Follow this Complete SEO Checklist for your business to rank higher organically in 2020. SEO (search engine optimization) and digital marketing will help your company land on page one so your buyers can find you.
Google My Business for Complete SEO Checklist
As a business, you must have a strong google my business profile created. It’s completely free and google helps your business stand out, especially on google maps.
It’s very important that you fill out every section to the best of your ability. Furthermore, your google my business profile will connect to your website, helping you with your ranking.
Google Search Console
Your business needs to be connected to the google search console to monitor your performance with google. Additionally, this free tool helps you identify and fix any problems on your site.
Moreover, the Google search console helps you to understand how google sees your site and how you can improve it. Your goal should be to make your site easy to understand and provide a great user experience. Google search console will help you do that.
By doing this, you will do what the google search engine is trying to emulate as a visitor to your site. Understanding the google search console will help you address any issues google sees with your site. As a result, this will help your ranking with google.
Google Analytics for Complete SEO Checklist
Connecting your website with google analytics won’t necessarily help you with your ranking. However, it provides very useful information for you to understand how your site is performing. The analytics records site visits of users.
Additionally, it provides detailed information about your visitors so you can understand the traffic. My understanding of the traffic, you are more informed on how to adjust your marketing campaigns.
Page Content (Most Important Part of SEO)
If your website runs on WordPress, we strongly recommend using Yoast SEO to help you optimize your pages. The free version is sufficient for beginners.
With the Yoast tool, follow the recommendations for each of your pages. If you can get all of your pages on the green, you have a better chance of ranking well.
Page Main Title
Make sure the title of your page is clear to visitors and they understand exactly what you offer. As a result, each page has a title clearly explaining what it is about.
For example, if you have a restaurant, you will have a menu page. Visitors will know that’s where they go to see what’s on your menu and the prices. In addition, you can provide sub-pages under the menu, detailing specific dishes.
Header Tags
Make sure you have H1, H2, and H3 headings on your pages. This makes it easier for users to follow the content on your pages.
If you notice, this article has titles and sections for each particular topic. By using headers, you give users a better experience.
Page Description Meta Tag
With Yoast, you can provide a custom snippet to better explain what the page is about.
The page title is very important to ranking well. Make sure you provide a clear and simple title that explains what the page is about. Furthermore, you need to have your long tail keyword in your Meta description.
For the Meta description, write a few sentences that provide more details about the page. This is your elevator pitch to bring interested buyers to your site.
Keyword(s) in Introduction
The introduction paragraph is the first section users read. It’s essential to have your keywords naturally embedded so your visitors know they came to the right place. Google uses the introduction to understand what your pages are about.
Internal and External Links
Help users find more information about relevant topics on multiple pages on your website with internal links. At times, you might have too much information on one page that can seem overwhelming.
By segmenting sections into other pages, you make it easier for the user to read and provide internal linking that helps with your ranking.
For external links, help users find relevant information outside of your website. For example, you may use multiple external links for tools that will help you with a complete SEO checklist.
Long Tail Keyword Integration
In your headers and content, you need to integrate keywords that you want to rank for. Most importantly, they should be done naturally in a genuine way.
For example, a keyword might be “dentist.” This is very general and can have multiple results on a search engine. A long tail keyword might be, “High Rated Dentists in Denver Colorado.” Furthermore, explain why you are highly rated and include google reviews that complement the statement.
Image Compression
For this section, find a few high-ranking competitor websites. Next, look closely at some of the images they have on their site. You might notice that they are slightly “fuzzy.”
Search engines want a website that loads fast. To do this, web developers will compress the images so they load faster.
If you use WordPress, we recommend a free tool called “red mush.it Image Optimizer” that automatically compresses images as you load them.
In addition, we recommend resizing and compressing images before loading them. You can use a free tool like Gimp.
Finally, make sure to name your images according to the page. As search engines crawl your web pages, they read all the content. By providing image alt attribute names, you will allow search engines to understand what the image is about.
Easy Read Content
Your goal is to make the content easy to read for a 13-year-old. When you’re trying to attract customers, you don’t want your content to be hard to read.
When content is hard to read, visitors will leave, leading to a higher bounce rate of your website. A bounce rate is when a user comes to your site and leaves because they did not find the information useful.
Consequently, this can impact your ranking because search engines understand that visitors are not finding your site helpful.
Therefore, focus on short sentences that engage your readers.
The content Does Not Have Grammatical Errors
Not only should your content be easy to read, but it should also be free of grammatical errors. Search engines have tools to identify errors just like Microsoft word.
Therefore, make sure you review your content before publishing.
Website Speed and Performance
Your website needs to be fast and provide a pleasant experience for users. Luckily, there are several tools to help you test your site’s performance. You want to try to be in the green as much as possible. Here are a few listed below.
Google PageSpeed Insights
GTmetrix
Pingdom Test
Expert
Being in the green will help your site. In addition, these tools will provide insight into how to improve your site’s performance. One of the biggest culprits of low grades is having a flashy theme.
Additionally, there are a few easy tips and tricks to help you with the scores. They include adding expired headers, using compressed images, and plugins that speed up your website.
The two we recommend are Autoptimize and W3 Total Cache. They both have free options which are sufficient for what you will need.
In most cases, these tools do the job. However, be very careful using these tools as they can alter your site. In some cases, they can completely break your site.
404 And 301 Redirects
Over time, you may have a web page that you deleted. Unfortunately, Google may have indexed it. If someone visits the page, they will get an error.
Therefore, you need to redirect the visitor to the right page. A free, simple tool we recommend for WordPress is Redirection.
Schema & Structured Data
Structured data helps search engines identify, categorize, and index the content on your webpage. It’s important to have structured data and schema on your web pages to help you in ranking.
Here is a google testing tool for structured data:
Google Structured Data Testing Tool
SSL Certificate Secured Websites
As a business, you need to have a secure website. Even if you don’t sell products, SSL certificates help with ranking status.
If you don’t have a secure website, visitors will receive a warning from their browser. As a result, visitors will think your website is not credible and leave.
Mobile Friendly Website
Today, more and more people use mobile devices over computers and laptops. Therefore, your website needs to be optimized for mobile devices.
This is one of Google’s ranking criteria.
Test your site to see if it is mobile-friendly with Google:
Mobile-Friendly Test – Google Search Console
Publish New Content Regularly for a Complete SEO Checklist
You may have heard the term, “Content is King”. The more content you have in your industry, the more search engines will see your expertise in the industry.
Therefore, having a blog where you publish content weekly is strongly recommended. Ideally, you want to produce high-quality articles that genuinely help people with what they are looking for.
Summary of Complete SEO Checklist
Many factors help your business rank well with search engines. Make sure you have a google my business account set up and completed. Next, the google search console will help you diagnose issues with your website.
As far as your website, make sure to optimize your page content, page title, headers, page description, keyword integration, links, and image compression. Most importantly, make sure your content is easy to read and error-free.
In summary, this complete SEO checklist will help your business rank higher and ultimately lead to sales.
You have a business that you do well. Unfortunately, you can’t figure out how to get in front of buyers. Tier2Tek can do this for you. Please review our SEO Packages and contact us for a free consultation.