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The Perfect SEO Checklist That You Need in 2022

Vikas Singal

Millions of websites are started each year. Most of the entrepreneurs who start their websites are new. Without a complete SEO checklist, they are bound to fail in their quest.

However, close to 40% of those that start new websites already have other online businesses, thus, have some knowledge about how to earn online business, particularly websites.

Whether you are new to these things or you have had other online businesses, then you know that commanding online presence is key. Yes, increasing your website’s organic traffic and subsequently ranking on Google, are important things to put in mind.

To achieve that, we’ve gone ahead to do a comprehensive SEO checklist that seeks to help you not just to rank your website, but also to increase your conversions.

This perfect 2022 SEO checklist is all you need to ensure your business stands out. Be sure to follow all these well-thought SEO practices that have taken our experts several months to pile together.

How to Use This Checklist

To help you have a better understanding of this perfect SEO checklist, we have broken down the article into various sections. Further, we’ve gone ahead to explain each point using simple language. Therefore, be rest assured that we have your best interests at heart.

Although there are several sections on this post, we’ve picked the various aspects from the following points:

For a holistic analysis of your website, you will need to focus on all the points mentioned above.

In addition, there will be more pointers, which our experts believe go a long way in helping you take your online business on an upward trajectory.

I want to believe that you now know how to use this SEO checklist. If so, it is time to look at the very first point.

SEO Basics

Whether you are an expert or just started to learn SEO, it is important to know that your website’s online performance depends on best SEO practices.

That means, if you do not employ good SEO practices (some of which we recommend on this SEO checklist), it’d be difficult for your site to rank for target or competitive keywords.

Although some people think that some points on this guide are basic, the truth is they carry a huge difference when implemented properly. Therefore, go ahead and do the following simple tasks. You will start to see good results soon or later.

Set Up Google Search Console

Google Search Console or GSC as many experts refer it to, is one of the basic yet fundamental tools. GSC is free to use and quick to install. The tool gives you essential and invaluable insights on how your website performs.

GSC presents data using numbers and graphs, something that makes it easy to understand. The data presented on the GSC page will help you assess your website and know what you can adjust in order to increase your site’s online visibility, traffic, and conversion.

The other good thing about GSC is it comes with accompanying features (Google properties), such as Google Analytics (GA), Google Insights, and Google AdSense, which you connect via the Google Site Kit.

When properly connected, the Google Site Kit provides you with comprehensive insights that will help you improve your site’s online presence.

Install Bing Webmaster Tools

By now, I’m sure you know that Bing is the world’s second largest search engine. As such, perhaps, you’ve gone ahead and installed it. Don’t worry if you haven’t. You will learn how to install it. Keep reading.

Why should you even trouble yourself by installing Bing? Well, the main reason why you should install Bing is to increase SEO traffic to your website. Even so, let’s answer some of the important questions.

What is Bing Webmaster Tools?

Bing Webmaster Tools or Bing WMT is a Microsoft service. The tool is free to use thus you do not have to worry of spending any penny.

The tool allows webmasters like you to add their websites to the Bing crawler with the aim of the sites showing up in the Bing search engine.

Bing WMT also helps monitor the site’s performance and maintain its various functions online. In short, Bing WMT helps your site to appear in the Bing search engine just as Google Search Console (GSC) is to Google.

You shouldn’t even for a second think that Bing is useless because as mentioned earlier, it is number two after Google. In fact, when Google unleashes its various updates (at times, it releases up to four in one year), some sites depend on Bing traffic.

Therefore, it is important that you install Bing Webmaster Tools and you can do so whether you are a site admin, owner, developer, or even website marketer.

Here are some of the facts you need to know about Bing: 

If those are not enough reasons to install Bing Webmaster Tools then you are lacking a lot. 

Like the Google Search Console, once set up, Bing Webmaster Tools helps you monitor your website’s overall health.

Besides, it enables you see how people are finding your website. The tool’s features come in handy in showing detailed reports on what keywords are driving traffic to your website.

The report also shows page/post clicks and impressions; things that help you understand your site’s performance.

Setup Google Analytics

Here is another truth you need to know; without the right facts that come at the right time, it’ll be hard to make the right decisions and Google Analytics (GA) will help you do just that.

To be honest, no other free tool that gives you rich data as GA that will help you make the right decisions.

Among the important statistics, Google Analytics will help you with include:

The good thing with Google Analytics is it’s a free tool and is among the core features of the Google Site Kit that I mentioned earlier.

Install and Configure a Yoast SEO Plugin (If You’re Using WordPress)

If you are using WordPress as your Content Management System (CMS), it will be easy for you to install and configure Yoast SEO plugin.

Thanks to the plugin, you are able to monitor how your webpages and posts are performing in the SERPs. 

Yoast comes in two forms – basic and premium. Even with the basic version, you are able to configure many important things on your site.

Some of the things Yoast SEO plugin will help you configure include:

Do not panic if you are using a different CMS. Your developer may be able to help you setup Yoast SEO plugin.

The premium version comes with comprehensive features that help you turn around your content to meet with clients’ and the search engine’s needs.

Generate and Submit a Sitemap

There are people who at this time of digital age who argue that it is not necessary to create and submit a sitemap. That is backward thinking! It is not only necessary to create and submit a sitemap but also important. 

Submitting a proper sitemap will help the search engine to conduct a proper crawling of your website. The search engine will then identify which pages should be indexed or not.

When you create and submit a sitemap, it becomes easy for the search engine to know when you make a new post, when you create a new page, and category.

The search engine also gets to know when you update a live page or post. It is also easy for the search engine to translate the page whenever the need arises.

Although Google supports various sitemap formats, the most common is XML format. If you are using WordPress as your preferred CMS, it becomes very easy to create and submit a sitemap. 

Even if you are not using WordPress, it is still easy to create and submit a sitemap using the available free or premium tools.

NB: Once you create your XML sitemap, do not forget to submit it to the Google Search Console (GSC) and the Bing Webmaster Tools (Bing WMT).

Create a Robots.txt File

Robots.txt file is another important thing that you need to do to improve your website’s online performance.

The file does its work by informing the search engine what pages on your website that needs crawling. In addition, it is the Robots.txt file that determines what pages on your website cannot be crawled.

However, for many people who prefer creating a Robots.txt file, they intend it to prevent the search engine not to crawl certain pages.

Nonetheless, that does not mean that the Robots.txt file can be used to direct the search engine from de-indexing certain pages.

In some instances, it is possible for the Robots.txt file to be generated automatically. Therefore, before you decide whether you need the file, check whether your site already has an automated Robots.txt file.

If upon checking, you find out that your website does not have a Robots.txt file, create one. That is even if you currently don’t need to prevent the search engine from crawling some of your webpages.

If you are using WordPress CMS, you’ll find an array of free SEO tools that can help in the creation of the Robots.txt file.

However, if you are using a different CMS, you will need to create the file manually using a text editor before uploading it to the site’s domain root.

Check Search Console for Manual Actions

Although rare, Google imposes manual actions that affect some sites negatively. However, you may still ask, what brings manual actions? Google imposes manual actions on sites that deliberately violate a number of Google’s elaborate regulations.

Some of the specific reasons why Google may impose manual actions on your site include:

The beauty is most sites may never be affected by Google’s manual action because many webmasters know and observe Google’s elaborate rules.

In many cases, if and when a site is affected by a manual action, Google sends a message notifying the site admin of a possible violation of Google’s elaborate regulation.

When need be, Google gives suggestions on what needs to be done. Failure to implement Google recommendations may result in imposing the manual action.

Make Sure That Google Can Index Your Website

Making sure your site is indexed or can be indexed by Google or any other search engine for that matter, is imperative.

Although uncommon, some sites may not be indexed. However, a simple mistake by your website developer or an error during manual setup of certain things on your site can cause your site’s de-indexing.

Therefore, be careful when working on your site. Otherwise, do not just give your site’s logins to anybody unless it’s your developer who after making an error, can try hard to rectify.

One of the tools that stand out in ensuring your site is crawled and indexed is the Site Audit Tool. Setting up the Site Audit Tool is pretty simple. 

Check for Google Penalties

Google penalties are similar to manual actions. When they take place, they are bound to change many things in your website including reducing traffic and your site’s performance in the SERPs.

You may still ask…

What is a Google Penalty?

Google penalty refers to partial or complete removal of a website from the Google index. It may also refer to the significant drop of a website’s rankings in the SERPs.

While there are many reasons why Google imposes a penalty on a site, the usual reason is a manual or automatic spam.

Decrease in a site’s rankings can occur on the whole website, several pages, or a few isolated keywords. 

How to Identify a Penalized Site?

In order to check whether your site has been penalized, you need to login to your Webmaster Tools account. While there, press the ‘Search Traffic’ tab.

The next step would be to open the ‘Manual Actions’ under the ‘Search Traffic’.

If Google has imposed a penalty on your site, you will find a message inside the tab telling you that your site has been affected by a certain Google penalty

Besides, you can also check whether there is a significant drop in the site’s traffic, something that suggests there was a penalty.

If you have a tendency of monitoring your site’s performance, chances are you will know when your site started recording a decrease in traffic.

Checking your site’s page rank is also another way to identify the date, which your site started to record a decrease in not just traffic but also ranking.

For partial penalty, all you need to do is to type the name of the domain and the keyword you intend to probe.

If the intended keyword or page does not show up in the search line, then chances of your site suffering from partial penalty are inevitable.

In short, to check whether your site has been affected by a Google penalty, you need to do the following six things:

Plan Your Website Structure

As the name suggests, planning website structure involves a systematic and elaborate way you pan to format your site.

If you plan your site nicely, it will attract many readers. People will not just visit your site when they need something but they would want to come back because it has a nice structure.

The opposite is also true. A website with messy webpages will not only send away readers but also lose the search engine’s attention.

Therefore, it is important to have a clean website, which has ideal arrangement of pages and categories.

Types of Website Structures

There are three main types of website structures. The first type of website structure is linear. This type of structure is also referred to as sequential.

In this type of website structure, webpages are arranged in a linear manner.

All the pages in a linear structure follow a logical path. A perfect example of a linear structured website is that with the Home page, followed by a service page, then something like a Sign up or requests a quote page.

Linear or sequential website structure works well with small websites that seek to sell a product, service or even a brand to its clients.

The second type of website structure is called network or web-linked structure.

This type of structure is rare. However, some small sites with fewer pages still use it. In this structure, readers can access each webpage from any other page. 

Something you might love about this type of structure is each page is connected to another, something that makes it easy to access web pages when you and on any page.

The third type is hierarchical or tree-like website structure. This structure is the widely used.

It can be applied on any website, but it does well for established websites that have many pages. This format follows a certain hierarchy, with a website having pages and categories.

A website may start with a typical home page, before it breaks down into a few main sections (categories) and then sub categories.

Large websites that often contain many pages have no option than to implement a hierarchal structure, something that makes it possible to do what is called siloing.

The Importance of Website Structure to SEO

Proper site SEO plus smart interlinking will always go a long way in ensuring readers find your site and improve your site’s performance in the SERPs. But there is more. An elaborate site structure will help you achieve the following:

The search engine cares about user experience – the site’s ranking is the SERPs have a strong connection on how easy it is for readers find, use, and navigate your site. Transitions between pages should be smooth. 

It should not take more than three clicks for readers to find a particular page.

The Search engine evaluates the whole website structure – although the search serves page-based rankings, it goes beyond that. Sometimes, it digs deeper to find how a certain webpage stands in the website structure.

Proper website structure yields to proper page crawling – the idea behind website structure and proper interlinking makes the website crawling exercise easier.

Besides, a nice structure minimizes the number of pages search engines craw at a given time, something that is referred to as the ‘crawling budget’.

Solid structure aids in perfect technical SEO practice – yes, there is no way you can achieve website technical SEO without first setting up an elaborate website structure.

A nice structure aids in making website content appealing and relevant for search intent – with a good website structure, it is easy to have better content distribution on your website. That way, you are able to arrange your content according to related topics and search queries.

 Good web structure increases the chances of getting sitelinks as well as other SERP features – in the SERP, sitelinks are the real block. These blocks show how your domain along with various internal urls, is grouped.

Further, blocks help differentiate your site from the rest in the search engine. The entire process also aids in increasing site CTR.

Ostensibly, Google pulls all relevant information from your site to generate sitelinks. However, for Google to do this, you need to help it by building a robust website structure.

Secrets of Building a Site Structure

While you can build a site structure from the scratch, there is no doubt that you will do better with a few secrets.

The following are some of the top secrets various webmasters have found beneficial:

Keyword Research Checklist

Now that you’ve done the basics of setting up your website and perhaps it is now live, it is time to plan your content.

In fact, because this is a complete SEO checklist, you should endeavor strive to optimize your website for the reader and the search engine.

Your foremost focus should be when writing blog posts. Yes, the ‘how to’ or ‘What’ blogs bring massive traffic to your website, thus you should strive to give them your best.

Therefore, to get the right results, you need to have and implement a proper keyword strategy.

Thankfully, this keyword research checklist will help you do just that.

Here are a few important pointers you need to put in mind as you embark on your keyword research strategy:

Find Keywords Relevant to Your Business

There is no one straight way to find relevant keywords for your business. SEO experts propose several SEO tools that can help in finding the right keywords for your business. Whatever tool you prefer, find keywords that among other things have:

On the first point, you must know that some keywords are more popular than others. Therefore, finding keywords is not a simple thing, as some may think.

Other things that affect how the keyword will fair once live include topical relevance, term awareness, and other factors.

Some webpreneurs argue that keywords with massive search volume are bound to bring a lot of traffic to your site.

That is not true! While this may be a possibility to some sites, it is not always the case with small sites.

Therefore, if you are just starting, do not attempt to use such keywords; it will take you many years before you get a breakthrough. 

My expert advice is: go for keywords that have a decent volume (<500) and a low keyword difficulty.

Make Sure of the Search Intent

It is one thing to find easy to rank keywords and quite another to go for keywords that have ‘search intent’. Clients who align their thoughts with your business may know where to find the information they are looking for. 

It might not be easy for those that do not know your business, to locate your site organically. Nonetheless, with good keyword strategy, you can achieve your goals. 

Understanding search intent is not easy but critical. For instance, if a client is seeking to buy a new puppy, he or she might want to know training tips beforehand.

In that case, they may be looking up for search queries as ‘puppy house training tips’ or simply ‘puppy training tips’.

With such understanding beforehand, you can go ahead in your quest of finding such keywords that will help householders who intend to purchase a puppy for the first time.

At the back of their mind, these clients do not want their new puppy to run into accidents, thus you have the opportunity to help them.

Even if your client is not planning to buy a new puppy, they could know of a friend or relative who intends to get one.

Therefore, they want to help the friend get rid of some home incidents that may be easily avoided. Whichever way, you’d have played a huge role in helping someone get crucial information.

However, you may ask, what is the best way to determine the keyword’s search intent? Well, the simplest and perhaps fastest way is to type the keyword on Google search tab and see the results yourself.

For many years, Google, the world’s largest search engine has figured how people search for different queries online. As such, you’ll be sure it will help you identify which keywords match your readers’ intent.

Therefore, if upon looking at the search engine’s results and realize that they do not match your business, just move on to finding another keyword.

If you continue doing this on a regular basis, chances are you will finally find the keywords that match your readers’ intent thus bring massive traffic to your site.

Check on the Competitive Difficulty of Your Keywords

Finding the right keywords does not stop at relevance, topicality or just because the searched keywords have decent volume.

The other thing that you need to ensure is competitive difficulty. In other words, you need to ascertain how easy or difficult it would be to rank for the keyword you’ve chosen.

It is good to know that a keyword would not be ideal for a small site if a few established sites have devoted a substantive amount of pages or posts for it.

Besides, a keyword that ‘everybody’ is targeting will not be a good fit not just for young sites but also for any site.

Therefore, it is prudent to go for keywords that only a few websites are targeting, or whose keyword difficulty is below nine.

Go for Zero Search Volume Keywords (ZSV)

I know this is debatable, but there are keywords that the search engine tells you ‘nobody is searching for.’ That is not true.

In most cases, a few people would be looking for the keyword, but the statistics are not enough for the search engine to show.

Some keyword research tools, such as the Chrome Extension keyword research tool are good in identifying ZSV keywords.

The keywords are a gem for smaller sites. Many people have taken advantage of these keywords to build robust keywords.

It is a nice thing to have a starting point as you look forward to building an established site. After which, you can go for keywords with a higher keyword difficulty without the fear of losing traffic or authority.

Understand What SEO Keywords Are

As the name suggests, SEO keywords are those keywords sites are targeting to rank for. Such keywords have a special place in the SERPs and for you to rank for them, you need to place them strategically on your website.

Besides, you need to place the SEO keywords a specific number of times, lest you’d be stuffing the keyword.

As mentioned earlier, you need to identify the specific places and number of times you pace SEO keywords on your site.

Some of the places you need to pace your SEO keywords include:

Identify Your Competitors

Identifying your competitors is not an option but a must. Like any other offline business, you need to know who your competitors are and what they sell.

Spying on your competitors from time to time helps you know what keywords are bringing visitors to their site.

You will be able to identify the target keywords, semantic keywords, and other strategies they use to ensure their content stands out.

In addition, you will get content ideas, something that reduces your keyword research budget.

If you have a tendency to check what your competitors are, chances are you will find many keywords and content ideas, some of which you wouldn’t find otherwise. 

Find Your Top-ranking “Money” Keywords

If you are targeting Amazon Associates or any other affiliate program, you have no otherwise but to find top-ranking keywords that will bring readers to your website.

Top-ranking money keywords are those that clients are looking for whenever they want to buy something.

For instance, a keyword such as ‘best blender for the elderly’ may be a better option for seniors interested in finding a perfect kitchen appliance.

Discover Long Tail Keywords 

Leveraging on semantic (long-tail keywords), is another ingenious way of ensuring your site stands out.

The good thing about semantic keywords is you are bound to get clients to your site on the keywords that you did not target.

The other good thing is in case the target keyword fails to attract the intended traffic, semantic keywords that have been spread throughout the article can help save the situation.

However, you need to check out those keywords that relate to the main or target keyword. 

Thankfully, the market offers a variety of SEO tools that will help in the identification of the right semantic keywords.

Create a Schema Markup Where Possible

Where possible, create and add a schema markup. The world’s major search engines often develop schema markups to help webmasters present their websites the best way possible to those search engines.

With a proper schema markup, it becomes easy for the search engine to understand a site well thanks to the stipulated arrangement/format of a particular website.

Thanks to a proper schema markup, the search engine is able to catalogue the information more precisely and accurately.