The Ultimate SEO Checklist [Infographic]

Search engine optimization seems to be the golden goose for digital marketers. 

It can be a full-time job to stay on top of because it is ever-evolving, but if done properly, it can produce a wealth of great results for your business. 

Don’t know where to start? Want some quick wins to improve your SEO now?  

Luckily, MarketingProfs shared this great Infographic created by LeapFroggr to help you kick start or polish SEO efforts. 

Step 1: Do your research

What are your competitors doing? What keywords are people searching for that are related to your industry? 

Research can be time-consuming and daunting, but the payoff is great.

Pull together a list of your top competitors and then do some keyword research. 

Google Ads - KeywordPlanner is a powerful free option available at your fingertips. You can also explore a paid option like SEMRush. If you don’t know what SEMrush, check out this in-depth review. 

Next, check out your website stats. 

Pull together some information on your site speed, crawl errors, and analytics, just to name a few. 

You can crawl your entire website with a tool like Screaming Frog and make sure to utilize Google Webmaster Tools to submit a sitemap, check for crawl errors and penalties. With this information, you will be able to discover and resolve issues on your site immediately resulting in better site speed and quick wins to improve your SEO. 

Step 2: On-page SEO

There is so much you can do to optimize your on-page SEO, but here are some quick things you can do immediately.

Make sure your content has a focus keyword. Include the keyword in your H1 title, purposefully throughout the content and in the URL of the web page if possible. 

Your images should also all have alt-text and be compressed and optimized for your website so that they do not affect your site speed performance. 

Tinypng is a free image optimization tool I love to use and if your website is on WordPress, there are a number of great plugin options like Imagify.  

Step 3: Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO refers to what you can do to improve your SEO outside of your website. 

This can be done by making sure you are active on social media, guest blogging, and providing quality content that your audience finds valuable. 

Step 4: There’s still more

Yes, after all of that, there is still more you can do. 

Become an expert in your space. You can do this by building your content library. Check out this Content Marketing & Blogging Basics playbook from us here at IMPACT to get you started. 

As your content is optimized and discovered by more users through Google, the search engine  will start to pay attention and reward you for your efforts by ranking your content higher.

You should also pay attention to conversion rate optimization. 

Monitor your bounce rates, set-up and track goals, and review where people are converting on your site. You can do all of this with Google Analytics or another marketing analytics tool like HubSpot. If you notice that certain pages are not converting well do some tests. Make one change at a time to see if it helps, for example, button text or color. You may discover that certain wording or colors resonate better with your visitors. Having this data and being able to make these adjustments will increase your conversion rate and add to your credibility with Google in turn improving your SEO. 

Lastly, but maybe most importantly, make sure to stay on top of Google guideline changes. 

Changes rolled out by Google can dramatically affect your SEO efforts so it is important to be in the know and update as necessary so that you do not see dramatic dips in your traffic.  

This article only scratches the surface of this incredibly in-depth checklist so make sure to view the full infographic below: