SEO Checklist to Drive More Organic Traffic

In the ever-changing world of digital marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) sit on the throne as a key factor for unlocking digital success. Whether you’re a seasoned digital marketer or just a beginner; having a complete SEO checklist can be the difference between visibility and obscurity. Here, I am going to share with you a comprehensive SEO checklist to help you increase your site’s organic traffic and boost your rankings.

Step-by-Step SEO Checklist

I have categorised this SEO checklist into different categories keeping in view the main focus areas of SEO.

SEO Basics Checklist
Keyword Research Checklist
Technical SEO Checklist
On-Page SEO Checklist
Off-Page SEO Checklist

This is a holistic SEO strategy and you must focus on all of the above key areas for top rakings in search engines. This checklist will ensure that you follow SEO best practices. The following sections include a detailed SEO checklist for optimizing your site.

SEO Basics Checklist

The first thing comes first – basics of SEO. Regardless of core updates, new trends and advances, the fundamental for SEO remains unchanged. The following tips are basic SEO tasks that serve as the foundation of a successful SEO strategy.

1. Set Up Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools

Google Search Console (GSC) is a free tool that helps you monitor, analyze, maintain, and troubleshoot your website’s performance in Google search results. It also let you understand how Google percieves your website. Here you can set up your account Google Search Console account. Verify ownership of your website by adding the provided verification code to your website’s HTML or through alternative methods like DNS verification.

With the help of GSC you can:

Check which pages Google is indexing
Monitor which keywords are driving traffic
Analyze a paricular page is ranking for which keywords
Know which which keywords have high CTR (Click Through Rate)
See search analytics for viewing impressions and clicks
Understand your website’s country wise visibility

Although Google is the undisputed king of search engines, you should also sign up for Bing or other competitors.

Bing Webmaster Tools can help you identify and fix any errors preventing your website from appearing higher in search results. Additionally, it’s a great resource for optimizing your website for Bing and improving your overall SEO health by identifying duplicate content issues and checking loading speeds. Here you can set up your account Bing Webmaster Tools account.

Now you can sign in Bing Webmaster Tools through your google account also, if you do so, you will not require to verify your websites and it will extract verification data from your GSC account.

Both these tools allow you to see which keywords users are searching for to find your site, identify crawl errors, and lots more.

If you don’t have these set up, we highly recommend you do so.

2. Set Up Google Analytics

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is a free web (and app) analytics tool. It helps track and report how much traffic you’re getting, where it’s coming from, and what your users are doing. Create a Google Analytics account add your property to your new account. Install the tracking code on your website to monitor traffic, user behavior, and engagement.

Connect your GSC to Google Analytics to see helpful SEO information inside of your Google Analytics account.

Through Google Analytics, you’ll be able to track things which will help you in your SEO strategy:

How much traffic you’re getting from search engines
How much traffic and from which countries you have on your website at current moment
Demographics of your website’s visitors
Find the pages on your site that bring in the most traffic (or the least)
Identify other sites and search engines that send you traffic
Track what’s your organic traffic’s average bounce rate, page views, and time on site
How much revenue you’re getting from organic traffic

3. Install an SEO Plugin (For WordPress Websites)

If you are using WordPress as CMS for your website, now it’s time to install and configure an SEO plugin. There are many SEO Plugins available which will make it easy for you to optimize your website for search engines. These will also help you with technical SEO aspects, like implementing robots.txt and XML sitemaps.

The most popular options include:

4. Create and Submit a Sitemap

A sitemap is a blueprint of your website that help search engines find, crawl and index all of your website’s content. Sitemaps indigates the search engines which pages on your site are most important. Sitemaps also helps search engines to identify any changes you’ve made since the last time the search engines crawled your site.

There are two main types of sitemaps; XML Sitemap and HTML sitemap. : XML sitemaps are by far the most common type of sitemap.

Generate an XML sitemap using a sitemap generator tool or your website’s CMS (Content Management System). Submit your sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools to help search engines discover and index your website’s pages more efficiently.

The easiest way to find an XML sitemap is to look for it manually. Most commonly, a website sitemap will be located at this URL address.

For example, https://domain.com/sitemap.xml

Quite often—especially if the website uses WordPress and the Yoast SEO plugin—you’ll be redirected to a sitemap index

For example, https://domain.com//sitemap_index.xml

5. Create a Robots.txt File

Robots.txt is a file that tells search engines which pages and files they should or shouldn’t crawl. Create a robots.txt file to instruct search engine crawlers on which pages to crawl and index and which ones to ignore. Place the robots.txt file in the root directory of your website and ensure it is properly configured to allow access to important content while blocking irrelevant or sensitive pages.

You can see your robots.txt file by typing your homepage URL and adding /robots.txt.

For example, https://domain.com/robots.txt

You must ensure including robots.txt as a part of your SEO checklist due to following advantages:

Robots.txt file

Prevents search engines from indexing duplicate content on your site.
Improves your website’s load time by preventing unimportant pages from loading.
Blocks search engines from indexing spammy or low-quality pages.
Focusing your SEO efforts on the most important pages of your site.

Keyword Research Checklist

A keyword is what users write into a search engine when they want to find something specific. Keyword research is the process of finding keywords that you want to rank for in search engines. It includes finding, sorting, and prioritizing keywords. To then feed your keyword strategy.

Your primary keywords work best when you use them alongside secondary words. Primary keywords have high search volume and are able to drive a good amount of traffic to any website. However, they have high competition and ranking for these keywords is a little more difficult than other types of keywords or phrases. Secondary keywords are words that relate to your primary keywords and have less competition.

For example, you might looking for targeting the primary keyword “vegan recipes” For that page you could also target secondary keywords like “vegan food recipes” and “vegan meal ideas.”

The following tips for keyword research will be helpful to create a best SEO strategy.

1. Identify Your Competitors

The best way to start with keyword research is to identify competitors. Look for which keywords they are targeting. Once you have the list of keywords which are working for them, it’s a high probability that they can work for you, too. Use them in your conetnt titles, meta description, headings, first and last paragraphs.

There are several tools available to assist you in keyword research, such as Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, and Moz Keyword Explorer. These tools provide valuable insights into search volume, competition, and related keywords, helping you make concious decisions about which keywords to target.

2. Identify Long-tail Keywords With “Google Suggest”

You should include identifying long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are search terms that are longer and more specific than common keywords, and are often made up of multiple words. The best way to identify long tail keywords is “Google Suggest”.

Here’s is an example of how it works. We will again use the keyword “vegan recipes” which we used to identify the secondary keyowrds above.

First, type a keyword “vegan recipes” into Google. Son’t press enter on your keyboard… or the “Google Search” button. Instead, check out the keywords that Google suggests you. These are the long tail keywords which you can use in your content. These are specific keywords, which will refine your search based on your requirements. Here in this example you will see long-tail keywors “vegan recipes for dinner”, “vegan recipes for weight loss” and “vegan recipes without onion and garlic.”

These are called “Google Suggest” keywords. These are suggested by google based on previous searchs done by people who also searched “vegan recipes”. This means that they may be great keywords to optimize your site around.

3. Find Keywords In The Google Keyword Planner

The Google Keyword Planner is Google’s official keyword research tool. It’s basically designed for Google Ads. But It can be also used for SEO keyword research. The data comes straight from Google which makes it accurate and trustworthy. Below is the data screenshot of keyword, we used earlier “vegan recipes”

Here you can check average monthly searches, % change in the search in three months, competition, top and lower bids for a particular keywords etc.

Technical SEO Checklist

Along with optimizing your site’s content, technical SEO is the important part of your SEO checklist. It involves optimizing the technical aspects of your website to improve data security, performance, speed, and user experience. Technical SEO can have a big impact on your search engine rankings. Here is the list of technical best practices to keep in mind.

1. Mobile-Friendly Website

When your website is mobile-friendly, Google rewards you with higher rankings in mobile search results. That’s a big deal because more and more people are using their phones to search for stuff online. If your site isn’t mobile-optimized, you could miss out on a ton of organic traffic.

You need to use responsive design so your website adapts to different screen sizes when used on different devices. Also ensure that it has dynamic serving i.e. site uses the same URL regardless of device. Optimize your website’s images for mobile by resizing and compressing them.

2. Secure Your Site With HTTPS

With HTTPS, data is encrypted in transit in both directions: going to and coming from the origin server. The protocol keeps communications secure so that malicious parties can’t observe what data is being sent. As a result usernames and passwords can’t be stolen in transit when users enter them into a form. HTTPS creates a sense of security for site visitors – which plays a crucial role in the overall page experience ranking algorithm.

To use HTTPS with your domain name, you need a SSL or TLS certificate installed on your website. Your web host (Web Hosting Provider) may offer HTTPS security or you can request a SSL/TLS certificate from Certificate Authorities and install it yourself. SSL/TLS certificates may need to be renewed periodically.

3. Fix Broken Links

Even though broken links may seem harmless, they can hurt your website’s SEO. Apart from creating a poor user experience, they cmay also impact your site’s ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). You should regularly check for and fix broken website links or fix 404 error to avoid this.

You may Google Search Console to check for broken links and pages. It allow you to spot broken links and find pages that Google has yet to index.

When you’ve found a broken link, you’ve got a few options:

Edit the link so that it points to the correct page
Create a 301 redirect so that the broken link is redirected to another page on your website.
Remove the link from your website altogether.

4. Core Web Vitals (CWV) metrics

It’s also crucial to analyze your Core Web Vitals (CWV) metrics. CWV metrics measures website performance, including loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability. You website needs to pass the Core Web Vitals assessment. Since page loading speed connected with CWV, ensuring that your pages meet CWV is crucial in technical SEO. It impacts user experience and search engine rankings.

Google uses these metrics to evaluate a website’s page experience, and pages that fail to meet CWV may be penalized in search rankings.

5. Accessiblity at One domain

Have a look at the following urls

https://www.yourdomain.com
http://www.yourdomain.com
https://yourdomain.com
http://yourdomain.com

It may look same to you, but google treat them different domain. Visitors shouldn’t be able to access your website at multiple locations. It can cause issues for search engine crawlers, as well as indexing, and security issues. Ensure that your HTTP and without www prefix domains should redirect to HTTPS version at top. You may need to set up permanent 301 redirects for that.

On-Page SEO Checklist

When making a SEO checklist for your website for ranking higher in SERP, on-page SEO is a integral component of that without any doubt. By ensuring you optimize your website’s content, structure, and metadata, you can improve your rankings, attract more traffic, and boost visitor engagement.

1. Use a Caching Plugin

One of the best WordPress SEO tips is Caching. It can help store the frequently-accessed files so users can access them more quickly.
All you need to do is install a A caching plugin caching plugin and configure. Caching plugin like WP Rocket, WP Super Cache, and W3 Total Cache will help you improve the following:

site performance
site usability
load times
search engine rankings, and more.

2. Create Internal Links

One of the excellent practice in the WordPress SEO checklist is internal linking. It’s the technique of inserting the link of one page of your own website onto another page of the same website.

Internal linking ensures users understand the content a little better with more context. They also enable search engines to understand your website pages’ hierarchy and relevance. Internal links spreads link equity and improves the authority of the page and domain.

Here are a few tips for effective internal linking:

Use the relevant links rather than cannibalizing them for the sake of linking.
Use descriptive anchor text, showing a hint of what the linked page is about.
Link the pages in the right context.
Incorporate internal linking to interconnect every page of your website. So the crawlers can go through it more easily.
Monitor the page traffic regularly to check what kind of effect the internal links have on the page.

3. Keywords in Title, Meta Descriptions, Url and Alt-text

Once you are ready with your keyword list through keyword research mentioned above, It’s time to use the strategically in content, title, headings, meta descriptions, url and alt-texts. These helps search engines to understand the content and consider the page for ranking in search engines.

You must also ensure that there is no keyword cannibalization issues on your website.

Off-Page SEO Checklist

Off-page SEO involves optimizing factors outside your website, such as link building, social media engagement, and brand mentions. This off-page SEO checklist will help boost your website’s rankings and online visibility.

1. External Backlinks

External backlinks are links from other websites that point to your website, indicating to search engines that your website is trustworthy and authoritative. The more high-quality backlinks you have, the better your chances of ranking higher in search results.

There are various strategies you can employ to build backlinks:

Guest Blogging
Content Promotion
Influencer Outreach and Networking

It’s important to note that while backlinks are essential, quality matters more than quantity. Focus on acquiring backlinks from reputable websites in your industry rather than engaging in shady practices that could harm your website’s reputation.

2. Social Media Engagement

Social media plays a crucial role in off-page SEO by contributing to better search engine rankings. It helps in driving website traffic, building brand visibility, and creating valuable backlinks for SEO purposes.

Social media profiles can be optimized by incorporating relevant keywords, maintaining consistent branding elements, and including a link to the website. Post at optimal times when your audience is most active. Interact with followers by responding to comments and messages promptly. Utilize social media analytics tools to understand what types of content resonate with your audience. Create branded hashtags for campaigns to aggregate content and track engagement.

SEO Checklist to Drive More Organic Traffic