Daily SEO Tips: Using an SEO Checklist

Welcome to Casey SEO and I’m going to be starting a new series. So this is going to be basically a daily SEO tip. For today’s tip, it’s going to be creating a checklist. So if you do not have a checklist and you are in the SEO industry, you should get one. And it’s not that you do not know what you’re doing, it just makes it a little bit easier when you come across any issues and you can just go right up that checklist and say, hey, maybe these pages aren’t getting indexed.

So what could be the issue there? Maybe you have a no index in your Robots Tst file or maybe somebody clicked the button and WordPress it says discourage search engines from listing these pages. Who knows? But a checklist just makes it a lot easier. So if you have an issue, you can go back, you can go through that checklist and hopefully you can solve that issue without spending hours trying to pull your hair out.

So if you guys don’t have a checklist, let’s just hop over the computer. I’m going to go over a couple of the key components of what a checklist could look like. I’ll put a link to this checklist from SEO Power Suite, and then I will be making a video tutorial explaining each section and basically how you could perform some of these steps within the checklist. So it gives you guys a better idea what needs to be involved and how to do it. So hop over the computer.

I’ll go over the checklist from SEO power suite. I will leave a description below in case you guys want to go ahead and download this. So let’s go. So the checklist starts out with a website launch. Now if you don’t launch any websites, you’re not necessarily going to have to worry about this section.

But it is still very good to know every component within the website launch because if you have any issues, you can go back and just double check to what either the website developer did or maybe somebody on your team. A lot of times when a website is launched, depending on who is launching the website, they may not actually know too much about SEO and they may leave out, let’s say, a plugin for Google Analytics. Or maybe they did click that button to discourage search engines from searching the site. Those are just little things that you need to check out before the launch or right when it launches. So you don’t have to worry about a client complaining six months later because you don’t have any traffic or none of your pages are indexed.

So at first it just goes into like use the Https protocol which is exactly what you want to do. And what may happen to is you might find if it’s an older site, maybe they had Http links throughout the site, throughout the blog and you’re going to want to go back and also change those. If you find those in your website, audit another one here, it just says choose an SEO friendly content management system. I always prefer WordPress, it’s the most familiar for me. You can do a lot of things with it.

It’s great for SEO and then one of the other ones we just have planned your website structure. So that’s going to be another big component of your website, especially when you’re setting it up. Next on the checklist we’ll just go into keyword research. So we need to find some top ranking keywords, what your competitors may be ranking for, what keywords you want to rank for the most profitable, and how to map those out. The next section we have on page SEO and Content optimization.

So if you create any content, just make sure to have your title text message description, make sure they’re not too long. Make sure the main content is actually covering what your website is about. You don’t want to go off and let’s say you’re a landscaper, you don’t want to be talking about washing cars unless it’s related to some type of service that you do. But it seems like that would be in a different niche. So not sure why you’d want to do that to begin with.

But if you work in the industry long enough, nothing will surprise you anymore. And then just add structured data which would be schema depending on what your content management system is. If it’s WordPress, for example, you may be using a different plugin to automatically add some schema or you might be doing it manually, who knows. Then the next section we have is just technical SEO. So look for like a custom 404 page.

If you don’t have that, go ahead and create it. Make sure your robots TXT file is set up correctly and you have a site map fixing the duplicate content and just make sure it’s mobile friendly. If your website is not mobile friendly in 2022, you need to get that fixed ASAP. I still come across a lot of sites that are not mobile friendly and kind of surprised by that. But then again, I’m not next could just be some link building and some PR outreach.

We’re going to need to get some more backlinks to your site, fix any spam issues. Although with the spam issues, Google has said essentially they remove any links or they don’t count any links in your search console once you dive in there and you click that link button. So you may really not have to do that use the dish out file anymore. I think sending a recent article, don’t really have to worry about that but if you still want to go for it and one of the last sections here on the checklist we got local SEO. So if you have a local business, local SEO is going to be one of your best friends.

You need to look at your search rankings by Geolocation, which you can break that down when you’re doing keyword research. You definitely need your Google business profile page, have some local schema markup, build some local citations, those types of things. And then you want to set up some type of rank tracking for your keywords because you don’t know if you’re doing a good job with your SEO if you’re not tracking the keywords that you’re really wanting to track. Plus you’re going to want to track any other thing that the search engines come up with. So, for example, you might be tracking Windows, but you’re ranking really high for window accessories.

Well, I don’t care about window accessories, but maybe you should. If you’re ranking really high for that, you can take or create a page specifically for window accessories, and then that just gives you another lead page back for you to sell some windows to these people that may have some window accessory issues, but kind of in a nutshell, that is your tip of the day. Make sure you guys have a checklist. And like I said earlier, I’ll be going over like a full tutorial of a checklist and how you can find these things, what might be some best practices and what might not be some best practices for your SEO campaign. So I hope you guys enjoyed today’s little SEO tip.

Hit that subscribe button and I will be back with some more SEO tips. I said daily. I’m going to be trying to do this daily in this little series here just so I can give you guys some more information to help you out with your SEO. So if you guys have any questions, please leave me a comment below.