Hello, are you looking how to get more traffic and rank on Google? So, we are here with an SEO checklist which will help you to increase your website’s organic traffic and rank on google.
I am going to discuss the 05 most important points, so you read the 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.
Small disclaimer before we dive into it: In this article, we’ll cover five main areas SEO basics, Keyword Research, Technical SEO, On-page and Off-page SEO. If you feel sure in any of these areas, you may skip a bit; but I strongly recommend to stay through out the whole article because all these points are extremely important to your website’s success.
SEO basics, If you haven’t got the basics covered your website will definitely struggle to rank for competitive terms so the next steps will be a little bit of a “house keeping” 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. 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.
After Google Search Console, let’s move to Google Analytics: without the right data you can’t 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.
Generate and submit a sitemap: The 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 generated your site map, make sure that this is submitted to Google Search Console and Bing Webmasters tool.
Keyword Research, once you have conducted a thorough keyword research and you have identified your target keywords, 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 are to help you discover where to optimize, what content to build, and where you can add new pages to attract more traffic.
Before we go on with the checklist, I just want to tell you that the next few steps can be one of the most performing and most powerful tools in SEMrush, so if you want to find out if your website has any trouble and if you want to know how to solve it; you should definitely run a site audit with this tool. You need to make sure your site loads quickly and acknowledge that users continue to expect more. You will finds low loading pages flagged when you run a crawl using SEMrush 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, this 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 experience is 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 SERP.
So 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, 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 and the part is gonna be missing and of course, you should also ensure the title tags are not missing all of these issues. 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 it 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.
Off-page SEO: Analyze your competitor’s link profile, if 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 Backlink analytics tool in SEMrush and you can analyze your competitor’s link 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 step wise SEO checklist for beginners and also for more navigated SEO specialists, check that your website is always on point so that you can increase your organic traffic and ranking on google.
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. I’ll be waiting for you in the comments because I’m always curious to get to know more your work.
Thanks..!!
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