What Might Be Missing From Your SEO Checklist (and How to Fix It)

Are you looking to drive some quality traffic to your website?

Maybe you’re blowing money on Google Adwords or just don’t know how to make SEO work for your business.

If you think you’ve got the basics of SEO down, here are six items to add to your SEO checklist to take your strategy from good to super profitable.

1. Is Your Site Fast Enough?

You can use Google’s PageSpeed tool to test your website speed.

If your pages aren’t quick enough, you can be certain that your bounce rate will increase.

Your website’s loading time can seriously affect your site’s SEO and ranking, so be sure to keep the speed quick by keeping image sizes down and having your content set to preload or hosted off site.

2. Are Your Pages Indexed?

If certain pages on your website aren’t being indexed, they will not show up in search engines no matter how strong your keyword strategy is.

To check which pages are indexed, search Google for site:yourdomainname.com.

If pages you want to rank aren’t showing up, ensure that the site is crawlable by checking the robots.txt file or using an SEO crawler tool.

3. How Does Your Content Measure Up? – Content Is King on Your SEO Checklist

Before you publish a blog post ask yourself, “Will someone want to check this out?”

It goes without saying that the content that you’re posting will only improve your SEO if it is engaging and grabs the interest of your audience.

4. Are You Mobile Friendly?

In 2017, there is a high probability that a lot of the traffic to your website will be coming from users on mobile devices.

Whether people are finding your content on social media or through search engines, as part of your SEO checklist, you need to make sure your website is mobile compatible.

Many hosts, such as Wix and Squarespace, have tools that allow you to do this within the platform.

You can also use Google’s Mobile-Friendly tool to test your website.

5. Check Your Links

Use Google’s Search Console or a backlink checker like Moz to ensure that any backlinks to your site aren’t giving users 404 errors.

Backlinks from other websites can get broken during a website migration.

Since link building is a big part of any SEO strategy, you want to be sure to have this step as part of your SEO checklist.

6. Are You Secure?

In early 2017, Google announced that it would begin labeling websites with HTTP connections that accept credit cards and passwords as nonsecure.

This is part of Google’s larger plan to eventually indicate that any HTTP pages are non-secure.

This will become increasingly important for SEO in the coming months.

Google may implement an algorithm change to prioritize HTTPS websites over HTTP pages. If you are not on HTTPS, begin taking the steps to transition in a way that will not crush your search engine rankings.

While focusing on great keywords is a good start to implementing an SEO strategy, details on your SEO checklist like the ones above can make or break your ranking.

Are you still feeling uncertain about SEO? Have a tip or trick that worked for your business? Leave a comment below or contact me and I’ll be happy to help!