Basic SEO Checklist You Can Use For Your Business
Just created a new website for your business? Now is the time to focus on SEO so you can gain more site traction. Just so you know, every major search engine like Google, Yahoo, and Bing have search results for every keyword that users search for. In the search results, local listings are shown, and websites are ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to the user. In short, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the art of getting traffic to your site from the search engine by ranking higher in the search engine results.
Basic SEO Checklist
Let us first talk about the tools and plugins you will need to increase your website’s organic traffic.
Set up the Google Search Console
This tool offers you a lot of valuable data for your search engine traffic and rankings. You can use this to submit your sitemap for the search engine to recrawl your website. Additionally, this tool will help you in finding keyword ideas. That is not all; it will also share the information about the website errors and manual penalties that you need to rectify on your website. In fact, these errors and penalties can be handled directly from this tool.
Set up Google Analytics
This will help you see what your SEO efforts are getting you. It will show you the traffic coming into your website. You will be able to see where the traffic is coming from, how much revenue you are getting from the traffic, and the bounce rate. The best way to use this is by connecting this with your Google Search Console.
Install Yoast SEO (for WordPress)
This plugin will help you with suggestions about improving your web page to make it SEO-friendly. Using the suggestions, you can edit to remove the error and create an SEO-friendly web page.
Use Google Keyword Planner
Although many keyword research applications are out there, this is the most appropriate one to use. Using this, you can search for the most relevant keywords that you like to use to rank your website. Just so you know, you are not restricted to using this tool. Other keyword research tools you can use include KeywordTool.io, KWFinder, and Ahrefs.
Set up Bing & Yandex Webmaster Tools
Google is obviously the most famous one, but Bing and Yandex are also used a lot. It is better to set up these tools as well for your website. They work in the same way as the Google Search Console & Google Analytics. Their job is to index and crawl your web pages to be displayed on the search results when a person searches for something relevant on these search engines.
Technical SEO Checklist
This part includes everything you need to do to make it easier for search engines to find your website. It consists of the following things:
Optimize Your Website Speed
Ensure that the speed to load your website is as less as possible. The longer a website takes to open, the more you lose traffic and potential customers.
Check the User-Experience
This is an essential part of SEO, just like every other point mentioned in this checklist. Here, you need to see that the website is user-friendly. Other than this, ensure that the website is accessible from any browser and device. Basically, the website needs to be mobile-friendly as well.
Fix bad re-directs
You need to create an error page so that when someone looks for a URL of your website that does not exist, they can be redirected to the Error 404 or 302 pages.
Fix Crawl Errors & Broken Links
You can do this easily with the help of the Google Search Console. But you will need to keep checking it frequently so that there are no errors for your website.
Create XML Sitemap & Submit to Google Search Console
This helps the search engine understand all about your website’s structure and find all the web pages.
Create a Robot.txt File
Along with a sitemap, you will also need this file. In this file, you will need to add the code to help Google understand which pages it should crawl and which pages it should not crawl. For instance, you can block Google from crawling the admin login page of your website.
Keep reading!
With all this clear now, you can go ahead and begin to work on the SEO of your website. If you have any doubts about SEO, hit the comment section, and we will reply as soon as possible! Check out other informative posts on our blog to get answers to your digital marketing-related questions.
