There are some important actions that you need to undertake when starting a new website or performing an SEO audit.
They cover technical SEO, Keyword Research, On-Page SEO and Link Building. By taking care of these you will be able to increase long-term targeted traffic to your website.
TECHNICAL SEO
- Install Google Analytics. This free tool enables you to measure key SEO metrics such as web traffic, conversions and revenue.
- Use Rank Math. This will simplify your life, especially when carrying out the many tasks involved with Technical and On-Page SEO practices.
- Install Google Search Console. This free tool allows you to check how the search engines view your site and includes many reports that will help you to determine crawl errors and penalties on your site, as well as give you useful information on such things as search queries and indexing statuses.
- Analyse your website with Google Pagespeed Insights to help you improve performance and speed issues. You can also install plugins such as WP Smush, W3 Total Cache, or Better Delete Revision to help you speed up your site.
ON-PAGE SEO CHECKLIST
- Choose one Keyword per page. Normally, this will be a lower-volume keyword that is long-tailed.
- Write title tags that Google will love. Every page of your website should have a unique title tag and ideally, this should start with a relevant keyword.
- It is also a good idea to use eye-catching modifiers to the title as well to pick up long-tail searches.
- A few examples of such modifiers include: ‘ 20 ways to achieve success with …’ and ‘best SEO tactics For 2022’.
- Title tags should be no longer than 55 characters- if they are then words will be truncated and look unprofessional.
- Follow URL best practices. URLs should be as short as possible and look pleasing to the eye. They should always include hyphens to separate the keywords, and you should avoid numbers.
- An example of a good URL would be www.yourwebsitename.com/events and a poor one www.yourwebsitename.com/ p=472
- Your meta descriptions are mega important. Being no more than 160 characters in length, they should describe the benefits of your post or product compared to competitors who are already appearing in the search results.
- Include a target keyword in your filename and include a keyword-rich alt text to all of your images.
- Include your target keyword within the first 100 words of your post.
- Add 2-3 Internal links in your new post that direct visitors to some of your older posts.
- Make sure that you add social sharing buttons to your page to encourage readers to share your content.
- When writing your post, make sure that you split up your content into paragraphs. At the head of each one, use a keyword within an H2 or H3 heading tag.
- Include outbound links to authority sites that you have referenced within the post.
- Your content should be informative and useful to readers. We recommend your content be at least longer than 750 words in length.
- Finally, after publishing your post, complete a site audit to ensure that everything is correct. There are numerous free site audit tools available on the web.
KEYWORD RESEARCH
- Getting into your customer’s shoes is the first thing you should do when starting your keyword research. Prospective clients are often searching for information to solve their problems and you should take this into account when starting this process.
- Keyword Strategy.
- For a new website, it is best to concentrate on less competitive long-tail keywords and then write content around these.
- When writing content, it is best to use associated keywords alongside the chosen keyword for your topic. You will be able to brainstorm for these types of keywords using a variety of free tools such as the Google Adwords Keywords Planner, Ubersuggest, Google AutoComplete, Quora,
- When using these tools, as well as looking for long-tailed keywords. look for synonyms that you can use.
- Narrow down your keyword list. Use a variety of parameters to sort out your keywords, such as search volume, SD, etc
- Also, make sure that you take in the commercial intent of your keywords – a simple way to do this is to find those keywords that have a high CPC ( cost per click). These figures can be found on many search tools.
- Choose Target Keywords. For each keyword, review the first page of Google to see what is appearing.
- When you finally have a list of possible keywords and phrases, run each keyword into Google Search and review what appears in the search results. For example, look to see if there are any brand names appearing – if there are then you will most likely see high-quality content within the site.
- You can then use the MOZ SEO toolbar to assess the authority and number of backlinks they have. Bear in mind though, that you should only be looking for keywords that you have a chance to rank for.
- Eventually, you will be left with a list of useful keywords that you will be able to use. You then simply need to build quality content around each of these keywords.
LINK BUILDING
Analysing your competitor’s backlinks, rankings and traffic is the easiest way to get started with link building. For each of the top 10 top search results for your target keyword, view the links using the MOZ SEO Toolbar. Take a look at their ‘Inbound Links’ from ‘only external’ sources to see who is linking to them. You can use other tools to determine backlink sources such as Ahrefs and SEMRush.