SEO Checklist

Download our SEO checklist today to help your business SEO. If you are in need of professional help, please contact us.

startup business people group working as team to find solution to problem

What is Search Engine Optimization?

SEO is the process of improving your rankings when someone searches a specific search term (a search term similar to; SEO Bristol OR SEO Company Bristol).

SEO involves working on your website, and improving backlinks, content and metadata.

Ultimately, these actions are going to improve your search engine for the keywords that will power your businesses growth. Keywords are chosen to capture potential customers when they are looking for your product or service, putting your business will be one of the first businesses they see when searching!

SEO Basics

    1. Set up Google Search Console – Google Search Console lets you easily monitor and sometimes resolve site load issues, server errors, and security issues like malware and hacking. You can use it to ensure any site adjustments or maintenance you make happen smoothly concerning search performance.
    2. Set up Bing Webmaster Tools – While you may not use Bing as much as you do Google, you should at least activate Bing Webmaster Tools. Why? Because it’s effortless to do so and can help you get additional SEO traffic to your site.
    3. Set up Google Analytics – Google Analytics includes features that can help users identify patterns and trends in how users engage with their websites.
    4. Install an SEO plugin – SEO plugins are extensions for content management systems, software solutions, and browsers. An SEO plugin enhances the scope of the source software with unique tasks and functions which affect web analysis, online marketing, search engine optimization, and other aspects.
    5. Create and submit a sitemap – A sitemap lists a website’s most important pages, ensuring search engines can identify and crawl them. Sitemaps also help understand your website structure, making it easier to navigate your website.
    6. Create a robot.txt file – A robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers exactly which URLs the crawler can access on your website. This is used to avoid overloading your website with requests; it is not a tool for keeping a web page out of Google. In order to keep a web page out of Google, block indexing with noindex or password-protect the page.
    7. Set up Ahrefs Webmaster tools – Improve your website’s SEO performance and get more traffic from search. Free for website owners. 

 

Business men consulting marketing plan for the company using tablet and computer technology in analysis.

Technical SEO

  1. Plan your website structure – The structure of your website shows Google which pages of your site are most important. This means you can influence your site’s structure which content will rank highest in the search engines. It’s also a very actionable part of your SEO strategy; you can start improving your site structure today.
  2. Make sure your site is crawlable – If your website is crawl-friendly, you’ve won the first battle in SEO. Crawlable sites can be indexed, and Google can rank indexed sites. And ranked sites bring in leads. In addition, a crawlable site considers bots’ nature and their limitations from its design through its monitoring.
  3. Make sure your site is indexable – Indexability means that you allow search engines to show your site’s pages in the search results.
  4. Make sure you’re using HTTPS  The “S” in “HTTPS” stands for secure, indicating that the website is using a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificate.
  5. Make sure your site loads fast  A fast site speed will result in a better user experience, while a slow site speed will result in a poor user experience. A user typically stays on a site longer if the site speed is faster, and they also convert better and bounce less. For those reasons, Google has made it a ranking factor.

More Technical SEO

  1. Make sure your site is mobile & tablet Friendly – Attract a wider audience. Your audience will access your website from a variety of different devices in all shapes and sizes. Making it easier to monitor analytics, maintain, Boost SEO, Consistently design and brand, Lower bounce rates, and Improve conversion rates.
  2. Install an image compression plugin – Some of the main benefits of Image compression are: Improves page load speed, improves site user experience, Helps in boosting website SEO ranking, Saves server memory & reduces the load on the Server, and raises Conversations.
  3. Fix duplicated content issues – Duplicated content will damage your rankings. At the very least, the search engines won’t know which page to suggest to users. And as a result, all the pages those search engines see as duplicates are at risk of being ranked lower. That’s the best-case scenario.
  4. Fix broken pages – Broken links can destroy your conversion rates. In addition, they indirectly harm SEO by affecting bounce rate, time on site, and how you pass link data. Broken links may also directly harm SEO rankings by sending signals that your website is old and outdated.
Cartoon image of laptop with hands and gear coming out of the screen - Represents SEO
SEO Keywords Logo

Keywords

  1. Find your primary keywords – As the website owner and content creator, you want the keywords on your pages to be relevant to what people are searching for so they have a better chance of finding the content they need among the search results.
  2. Assess search intent – The words people use in their search queries give us insight into user intent. This also works the other way around. By formulating keywords with intent-specific words, you can increase your chances of being seen by people with matching search intent.
  3. Assess your chance of ranking – The average time for websites to rank on Google through optimization (SEO) techniques is between three to six months. Yes, that’s right – jumping to the front of Google’s results usually takes 90-180 days, depending on your industry’s competitiveness and your keywords’ popularity.
  4. Research what people want to know – Use Google Trends to find the most searched keywords on Google. Go to https://ads.google.com/aw/keywordplanner/plan/keywords/ or https://trends.google.com to find the most sought-after searches around the world. Google Trends also helps you find trending searches for thousands of keywords and topics for each day, week, month, and year.

On-page SEO

  1. Use short, descriptive URLs – The shorter, the better. To prove this, here is an extensive test on one million Google search results. Here’s a graph showing how Google rankings decline as URL length increases.
  2. Write eye-catching title tags – Title tags are a major factor in helping search engines understand what the page is about. But, even more importantly, they help searchers understand the content on your page, allowing them to choose the most appropriate result for their query.
  3. Write a compelling meta description – A compelling meta description has the power to raise the click-through rate of your organic search results. That means more people who see your page in the search results will click through and land on your site. That means increased traffic for you, even if your ranking stays the same!
  4. Add schema markup – Schema markup is essential because it makes your website look better in the search results. Thanks to it, the SERPs display extra elements like photos or videos as rich snippets. As a result, users see the exact information they need and are likely to click such results.
  5. Add internal links – Internal links are essential because they help Google understand and rank your website better. By giving Google links to follow through with descriptive anchor text, you can indicate to Google which of the pages on your website are important, as well as what they are about.
URL Graph Google Position

Download our SEO Checklist today!