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The Complete SEO Checklist - 8 Steps You Will Need

seo checklist
Topic: SEO Checklist | By Lex data

What Is On This Page?

  1. Introduction to SEO Checklist
  2. SEO Checklist Steps to Follow
  3. Step 1: Setup Google Accounts
  4. Step 2: Technical SEO
  5. Step 3: Keyword Research
  6. Step 4: On-page SEO
  7. Step 5: Off-Page SEO
  8. Step 6- Local SEO
  9. Step 7: Mobile SEO
  10. Step 8: Core Web Vitals

Introduction to SEO Checklist

Search Engine Optimization, which is commonly known and referred to as SEO, is a process of optimizing your online content, website, video, blogs, etc. to rank higher in search engines to get organic traffic onto your website and blogs, generate more leads and let people know that you not only exist but provide goods or services in a particular sector. Here is our easy guide of SEO checklist to set up, optimize and rank.

SEO Checklist Steps to Follow

The easiest and quickest way to implement SEO is to follow the following SEO checklist steps. These step includes setting up google and Bing accounts, some technical SEO, keyword research for your content, on-page, and off-page SEO, and Core Web Vital, etc. We will discuss each point in more detail below;

checklist

Step 1: Setup Google Accounts

The starting point in SEO checklist is to set up multiple accounts with Google. The details of Each account which needs to be established are provided below;

Google Tag Manager

Tag Manager gives you the ability to add and update your tags for conversion tracking, site analytics, remarketing, and many more. There are nearly endless ways to track activity across your websites, apps, and content. The intuitive design of the Tag Manager lets you change tags whenever you want.

Installation Steps:

  1. Setup the GTM Account.
  2. Navigate to the “Admin Section”.
  3. Click on “Install Google Tag Manager”.
  4. Copy and paste the code into your WordPress theme header. PHP file. If you have created your content in WordPress, otherwise into the header of your website.

Google Search Console 

Search Console is a free tool that shows you useful data about your search engine ranking and traffic. Search Console is the most important tool required to analyze the data, ranking, and authority of your contact. Just search the google search console and follow the simple instructions to set up the Google search console.

Google Analytics 

Google Analytics is a useful tool that shows the following;

  • Your website traffic from search engines.
  • Information on pages which are having more organic traffic.
  • A bounce rate of organic traffic.
  • Your revenue of organic traffic.
Analytics

Step 2: Technical SEO:

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO involves submitting your content or website sitemap to search engines including Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. so that they can crawl your website and index the content in the relevant category.

Why is Technical SEO Important?

Technical SEO is crucial because it helps the search engines to understand the nature of your content and its relevance to the queries raised by the consumer. Further, a site map helps the crawling bots to understand, digest and index your content correctly and easily. If a search engine can crawl, index, and render your web pages correctly, it increases your chances of ranking high in the search results for the relevant keywords. The three core elements of Technical SEO include the following;

  1. Performance
  2. Crawlability
  3. Indexation

Performance:

The following things should be considered for performance;

  • Firstly, site speed, ideally your website should load in less than 3 seconds, if your website or content is unable to download within this time frame, you must seek an alternate hosting service provider or upgrading your package.
  • The second most important element in enhancing the user experience and performance is the responsive design. If you have not already implemented Responsive design, then this should be your top priority;
  • Along with these, you must also think of Code Bloat, whether it is causing any concern or making your content upload slowly; and
  • Finally, you must also consider implementing AMP.

Crawlability:

Crawling simply stands for making your content ready to be looked at in detail by the Google bots. During Crawling the Google bots read your content and based on the type of content they will index your content.

Indexation:

After crawling and analyzing your content, the search engines will place the content into its relevant category and will show up the results according to the user query. This whole process is known as Indexation. The indexation is quite close to how the libraries store books. The librarian will read the content and ascertain whether it is fiction, IT, law, humanities, etc. and according to the content, will store the book in a particular section of the library for easy use and reference purpose. Indexation is the same process, after crawling your content storing that information in the relevant section is indexation. You must submit your content for crawling and indexation if you wish to rank in the search engine queries.

Some popular Tools for Technical SEO audit:

  • Screaming Frog.
  • Deep Crawl.
  • Copyscape.
  • Integrity for Mac 
  • Google Analytics 
  • Google Search Console 
  • Bing Webmaster Tools 

Technical seo practice

The most important technical SEO practice includes the following;

  • Specify a Preferred Domain
  • Optimized Robots.txt
  • Optimize Your URL Structure
  • Navigation and Site Structure
  • Breadcrumb Menus
  • Implement Structured Data Markup
  • Canonical URLs
  • Optimize 404 Page
  • XML Sitemap Optimization
  • SSL and HTTPS
  • Website Speed
  • Mobile Friendliness
  • Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
  • Pagination and Multilingual Websites
  • Register your site with webmaster tools

Step 3: Keyword Research:

When you write any content, you need to ask yourself why you are writing? what is the problem you are solving or information you want to provide and how people are searching for the problem on the search engines i.e., what type of words are used by people to search the solution of the problem or the related content?

These words by which people are searching for a topic or a solution are known as keywords. If you have not included keywords in your content, then it is unlikely that your content will rank. The key points to keep in mind for better keyword research are.

  • Understand your user’s intent.
  • Understand how keywords fit into your sales funnel.
  • Understand search volumes i.e., how many times that keyword is searched if the word is searched for less than 3000 times then it is probably not worth including that keyword.
  • Understand keyword difficulty.
  • Understand head term and long-tail keywords.
  • Use keyword search tools.
Keyword Research

Step 4: On-page SEO:

What is On-Page SEO?

It is all about optimizing each page of your website individually, for getting more relevant traffic to your site.

Why is On-Page SEO Important?

On-page SEO is important because it gives numerous signals to search engines that help the search engines to understand your content in more detail, hence better indexation and ranking.

How to do on-page SEO?

  1. Publish high-quality content
  2. Carry in-depth Keyword Research
  3. Optimize your page titles
  4. Optimize your page URL
  5. Optimize your H1, H2, H3 headings
  6. Optimize your image alt-text
  7. Optimize your Meta descriptions
  8. Use internal links
  9. Use external links
  10. Use structured data
on page seo

Step 5: Off-Page SEO

What is off-page SEO?

Off-page SEO as the name suggests relates to activities that are conducted off-page i.e., not on the website, for example, getting backlinks to your content or website.

Why is off-page SEO Important?

Off-Page SEO is valuable because it shows search engines that how much your content or website is authoritative and popular among users for the relevant topic and keywords.

Off-page SEO techniques?

The top Techniques are the following;

  1. Creating Shareable Content
  2. Influencer Outreach
  3. Contribute as Guest Author
  4. Social Media Engagement
  5. Social Bookmarking Sites
  6. Forum Submission
  7. Blog Directory Submission
  8. Article Submission
  9. Question and Answer
  10. Video Submission
  11. Image Submission
  12. Infographics Submission
  13. Document Sharing
  14. Press Release
  15. Web2.0 Submission
  16. Use Google My Business 
  17. Guest Blogging
  18. Newsletters
search engine

Step 6- Local SEO:

Local SEO is for the businesses that physically exist i.e. if you have a physical place from where you conduct your business, then you must get the clients from your neighborhood. Local SEO helps you in bringing clients in-person to your premises from the local area.

Local SEO includes.

  • Add the Local Business schema to your homepage.
  • Create a Google My Business Account.
  • Create Bing Business Account
  • Register your business with reliable directories such as Yelp, Yahoo small business, Foursquare, and others.
  • Promote and boost your website on local directories and websites e.g., online local newspapers.

Step 7: Mobile SEO

What is Mobile SEO?

Mobile SEO is the process of designing a website to make it appropriate for viewing on mobile devices of different screen sizes having low bandwidth. In addition to all the SEO rules that apply to a desktop website, we need to pay close attention when designing a website.

Mobile SEO should include.

Running the mobile-friendly test is a good starting point to test whether your website is mobile-friendly. In general, what you need to assess is whether

  • Your website loads fast on mobile?
  • Website is easy to use on mobile?
  • Whether the user experience on mobile is not disturbed by interstitial banners, other methods of aggressive advertising, or popups?

How to optimize for mobile SEO?

The following steps should be considered in optimizing your content and website for Mobile users. If your site is previously optimized for search engines, then it should not be too difficult to boost it for mobile devices. First, let us understand what it takes to get optimized for mobile.

We can categorize the steps into three broad categories;

Step 1 − Select a Mobile Configuration

Step 2 − Inform Search Engines

Step 3 − Avoid Common Mistakes

It is important to note that there are three different mobile configurations that you can choose from; these include, Responsive Web Design, Dynamic Serving, and Separate URLs.

Step 8: Core Web Vitals

This is the last step of this article’s SEO Checklist, which is important for website speed.

What are Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals are page speed metrics that are designed to understand the performance of your website.

There are three main Core Web Vitals;

  1.     Largest Contentful Paint (LCP):

LCP is the total time in seconds that it takes for the largest element on your website to load. Your LCP should be under 2.5 seconds. 

  1.  First Input Delay (FID):

FID is the total time in milliseconds that it takes for a page to become interactive. Specifically, it measures the amount of time it takes between a user’s clicking on your page to when the browser responds. FID should be under 100ms. 

  1.  Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS):

The quantity of unexpected movement your page experiences as it loads. CLS is measured by scoring the page of the website, your score should be less than 0.1. 

Why Do They Matter for Your Website?

The modern user does not want to wait for a website to take longer than 3 seconds to load to get the information they are looking for, and Google considers it a vital step in ranking content. If your content does not load under 3 seconds, then google will be unlikely to rank it.  We now know that Google’s goal is to show not only the most relevant result for a search query but also the fastest. You can no longer score well if page speed and other user experience metrics are missing.

This shift to prioritizing the user experience along with existing ranking factors, such as content and inbound links, will drastically affect the way website owners think about SEO. There are additional items in the checklist that you need to check if you want to rank them on the first page of Google for target searches.

How to measure Core Web vitals?

The most common tools for measuring core web vitals are;

Page Speed Insights

Chrome UX Report

Google Search Console

Chrome Dev Tools

Lighthouse

Web vitals Extensions

How to improve Core Web Vitals?

5 main steps to improve core web vitals;

  1. Reduce JavaScript execution.
  2. Implement lazy loading.
  3. Optimize and compress images.
  4. Provide proper dimensions for images.
  5. Improve server response time.

Search Engine Optimization: How Lex Data’s experienced SEO team can help?

We are London based IT company with a proven track record. Our team comprises front and back-end engineers, experts in programming, Web and App development, SEO, inbound and digital marketing.

  1. We have successfully assisted businesses of all sizes by providing innovative, user-friendly, and practical IT solutions. We have developed and designed products that convert and delight our business partners and end-users.
  2. We have helped our businesses partners to scale and enter new markets. We believe in knowledge, collaboration and a relentless focus on producing solutions that delight our business partners and end-users.
  3. We understand our clients and their business needs. We strive to provide reliable IT Solutions.
  4. Team of Experienced IT professional
  5. Our Areas of Expertise
  • Software Development
  • App Development
  • Website Development & SEO
  • Portals and CRMs
  • UI/UX Design
  • Digital Marketing
  • eCommerce Store

For a free and non-obligatory quote get in touch with us Now.

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