words, and split the content point-wise. This will boost your readability, lower your bounce rate and grow your ranking. This is how we do it.
3.Cover Your Page’s Topic In Detail
A study reveals that pages covering the topic in detail tend to rank higher than those containing thin content.
This suggests that covering an in-depth topic can help improve the content quality. You can include this tactic in your content strategy to give a boost to your content.
4.Use Schema Markup
Schema markup can help boost your visibility and search ranking on SERPs.
It is designed to help search engines understand your website and content better. Schema markup can be tricky to implement, so you can use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.
This tool makes the use of schema markup very easy than doing it manually.
5.Focus on Content Formats That Are Working Right Now
First, You can analyze your Published content. You can take help from an SEO tool that can give you a complete site analysis. This will help you find out the content that is working great. You can analyze those content and try to focus on the strategy to use in creating your new content. This can help you with your search presence.
Secondly, You can get an idea of what formats are working at present from below.
Team BuzzSumo has analyzed 100 million articles. First, they found that most articles did not get any links.
Second, they found that some content formats performed better than the rest. How? They revealed that the sites that provide original and authoritative content ranked well.
This means- The original content written by topical experts that has original research, surveys, and real-life case studies and is not repetitive.
With this, you have got the idea of the format that Google prefers.
6.Use Multimedia
Multimedia has a different power to attract and engage users. You, too, have noticed that whatever you read contains images and videos.
This is for a reason. It makes the content better, conveys the context more easily, engages users on your site, and improves user experience.
You must include images, videos, charts, infographics and other forms of multimedia to improve user experience and boost your content presence in the search results.
# Technical SEO Checklist
Our next task is to tighten our Technical SEO. It can help you gain or lose your ranking. But you need not worry.
Technical SEO is not that hard to tackle. You can easily follow this technical SEO list to fix the technical part of your website.
1.Identify Crawl Errors
Finding out crawl errors on your site is helpful to know if Google crawls your webpage or not.
The crawl error simply means that Google is having trouble looking at the webpage on your site, which is a big concern.
When Google can’t see, crawl and index your webpage, how will it rank in SERPs.
For this, You can use Google Search Console. Its ‘coverage’ report can easily find crawl errors on your site.
If it displays any crawl error on your site, maybe the robots.txt file is blocking the crawlers; you need to fix this.
2.Find Out How Google Views Your Page
Page indexing is the most important. There are times when users are able to notice your webpage, but Google can’t
As we mentioned above, if Google cannot access your page, how can it rank.
For that, you can again use the Google search console. Its ‘inspect URL’ feature can help you find out if Google can access your page or not.
You need to enter your page URL at the top of the Google search console, and it will display your page from Google’s point of view, which means you will see how Google view your page.
3.Make Sure Your Site is Mobile-Friendly
Most users visit your site using mobile devices. That is why Google
Google lately released a new “Mobile-First Index “.
This means Google bots now predominantly use mobile versions of your site to index. If your site is not mobile-friendly or not optimized for mobiles, it cant rank well in SERPs.
You can test your site’s mobile-friendliness using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. For this, you need to enter your website’s page URL into its search bar and find out whether it is mobile-friendly or not.
4.Fix Broken Links
Broken links on your site are the links that are defective and do not lead to anything. These can really harm your SEO. They can destroy your conversion rate by affecting your bounce rate, dwell time, and link juice.
These can also signal that your site is aged and outdated.
Broken links can destroy your conversion rates. They indirectly harm SEO by affecting bounce rate, time on site, and how you pass link juice. Broken links may also directly harm SEO rankings by sending signals that your website is old and outdated.
Therefore you will want to find and fix the broken links on your site.
DrLinkCheck.com can help you with that. It is a free tool that can help you find out your site’s broken links.
5.Secure Your Site With HTTPS
Google’s top priority is security. For which it has made efforts to make the Internet more safer. Google, therefore, announced HTTPS to be a ranking signal.
Google now prioritizes the site encrypted with HTTPS rather than HTTP to keep everyone safe on the web.
If you have not yet switched from HTTP to HTTPS, it’s time to make a move.
This will certainly give you a boost to your ranking compared to the one having HTTP.
6.Check Your Site’s Loading Speed
Site loading speed is considered to be a ranking factor. Google and users can quickly visit and grab the content on your site and web pages, leading to a better experience on your site.
This can help reduce your site’s bounce rate, which can push your ranking.
You need to check out whether your site loads fast. If not, it will affect your ranking.
You can use PageSpeed Insights. This is a free tool that can help you find out your site loading speed for desktop and mobile. It can also suggest ways to boost the site’s speed.
# Link building checklist
Link building is the key to off-page SEO. Google also consider the backlinks as an important ranking signal. Link building is not that easy, but it is a must to rank higher. Let us help you with this. We will cover link building in more steps.
1.Build Strong Backlinks With Guest Posting
A Guest posting is when you create and publish your content on others’ websites. It can be a great way to gain backlinks.
There are two different types of sites for which you can write a guest post. The authoritative sites and the sites that invite others to write for them.
The right way to guest post is to post it on a reputed, authoritative site in your industry that can send you traffic and link you back.
Google prefers backlinks from the authoritative site and deemed your site authoritative.
2.Reverse Your Competitor’s Backlinks
Backlinks on your competitor’s site can be a rich source of getting backlinks. To gain insight into your competitor’s backlinks, you can use a link analysis tool.
It can give you a detailed report on your competitor’s backlinks. There are paid and free tools for it you can use accordingly to your need.
Semrush is a paid but potent tool that can help, and if you like to use a free tool, you can go with MOZ Link Explorer.
You can follow the same process using any of the tools:
Enter your competitor’s URL into the tool and get the backlinks details.
You can build a relationship with the website owners so that they tend to link you back.
3.Build Contextual Backlinks With Link Roundups
Link roundups are the blog posts that link out to quality content on other’s websites on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
This link roundup strategy works well to get contextual backlinks.
You can follow the process to find link roundups:
- Find link roundups in your niche
Below are the search strings that work very well
‘Your keyword’ + ‘link roundups’
‘ keyword’+ ’roundups’
‘Your keyword’+ ‘best of’
‘Your keyword’+ ‘this week.’
- Offer your content to the one that runs that roundup
That’s it. If the person found your content to be worth linking back. You’ll get a backlink.
4.Become a Podcast Guest
Podcasting is more similar to Guest posting. As in guest posting, we post content on other’s sites; in podcasting, you become a podcast guest. Instead of posting articles, you podcast your content. You may even get backlinks and traffic to your site.
5.Mention brands In Your Blog Posts
Mentioning bigger, recognized and authoritative sites can be a great way to get backlinks. You can mention them in your post for reference or cite them as your source. And let them know that you mentioned them in your post. They may share your content on social media or link you back.
To conclude-
So this was our complete SEO checklist covering SEO basics, on-page SEO, content, keywords, and link building. These basic tips can help you create great and unique content and optimize it for SEO. Along with the above-suggested tips, you can delete the dead pages on your site and update and refresh your outdated content. All the tricks mentioned above can optimize your website and web pages, improve your search presence, and boost traffic to your site.
We hope this SEO checklist has helped you boost your SEO.