SEO Checklist: How to Get More Traffic and Rank on Google

Checklist intro (why do you need one?)

If you’re looking for an SEO checklist that will help you increase your website’s organic traffic and rank on google well you’re in the right place.

But since the actual checklist is like 41 points long and I would still love for you not to have white hair at the end of this article I cut it short to the 10 most important ones So if you want to read the full checklist, which I definitely suggest you do, I’ll leave it below in the description So take a look there and if you want to stay for the most important ones, let’s keep on with the article! Hey everyone, I’m Chiara from TECHNOPASHTO and today we talk about an SEO checklist You can use this checklist to make sure that your website, whether it’s new or already existing, is up to the point with the latest best practices in SEO and that you’re not being held by any mistakes that you might have missed.

A small disclaimer before we dive into the fun: in this article, we’ll cover five main areas SEO basics, Keyword Research, Technical SEO, On-page and Off-page SEO so if you feel sure in any of these areas and want to skip to the next oneI’ll leave the timestamps in the description so that you can check and go wherever you want, but I definitely suggest you stay throughout the whole article because all these points are extremely important to your website’s success.

SEO basics you haven’t got the basics covered

SEO Checklist: How to Get More Traffic and Rank on Google
SEO Checklist: How to Get More Traffic and Rank on Google

your website will definitely struggle to rank for competitive terms so the next steps will be a little bit of a “housekeeping” but definitely you have to check them out because without those you can’t have a successful SEO strategy.

Make sure you have set up Google Search Console and Google Analytics correctly.

Make sure you have set up Google Search Console and Google Analytics correctly
Make sure you have set up Google Search Console and Google Analytics correctly

Google Search Console is an essential tool that provides you with invaluable insights into your site’s performance as well as a wealth of data that you can use to grow your site’s organic traffic and visibility, and if you have any doubts about it or you’re just unsure on how to set it up properly I’ll leave in the description below the ultimate guide to setting up Google Search Console that we made in TECHNOPASHTO so take a look if you want.

After Google Search Consolelet’s skip to Google Analytics: without the right data, you can make the right decisions.

 

Google Analytics as you probably know is a free analytics tool that allows you to view data and insights about how many people are visiting your site, who they are, and how they’re engaging with it.

And just as for Google Search Console we also have a guide on how to set up correctly Google Analytics so if you have any doubtsI’ll link that as well below in the description so take a look if you need it

Generate and submit a sitemap

Generate and submit a sitemap
Generate and submit a sitemap

purpose of a sitemap is to help search engines understand which pages should be crawled on your website and which should not.

It is just very simply a list of URLs that specify your main content so that it gets crawled and indexed.

A sitemap tells the crawler which files you think are important in your site and also provides valuable information about these files for example for pages: when the page was last updated, how often the page is changed, and any alternate language versions of a page Once you have generated your site map make sure that this is submitted to Google Search Console and Bing Webmasters tool If you don’t know how to create a sitemap well, guess what? I have a guide for you and I’ll leave in the description and be sure to check it out because there are a lot of recommendations on sitemap generators.

 

Create a robot.txt file Your robots.txt

Create a robots.txt file
Create a robots.txt file

the file is used to make search engine crawlers understand which pages and files they can or can request from your website most commonly it is used to prevent certain sections of your site from being crawled and it’s not intended to be used as a way to de-index a web page and stop it from showing on google you can find your site’s robots.

txt file here and check whether you have it already in place if you don’t you can just google robots.

txt generators and you’ll find tons of tools to help you that way

Keyword Research Create a keyword map:

Keyword Research - our second main area
Keyword Research – our second main area

once you have conducted thorough keyword research and you have identified your target keywords (and if you want any suggestions or advice on that you should check the cards above or the description below for some super useful content) well after you have found those you should definitely map them out.

In its simplest form keyword mapping is a framework for the keywords you have chosen to target that mirrors your site’s structure driven by research.

The ultimate goal of the maps is to help you discover where to optimize, what content to build, and where you can add new pages to attract more traffic.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO
Technical SEO

 

Before we go on with the checklist I just want to tell you that the next few steps can all be checked in our Site Audit tool which is one of the most performing and most powerful tools in TECHNOPASHTO so if you want to find out if your website has any trouble and if you want to know how to solve you should definitely run a site audit with our tool.

Improve your site speed

Improve your site speed
Improve your site speed

I’ll say it as it is: slow website makes for poor user experience, in fact Google has recently confirmed an upcoming page experience update for 2021 that is set to place an even greater focus upon user experience as a ranking factor than is currently the case.

You need to make sure your site loads quickly and acknowledge that users continue to expect more.

You will find slow-loading pages flagged when you run a crawl using TECHNOPASHTO Site Audit tool and can also gain more specific insights using Google’s page speed insights tool

Make sure that your website is mobile-friendly

Make sure that your website is mobile-friendly
Make sure that your website is mobile-friendly

Mobile-friendliness is a key factor in google’s upcoming user experience update but the real reason you should always check that your website is actually mobile-friendly and optimized for mobile experiences that Google switched to mobile-first indexing for all websites starting from mid-2019.

If you’re not serving a mobile-friendly experience you will find that your organic visibility suffers because of this: you can test your site’s mobile-friendliness with google’s mobile-friendly testing tool

On-page SEO and content

Without great content and great on-page experience your website will definitely struggle to rank for any position in the google SERPso always make sure that you have the next few steps ticked in your checklist and make great content for users and not only for search engines

Find and fix duplicate missing and truncated title tags

Find and fix duplicate missing and truncated title tags
Find and fix duplicate missing and truncated title tags

Optimized title tags are the very basics of SEO,in fact, they’re often the first thing any SEO would take a look at to help a page to rank You see, a title tag informs search engines what the page is about and should be unique duplicate title tags shouldn’t be found and truncated title tags, which are the ones that are too long, will be cut off on the SERPs (you will see three dots after the title tag) and the part is gonna be missing and of course, you should also ensure the title tags are not missing all of these issues, by the way, can be found flagged in your Site Audit report and can be fixed by updating and improving your pages title tagsFind and fix duplicate and missing meta description.

While meta descriptions haven’t been used as a direct ranking factor for many years this is usually what shows beneath your site’s title tag on the SERPs, quite simply is your meta description that encourages a user to click on your listing over someone else’s and can either positively or negatively affect your organic CTR If you don’t have a meta description in place Google will display part of your page’s content but this could include navigation text and other elements and be far from enticing.

If you have duplicates there is a good chance that you are not presenting a unique description that encourages clicks.

Run a content audit: prune, update, cannibalization

I can’t stress enough how important it is to check the quality of your content, of course, I don’t mean just producing quality content, that should be the base, but you should also check if you’re in need of any pruning which is cutting all that is not needed or if you’re in need to check if you have any cannibalizing content on your website or if you should update any old existing ones.

This is extremely important because you always need to provide the user with the best content you can give them: it doesn’t matter if it’s old or new it should be always updated, up to the point, and extremely helpful and useful.

If you find any content on your website that it’s not useful, it’s not up to date anymore, and it’s not gonna give anything to the people that read that, well, cut it off It doesn’t have to be on your website.

Off-page SEO:

Analyze your competitor’s link profile

Analyze your competitor's link profile
Analyze your competitor’s link profile

you don’t have any insights on your competitor’s link profile how can you set up a strategy to outrank them? Just as it is important to spend time analyzing your competitor’s content, you should also invest resources into digging deep into their link profile You can run any URL through the BacklinkAnalytics tool in TECHNOPASHTO and you can analyze your competitor’ slink profile and start to understand the overall quality and authority of the links that point to their site Are you missing out on links that your competitors are benefiting from but you’re not? You can definitely find that out using our Backlink, Gap Tool.

If there is, let’s say, a resource page that links to all others in your space except you a great starting point would be to reach out to ask to be added

Bonus point for local SEO specialists:

set up and optimize Google My Business.

Off-page SEO goes way beyond links even though we know they’re super important because they’re a huge ranking factor anyway if you’re running a local business you should definitely make sure that you’re listed on Google My Business.

This is extremely important because if you’re not listed, well, let me just tell you that you’re probably gifting visits to your competition which is not something that you want.

And there you go! A 9-10 step SEO checklist for SEO beginners and also for more navigated SEO specialists to check that your website is always on point so that you can increase your organic traffic and ranking on google And let me know in the comments below if you have already followed any of the steps, which you probably have, of this checklist or if you have some steps that we have missed out so I’ll be waiting for you in the comments because I’m always curious to get to know more your work and if you liked the article don’t forget to subscribe to the website and activate the notification bell so that you don’t miss any of the great content that will be posted and as usual please check the description below I don’t know how many times I’ve said it in this article I’m sorry if I’m boring you with this but there are a ton of super useful resources in the description that you should definitely not miss out! (guides, article, tools) everything is right below I’ve put all the links.

Thank you so much for listening to have a nice day and I’ll see you in the next article.

My Name Ahmadkhan

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