Trying to improve your new website’s visibility? Or has your existing website been underperforming?

Either way, you’re in the right place. We’ve created a full SEO checklist for you.

It will help you build a winning website that performs well and ranks high on search engines.

So, let’s get started.

SEO Toolkit to Get Started

Optimizing a website for SEO starts with using the right tools. Here’s the breakdown of essentials you’ll need for your site.

WordPress

If you use WordPress for your website, it comes with built-in SEO tools and plugins that make it simple to improve your content, manage meta tags, and boost your website’s overall rankings.

In this screenshot, you can see some recommendations from Yoast SEO about keyword usage, title, and content readability. It also gives a score to understand how well your content is optimized for search engines.

Google Search Console

If you want to make sense of how your website is performing, you need some analytics, and Google Search Console (GSC) is your friend here. Here are a few things you can do with this tool:

• Monitor traffic – See impressions, clicks, and top search queries driving users to your site.

• Check page performance – Track how individual pages rank and perform in search results.
• Fix issues – Identify and resolve indexing errors, mobile usability problems, or spam alerts.
• Submit sitemaps and pages – Help Google crawl your site faster and re-index new content.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics provides even more detailed insights into your site performance. Here’s what you can track with the tool.

• See how much traffic your site gets from Google,

• Check your top pages and organic traffic,
• Track engagement, page views, and time spent on site,
• Understand user behavior to improve your website (which pages they check, and how long they stay),
• Check the sources that bring people to your site (e.g., search engines, ads, or social media),
• Learn if the visitors take the desired action you want (e.g., making a purchase).

Note: Make sure to integrate Google Search Console with Google Analytics to get and track all important data together.

Keyword Research Checklist: Key Steps

After setting up your website, start keyword research to create content that meets your target audience’s needs and helps you rank higher on Google.

Here are a few simple steps you need to follow:

• Build content clusters around your products/services,
• Define your target audience and what they search for using keyword research tools, 
• Use Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer or other SEO tools to find different types of keywords,  

• Run a competitive analysis to see which keywords your competitors use and rank for, but you do not.

Pro tip: Target low-competition keywords with high global search volume and low keyword difficulty to easily outrank competitors.

We’ve also created a complete guide with clear steps and screenshots to walk you through keyword research in detail. Check it out!

Further reading
How To Do Keyword Research For SEO

On-Page SEO Checklist: Quick Steps

Keyword research is successfully done. Now it’s time to focus on on-page optimization. Why? To take your website’s visibility, user experience, and search rankings to the next level. 

Here’s an on-page SEO checklist to guide you through this process.

Use Keywords Strategically

Keywords matter. There’s no debate around this, but you need to be smart about how and where you place them.

Here are a few tips:

• URL: Add your primary keywords to your URL to tell both Google and visitors what the page is about and boost clicks.
  
• H1: Put your focus keyword in your H1 to help search engines understand what your page is about.
  
• Meta tags: Use keywords in meta titles and descriptions to increase visibility in search results and encourage more people to visit your page.
  
• Body text: There’s no set rule on how many times you should integrate the keyword. We generally recommend using both focus and secondary keywords wherever they feel natural. While maintaining an optimal keyword density is essential, it’s even more important to add them in a relevant context.

Use Proper URL Structure

Your content should be easy to find and navigate both for search engines and your website visitors. 

Here’s what we recommend to keep your URLs clean and SEO-friendly:

• Keep it short and simple,
• Add your focus keyword,
• Avoid underscores. Instead, use hyphens.

Use Visuals For Better Engagement

No matter how compelling your content is, you need visuals to make it stand out and feel unique. In our articles, you won’t see stock images. Instead, we recommend using either screenshots or illustrations to make your content more digestible.

Remember to add alt text to your visuals.

Add Internal and External Links

Internal linking should be part of your on-page SEO checklist. Why? Internal links will help search engines find and index your pages. Besides that, they help to create a website hierarchy and ensure your visitors have a positive experience when navigating your website.  

Smart internal linking is a specific art. How does our content team do this process? 

When creating a new article, we ensure it has internal links that are relevant and natural. Speaking by numbers, your 1500-2000-word article should usually have a minimum of 4-5 internal links.

Now, let’s understand how you can find internal linking opportunities. You can do it manually or use SEO tools. Our option is Ahrefs. Its Site Audit tool identifies pages that have few or no internal links, showing where you can add links to improve site structure.

On the other hand, the Internal Backlinks report, which is part of Site Explorer, shows which pages have the fewest links, helps to improve your internal linking structure.

Now, have everything set and done about internal links, add external links in your articles as well. Supporting your points with credible sources will boost your website’s authority. So, always link to reliable, trustworthy sources.

Further reading:
Internal And External Links

Content Checklist: Our Rules for Unique Articles

We came to the most interesting and exciting part. How to create content that Google loves and will bring traffic to your website?

• Follow E-E-A-T guidelines

Our first tip is to focus on the E.E.A.T. guideline, which is all about creating helpful, authoritative, and reliable content. It should truly give value to your readers.

• Use an interview-based content strategy

This is what the SayNine content team does. Our articles are interview-based, so if you read a post on the SayNine blog about building a backlink profile, you can be sure that the tips come directly from our link building team.

If this isn’t the case for you, you can find experts on platforms like LinkedIn and reach out to them, asking them to share their insights and thoughts.

• Conduct regular content audits

Another thing we’ll recommend is regularly auditing your content. Refresh your content and do a “complete makeover” for your old articles. 

Add new insights and perspectives to them. For example, when updating our old article on link building outreach, we interview our data specialists to learn about the new tactics they are using and then update the content based on that.

Technical SEO Checklist: Simple Steps For A Healthy Website

Great content is important, but your website also needs to be optimized so search engines can easily crawl, index, and rank it.

So, your job is to ensure that your website doesn’t have any technical issues. This technical SEO checklist will help you reach this goal.

Fix Crawling and Indexing Issues

Before your website appears in search results, search engines need to find and store your pages. Bots crawl your site to discover new or updated pages, and indexing organizes these pages in the search engine’s database. So, only pages that are crawled and indexed can show up in search results.

Site structure, sitemaps, and page speed can be reasons your site isn’t crawled and indexed properly.

You need to use Google Search Console to see if your web pages are indexed.

You can also check the reasons why your pages are not indexed.

 Then, your team should focus on fixing them to build a stronger website.

Optimize Your Website For Mobiles

This is the part you shouldn’t miss by any chance. Reasons behind it may seem obvious: more and more people are now using the internet via their smartphones. 

So, when you optimize your website for mobiles, you make navigation for users easier and faster. As you can imagine, it will translate to better engagement and rankings.

There is a fact you need to know – Google prioritizes mobile-first indexing and uses the mobile version of a site’s content for indexing and ranking.

Here is what Google says:

“While it’s not required to have a mobile version of your pages to have your content included in Google’s Search results, it is very strongly recommended. These best practices apply to mobile sites in general, and by definition to mobile-first indexing.

Test visuals on mobile. What looks great on a desktop might slow things down on smaller screens”.

To put it short, if mobile optimization wasn’t a priority before, it should be one now.

Find and Fix Broken Links

Never miss a chance to improve your website experience. A big part of this is finding and fixing broken links.

But what are they, anyway? These are dead links on your website that point to non-existent pages. So, search engines get stuck when trying to crawl your website, and users get frustrated.

To avoid this, you should regularly keep an eye on broken links and spot them using SEO tools. In our case, we use Ahrefs. Its Site Audit feature helps you find all broken links your website has. Here are steps you need to take:

Step 1: Open the Site Audit tool and enter your website domain.

Step 2: Start the crawl so the tool can scan all your pages and links.

Step 3: Go to the Issues tab in the report.

Step 4: Look for Page has links to broken pages to see which pages have broken links and what those links are.

Read our guide on broken links to learn how to fix the issues for having a healthier website.

Add Website Schema Markup

This term might sound technical, but let’s break it down. SEO professionals call it structured data: a bit of code you add to your “HTML” to share with search engines what your page is about.

Schema markup not only helps search engines understand your content but also gives you a chance to appear in rich results. These are short snippets Google shows in search results to summarize your page.  

So, as you can guess, adding schema markup to your website benefits its SEO performance. 

P.S.

Technical SEO goes beyond just indexing or schema markup, so you can check out our full article on that.

This term might sound technical, but let’s break it down. SEO professionals call it structured data: a bit of code you add to your “HTML” to share with search engines what your page is about.

Further reading:
Technical SEO Checklist

Link Building Checklist for Higher Rankings

Ok, now we come to the last part: building a successful link building strategy. We always advise our clients to invest in link building only after resolving all technical SEO, on-page SEO, and content-related issues.

When everything is done, you can start building backlinks. This is an SEO strategy checklist you need to follow.

• Choose your priority pages you want to support with backlinks and use the right anchor text.
• Get backlinks from websites that present legitimate, real businesses. These types of backlinks are powerful because they signal to Google that other authoritative websites consider yours credible enough to link to.
• Stay away from spammy and toxic backlinks, like PBNs or link farms. Reason is obvious: you only need to invest in ethical and white hat link building to get real results and avoid Google penalties.
• Ensure websites you are getting backlinks from have the following metrics –  DR-50+, Traffic 1K+. We use this policy to bring real results to our clients’ websites.
• Get no follow backlinks to ensure your website gets ranking value from linking websites.
• Use one backlink per domain approach. Having backlinks from different authoritative websites is a big step in building a strong backlink profile and increasing search engine rankings.

To Wrap Up

From technical issues, keywords to backlinks. 

SEO may seem a little bit complicated. 

But it doesn’t have to. We’ve created an SEO checklist for you, so you can improve your website presence step by step.

If all this work seems too hard to handle alone, contact us and check out our services, from link building to content creation.

FAQ about SEO checklist