top of page

New Website SEO Checklist: Elevate Your Digital Presence

Image SEO, Local SEO, Voice Search, Mobile SEO, User Intent, Google Snippet Features, People Also Ask features are likely to remain a core part of your online marketing efforts

​

Either you are building a new website for your business or amending the existing website to match the latest customer attributions. Explore this ever-evolving landscape of SEO, the value of a comprehensive SEO strategy, and its increasing importance for a website in the current year. Here is an article compiled with the ultimate New Website SEO Checklist that covers everything you need to consider.

 

SEO is dead, Of course, it is a misguiding fact. "Create a website with landing pages to target relevant high-search volume target keywords with relevant search intent" is a strategy that can never be ignored. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the key to increasing your website's visibility on search engines like Google, driving organic traffic, and ultimately, achieving your online goals.

​

Get Your SEO Strategy Right From the Start.

Involve the SEO team during the initial stage of development. Consider auditing CMS in advance to proceed with development.

 

Uncover Valuable Keyword Opportunities

Hire an SEO to Identify relevant keywords and phrases your target audience is likely to search. Also, enhance your website for keyword clusters by grouping similar keyword pages under a single Hub

 

Study Your Competitors' Websites:

Ask your in-house SEO or SEO Consultant to explore how your competitor's SEO strategies are performing, gaps you can exploit, and opportunities you might have missed.

 

Website Structure:

website structure helps visitors and search engine bots navigate your site and find all the pages on your website. Example: For Products/ service pages Home> Hub Page >> Product>>> Product-name/ and for Articles pages Home> Hub Page >> article-name/

 

SEO-Friendly URL Structure

Build a descriptive, clean, and logical URL structure for your website. Also, ask your website SEO owner to define a strategy to dynamically create keyword-rich URLs for filter pages instead of creating parameterized URLs with random characters and symbols.

 

Landing Page Optimization:

Optimize every page on your website for SEO. This includes:

  1. Use a 65 Characters Keyword Rich Meta Title

  2. Implement 150 characters keyword optimized Meta Descriptions

  3. Use Heading Tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) to structure your content and include keywords naturally.

  4. The page and its visible assets are device-responsive

  5. Describe the image's alt-text using keywords for accessibility and SEO.

  6. Link to other relevant pages on your website.

  7. Language-tag is implemented

  8. Implement canonical tag

  9. All the duplicate versions of the landing page are attended i.e. the filter-driven pages, querey parmeter URLs are canonicalized to the parent page and http:// version, pages without "/", is redirected to the parent page.

  10. bread crumb is implemented without errors

  11. The landing page passes Core Web vitals i.e. when measuring website performance, including loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability.

 

The Website is Secure:

Secure your website by implementing HTTPS. This not only enhances security but also has a positive impact on your search engine rankings. When your website uses HTTPS, you'll notice the reassuring "lock" icon in your browser, indicating a safe and trustworthy browsing experience.

 

The website is accessible with a Single domain

Ensure that your website is accessible from only one location to prevent complications with search engine crawlers, indexing problems, and rankings issues i.e. all your versions i.e. http://www.example.com, http://example.com, https://example.com are 301 redirected to https://www.exmaple.com website version

 

Create Useful, Actionable Body Content

Low-quality content risks losing your audience, so produce engaging, actional content for webpages using target keywords. Also, implement internal links from and to relevant web pages. consider following Google guidelines for content on the website

 

Check For Duplicate Content and Keyword Cannibalization:

Check if the website has multiple pages that target the same keyword phrase, the search engines may not know which page to rank higher.

 

Check For Website Errors - Focus more on 404 errors

Crawl the website using screaming frog to validate and fix broken links, meta robots tags, canonical issues, image, hreflang issues, metadata, h1 issues on all important landing webpages that needed to be shown on SERPs. redirect 404 error pages to relevant Landing pages

 

Robots.TXT

On the robots.txt file write rules to allow bots to crawl all important pages, and block unwanted pages from crawling. Include XML sitemap path on robots.txt.

 

XML Sitemap

Generate an XML sitemap dynamically or Create an XML sitemap using Screaming Frog for your website. Don't include PDF pages, 404 error pages, no-index pages, or security pages. Upload it to the root folder ( https://www.iamdoingseo.com/sitemap.xml). Create a recurring ticket each month to submit an XML sitemap to the Google Search Console or other webmaster tools.

 

Setup Webmaster Tools & Index Your Site

Set up a Google search console/Bing webmaster Baidu webmaster for your website. Submit an XML sitemap to help search engines index your site more efficiently. Also, these webmaster tools help See the keywords you rank and drive traffic, find website errors, check webpages that are indexed on search engines

 

Monitor SEO performance Using Tag Manager & Analytics Tools

Configure GA4, Adobe Analytics, Looker, or alternative analytics tools to oversee your website's performance. Once you've confirmed the clicks, behaviours, journeys, and goals that need to be tracked in your analytics tools, proceed to deploy tags through Google Tag Manager or Tealium tags on your website. Additionally, make sure to exclude self or office IPs from being tracked, and filter out sources that generate errors. Keep a close eye on essential metrics such as organic traffic, rankings, click-through rates, and user behaviour.

 

Get Additional Organic Referral Traffic

Setup Google business profile, Bing Places, apple business, Facebook/Instagram profile, LinkedIn company profile, and other social media profiles and link together

 

SEO is an Ongoing Process

SEO is an ongoing process, it is not limited to the above checklist. Yet there are a lot more from doing content gap analysis, assessing chances for ranking your content in the Google snippet feature, monitoring and amending your website content for search intent changes, regularly monitoring and fixing website technical issues, building new backlinks, and more

​

bottom of page