As we approach the middle of 2023 and look forward to 2024, it’s crucial to anticipate the exciting possibilities that lie ahead in the realm of SEO. Despite possibly seeming premature to implement new strategies, staying ahead of the game is crucial due to the ever-changing Google updates and algorithms. Securing a high ranking on Google is paramount, considering it is the world’s most popular search engine. Failing to achieve a prominent position on Google’s first page means missing out on significant traffic. However, reaching such a position requires substantial hard work, time, effort, and commitment.
To put things into perspective, Google receives an astonishing 95 billion monthly visits, while Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter each receive over 4 billion visits. For the past decade, Google has consistently dominated the web as the leading site.
Like any other trend, Google continuously assesses the factors that indicate a high-quality website for its users. Consequently, staying abreast of these ranking factors is vital to maintain a favourable position on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Without further delay, let’s delve into the strategies to enhance your Google ranking in 2023.
Why Does Your Google Ranking Still Matter?
Despite the proliferation of various platforms in the digital marketing realm, attaining a prominent position on Google search results continues to be an effective method for driving website traffic. Statistical data indicates that the first 5 organic search results on the initial page receive over 67% of total clicks. By attracting more visitors to your website, you increase the opportunities to convert them into loyal customers. Furthermore, outranking your competitors can enable you to capture a portion of their potential customer base.
Nevertheless, the benefits extend beyond acquiring new customers or redirecting them from competitors. Enhancing your brand or business’s credibility is equally valuable. While credibility may not be as flashy as acquiring new customers, establishing yourself as a trustworthy authority within your niche can significantly contribute to converting leads into paying customers.
Why Do You Need A Basic SEO Checklist?
In today’s crowded digital realm, where websites and online businesses are vying for attention, a strong SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) strategy is paramount. You may have heard about an “SEO checklist,” but what exactly is it, and why should you care? Allow me to explain.
Imagine you’re about to embark on an exciting road trip. Before hitting the road, you naturally create a checklist. You check your tires, ensure the engine is in good shape, and verify you have enough fuel. This checklist serves as your roadmap, guaranteeing a safe and successful journey.
Similarly, a complete SEO checklist is your roadmap to online success when optimising your website for search engines. It comprises crucial tasks and best practices that elevate your website’s visibility, organic traffic, and overall search engine rankings.
You may wonder why a “basic” SEO checklist is necessary. An essential SEO checklist forms the foundation of a well-structured website optimisation strategy. It encompasses the fundamental elements that search engines scrutinise when evaluating and ranking websites.
Adhering to an essential SEO checklist ensures your website is easily navigable for search engine bots, your content is relevant and captivating, and your website meets technical standards. It aids in optimising meta tags, headings, URLs, and images, enabling search engines to grasp and index your content effectively.
Furthermore, an essential SEO checklist offers guidance on optimising loading speed, mobile-friendliness, and user experience—critical factors in today’s digital realm. By following this checklist, you can enhance your website’s performance and provide seamless experiences for visitors, ultimately leading to increased engagement, conversions, and business growth.
Whether you’re an experienced SEO professional or a novice venturing into the online world, an essential SEO checklist is an indispensable tool. It keeps you organised, ensures you cover vital aspects of website optimisation, and helps you outpace your competitors.
So, if you’re serious about establishing a robust online presence and attracting valuable organic traffic, don’t underestimate the power of an essential SEO checklist. It’s your roadmap to success in the ever-evolving digital landscape. Get ready to optimise and thrive!
Check them out below:
SEO Basic Checklist
Technical SEO Checklist
On-Page SEO Checklist
Keyword Research Checklist
Off-page SEO Checklist
Local SEO Checklist
Mobile SEO Checklist
Content SEO Checklist
SEO Basic Checklist
To make the most of this checklist and effectively enhance your SEO, it is crucial to grasp the key elements that constitute search engine optimisation, commonly called SEO.
Verify Your Website With Google Search Console
The Google Search Console is a complimentary offering by Google that grants webmasters access to various webmaster tools like Bing webmaster tools and reports to enhance their websites’ performance on Google search.
By utilising the Google Search Console, you can uncover insights into Google’s understanding of your website, evaluate your rankings on Google, pinpoint and resolve issues regarding crawling and indexing, and notify Google about any modifications made to your site.
The GSC is a pivotal instrument for optimising your website’s search engine optimisation (SEO).
To initiate your journey with the Google Search Console, you must establish an account and subsequently add and verify your web properties.
Setup Google Analytics
Installing Google Analytics is essential for tracking your SEO performance, and utilising analytics and reporting tools is recommended. Google Analytics stands out as the optimal tool to employ, and the best part is that it is free of charge.
To begin, you should incorporate the Google Analytics code into your website and acquaint yourself with fundamental SEO reports.
Check For Google Penalties
From the start, it’s crucial to perform an essential SEO examination to verify that your website is not subjected to any penalties by Google.
Google enforces various penalties, both manual and algorithmic, as a means of penalising websites that violate their guidelines.
Should your website be affected by a Google penalty, you’ll likely need to take alternative steps to address and recover from the penalty before proceeding with the SEO checklist.
Install an SEO Plugin
There is a wide range of excellent SEO plugins available for your website. These plugins can assist you in optimising elements such as sitemaps and meta descriptions.
Technical SEO Checklist
Technical SEO aims to assist search engines in effortlessly discovering, accessing, navigating, understanding, and categorising your website.
The term “technical” is used because it pertains solely to the technical aspects of a website and does not involve its content or promotional strategies (which will be discussed later).
Presented below is a checklist for technical SEO:
Make Your URLs SEO Friendly
A permalink refers to the web page’s URL and is given this name because it remains constant over its lifespan.
To optimise your website for search engine optimization (SEO), it is essential to verify that all your website pages have SEO-friendly URLs.
SEO-friendly URLs possess the following qualities:
They are concise and descriptive.
They incorporate relevant keywords.
They employ hyphens (-) to separate the words.
Install SSL And Make Your Website HTTPS
One of the recognised factors that affect your website’s ranking is the installation of an SSL certificate. Having an SSL guarantees the protection of any data exchanged between your website and server.
It should be at the top of your priority list if you haven’t switched to HTTPS for your website. Simply adding an SSL certificate to your website is insufficient for SEO. It is crucial to execute the process correctly to prevent a decline in your current rankings.
Ensure Your Website is Accessible at One Domain
It is essential to ensure that Google indexes only one version of your website. To verify the appearance of your site, try entering these four variations of the domain into httpstatus.io:
http://www.yourdomain.com
http://yourdomain.com
https://www.yourdomain.com
https://yourdomain.com
If you are able to find your website using these variations, then you are good to proceed.
Check the Coverage Report In The Google Search Console For Errors
Any issues during the crawling and indexing process can significantly harm your SEO. It can lead to significant problems with your rankings, so it’s essential to regularly review the Coverage report in the Google search console and identify any errors.
Check And Optimise Your robots.txt File
The robots.txt file, located in the main directory of your website, provides guidelines to search engines regarding which pages they can access and include in their search results.
More than adequately configuring the robots.txt file can lead to significant issues or even removing your website from search engine indexes.
Check Your Website Visibility Settings
If you utilise WordPress as your content management system (CMS), it is crucial to review not only the robots.txt file but also the visibility setting within WordPress. This ensures you do not unintentionally prevent search engines from accessing your content. You can locate this setting by navigating to SETTINGS / READING.
Check Your Comment Settings And Make Sure That All Comment Links Are ‘nofollow’
Verifying links in your comments section have the appropriate nofollow attribute is essential. While comments are beneficial for SEO and should be allowed on your blog, it is crucial to prevent receiving a Google penalty for “unnatural links” by ensuring that all outgoing links are marked as nofollow.
A nofollow link instructs search engines not to transfer PageRank or link juice to the destination website.
To quickly verify this, you can utilise the INSPECT feature available in Google developers’ tools.
Optimise Your Menu And Site Structure
When conducting an SEO audit for your website, it is crucial to optimise your site structure to become a proficient SEO specialist.
One standard error we frequently observe during SEO audits is neglecting site structure optimisation.
A well-designed site structure should have a maximum depth of three levels, ensuring that any webpage can be reached from the homepage within three clicks or fewer.
It is essential for the menu of your website to accurately represent its structure.
If your website currently does not meet this requirement, modifying the structure of your site can enhance your SEO performance.
Optimise your XML sitemap and submit it to Search engines
An XML sitemap serves as a comprehensive list of all the pages on your website that are important for search engines to index.
It is essential to ensure that your XML sitemap is optimised and valid. Once verified, you can submit the sitemap to Google search engines.
Check for sitemap errors in Google Search Console
Simply submitting your sitemap to Google isn’t the final step. It’s essential to regularly monitor the Google Search Console for any errors related to your sitemap.
Add structured data markup data to your homepage
Nowadays, SEO greatly relies on schemas and structured data, making them crucial for improving your website’s visibility in Google search results. Implementing these elements can significantly impact local SEO and Voice SEO.
Unfortunately, many individuals overlook the importance of adding structured data to their homepage, which is a significant oversight. The homepage holds immense significance for various reasons, and from an SEO standpoint, it should be treated with the same level of attention as other pages.
When it comes to incorporating structured data into your homepage, it’s essential to include the following schemas, depending on your website’s nature:
Organisation (if your business operates primarily online)
Local Business (if you have a physical establishment, such as a shop)
Person (if you run a personal blog or website)
Test your structured data markup implementation
It is advisable to regularly verify your schema implementation using the rich results testing tool, as schema definitions may undergo modifications over time.
Utilise this tool to assess the structured data you have incorporated into your homepage and other pages.
Maintaining accurate and current schema information is of utmost significance.
Enable breadcrumb menus on all your posts and pages
A breadcrumb menu is a compact navigation menu typically positioned at the page’s top, serving as a guide for users. It displays the route from the current page to the homepage.
Breadcrumb menus enhance user experience and are consequently beneficial for SEO purposes.
Google highly values breadcrumb menus and advises their implementation on websites.
Check that your schema implementation for breadcrumbs is correct
Utilising breadcrumb menus offers several benefits, including improving the appearance of your search snippets on mobile search results.
Occasionally, Google replaces the URL with the breadcrumb name in search snippets. To ensure this happens, including appropriate structured data for your breadcrumbs is crucial.
Check that all your pages define a canonical URL
Proper canonicalisation is a crucial aspect of SEO that demands attention. Using canonical URLs serves multiple purposes: resolving duplicate content problems and safeguarding your content from unauthorised use by other websites. Additionally, it provides a means to specify your preferred domain to Google.
Implement hreflang if your website is available in more than one language
When your website has content in multiple languages, it is essential to utilise hreflang tags to inform Google about the different localised versions of your pages.
Neglecting to implement hreflang tags can lead to indexing problems as Google may become uncertain when encountering the same page in multiple languages.
While Google handles this correctly, employing hreflang tags helps minimise potential issues.
For further details on optimising your multilanguage website for SEO, refer to this comprehensive guide.
Check and optimise your 404 Page
The 404 Page is displayed when a webpage cannot be found on your website. This can occur because users enter an incorrect URL or when a page has been removed and is no longer accessible on your site.
To provide an optimal user experience, it is essential to create a 404 page that is informative and offers alternative options for users to locate the content they seek.
Fix Broken Internal and External Links
Broken links are links that do not work and can have a detrimental effect on the user experience of your website. You can conduct a website audit or use a free tool to detect broken links.
Check and improve the loading speed of your website
As part of conducting a technical SEO evaluation, thoroughly examining and enhancing your website’s loading speed is crucial.
The speed at which your website loads is a well-known ranking factor for Google and holds significant importance for user experience. Delayed website loading times can result in financial losses and decreased customer satisfaction.
Use Lazy Loading for images and videos
A practical method to enhance the speed at which your website loads, particularly on mobile devices, is to implement Lazy loading for images and videos.
Lazy loading is a technique that exclusively loads images or videos when they become visible within the user’s screen.
Optimise your website’s logo and favicon
Optimising your website’s logo and favicon is essential before moving on to the remaining tasks on your SEO checklist. Here are some steps you can take:
Ensure that your logo is an image rather than text. Google might display your logo in search results, so it needs to be an image.
Provide the appropriate name for your logo file. Instead of using a generic term like “logo,” use a combination of your website name and the word “logo.” For instance, you could name it “reliable-soft-logo.png.”
Add ALT text to your logo. Keep the alt text concise and descriptive, such as the “reliablesoft logo.”
When it comes to your favicon, specify a custom favicon for your site with a square size.
Google is currently testing the display of favicons in search results, so ensuring that your website is appropriately represented is essential.
On-Page SEO Checklist
On-Page SEO focuses on the content found on your webpage, aiming to achieve two primary objectives.
Firstly, it aims to assist you in generating content that fulfils the user’s intent, ensuring that it meets their needs and expectations. Additionally, it provides instructions on producing SEO-friendly content that search engines can readily comprehend.
Listed below is your comprehensive on-page SEO checklist:
Optimise your page titles (including the homepage)
Optimising the page title is crucial for effective SEO. Incorporating your desired keywords in the title is essential, as this assists search engines and users in understanding the page’s content.
In addition to keyword usage, it is essential to adhere to the following guidelines:
Every page on your website should have distinctive title tags.
The page title should accurately describe the page’s content.
Titles should be concise and informative, ideally under 60 characters.
Remember to optimise the title of your homepage alongside other pages.
Optimise your meta descriptions (including the homepage)
Meta descriptions appear in search results and present an excellent chance to effectively promote your webpage to users.
Well-crafted meta descriptions have the potential to boost your click-through rate (CTR) and attract more significant search engine traffic by leveraging your current content and rankings.
Check for your brand name on Google
It’s essential to perform a check that often goes overlooked: searching for your brand name on Google and evaluating the displayed results.
Verifying that there are no unfavourable elements, such as negative reviews, associated with your brand name is crucial. Such occurrences can harm your reputation and search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.
Optimise your website for Google sitelinks
Your website’s visibility on Google can be enhanced by utilising site links.
While you don’t have direct control over the specific site links displayed for your website, there are methods to influence Google in selecting the desired site links.
Optimise your posts for Google sitelinks
Google displays site links for individual posts as well. Including post-site links enhances the appeal of your search snippet, making it more likely to attract clicks.
Consider the post site links associated with one of my posts as an illustration.
To assist Google in displaying site links for your posts, you can designate the various sections of your article by utilising the ID attribute or employing named anchors.
Optimise your posts for Google featured snippets
Google frequently prioritises displaying lists at the top of its search results. This is particularly noticeable when searching for articles, tips, or posts that provide step-by-step instructions or include a list format.
One advantage of SEOs is the simplicity of optimising your posts to qualify for list snippets.
Check and optimise the H1 tag for all pages (including the homepage)
An easily manageable aspect of on-page SEO is optimising the H1 tag.
The H1 tag holds significance as it is the primary element displayed on a webpage, typically sharing the same value as the page title.
Optimising the H1 tag for SEO is a straightforward process:
Ensure that the H1 tag closely resembles the page title or has a slight variation.
Confirm that the H1 tag remains visible to users and is not concealed.
Apply a distinct style to the H1 tag compared to other headings.
Limit the usage of H1 tags to one per page.
Check and optimise your page headings
In addition to optimising the H1 tag, optimising the other headings in your post, typically the H2 and H3 headings, is crucial.
Here are some SEO guidelines to keep in mind:
Avoid using heading tags when other tags like bold or italic are more suitable for the content.
Don’t go overboard with headings—Utilise headings when relevant for structuring your content, aiding navigation, and enhancing readability.
You are not required to use all headings on a page. Depending on the length and nature of your content, having just an H1 and using H2s can be sufficient.
Striking a balance between headings and other formatting elements is always recommended.
Make sure that your target keyword is included in your opening paragraph
Including your desired keywords in the opening paragraph of your content is a fundamental principle of SEO. It enhances the relevance of your page for those specific keywords, benefiting both search engines and users.
It is important to exercise moderation and avoid excessive keyword usage. Mentioning your target keyword once or twice is sufficient.
Add text content to accompany your non-text content
To facilitate the work of search engines, it is essential to ensure the presence of textual content on a page, as search engines possess superior comprehension capabilities for text compared to other elements.
Employing a page predominantly consisting of images or videos is considered unfavourable from an SEO perspective.
Optimise your content for E-A-T
Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness are abbreviated as E-A-T in SEO. Why does this matter for SEO?
Google recently adopted this idea to emphasise the need for trustworthy websites to appear higher in search results.
In layman’s words, this indicates that Google seeks to rank websites that are knowledgeable and authoritative on a specific subject and websites that users regard as trustworthy.
Beautify your content (formatting and styling) and make it easy to read
Designing a webpage simply by placing text and images without considering its eligibility for Google ranking is not practical. It is crucial to focus on formatting and styling to provide users with a pleasant browsing experience. While you don’t have to go overboard with extravagant designs, ensuring that your pages are easily readable on all devices is essential.
Avoid using tiny fonts that hinder readability, and utilize the available formatting elements to enhance the visual appeal of your text.
Optimize your images
Image optimization is essential for effective search engine optimization. While search engines are improving their ability to understand images, there are three key factors to consider for optimising images:
Improve the Image Filename: Ensure the image’s filename provides relevant information and accurately describes its content.
Reduce the Image File Size: Keep the image size as small as possible regarding file size (in bytes) to enhance website performance.
Enhance the Image Alt Text: When writing the alt text for images, avoid using dashes and instead use natural language to describe the image concisely. Incorporate relevant keywords related to the page’s content, but avoid excessive keyword usage. Keep the alt text brief and focused on conveying the image’s main purpose.
Optimise titles/description/content of your category pages
We frequently observe a common occurrence where web admins invest significant time optimising their individual blog posts and product pages while neglecting the importance of optimising their category pages.
Accommodating the same level of attention to category pages as regular pages is crucial. This entails optimising their titles, descriptions, and content.
This becomes even more critical when operating an eCommerce website.
Check your internal linking strategy
We appreciate using internal linking as an SEO strategy. It’s a straightforward concept: connect the pages of your website by including links within your content, forming a cohesive web.
According to Google, pages with a higher quantity of internal links hold more significance within your website.
When incorporating internal links, optimising the anchor text for better results is crucial.
Give credit to other high-quality websites
The following advice originates from Google itself, specifically regarding SEO practices. In essence, Google recommends that web admins include links to reputable websites on the Internet.
The rationale behind this recommendation is straightforward: it assists Google’s algorithm in ranking significant websites more prominently.
By implementing this approach on your website, you can enjoy the following SEO benefits:
Providing your users with valuable resources to further explore a particular topic.
Establishing your content as a reliable source that references other trustworthy materials.
Keyword Research Checklist
The process of keyword research is crucial for effective SEO. If you make errors in your keyword research, you will end up focusing on the wrong keywords. This can lead to two undesirable outcomes: either struggling to achieve high rankings due to highly competitive keywords or ranking for keywords with no significant relevance or benefit for your business.
To prevent such issues, it is essential to adhere to the best practices outlined in the keyword research checklist. By doing so, you can avoid these pitfalls and ensure that your keyword targeting is on point.
Identify Your Keywords From Competitors
When you’re at the beginning stages, it can be challenging to figure out the most relevant keywords to your work. However, a quick and effective strategy is to analyse the keywords that are proving successful for your competitors.
Explore Various Long-Tailed Keyword
Simply relying on seed keywords is insufficient due to their high competition. Consequently, the incorporation of long-tailed keywords becomes necessary.
For an effective SEO strategy, it is crucial to strike a balance between your seed keywords and long-tailed keywords. Once you have identified your keywords, ensure that you integrate closely related keywords into your page content.
Analyse Searcher’s Intent from the Page that Rank
If you’re interested in purchasing contact lenses, you’re unlikely to search for information on “What are SEO services?” Therefore, it’s crucial to ensure your content aligns with the searcher’s intent. Your page content won’t be ranked if it doesn’t match this intent.
To determine the searcher’s intent, follow these steps: include your keywords and analyse the types and formats of pages that Google ranks.
For example, let’s consider the keyword “SEO services.” By incorporating this keyword and examining the pages that rank, we can observe that the ranking pages are transactional in nature, emphasising aspects such as “local” and “best price.”
Determine the Right Keyword
Now that you have a collection of keywords, the question arises: how do you select the appropriate ones? Although we won’t be able to delve into this topic extensively, here are a few factors you should consider:
Search volume: Determine how frequently users search for these keywords.
Keyword difficulty: Evaluate the level of competition for each keyword.
Cost-per-click (CPC): Examine the average cost per click for advertising related to these keywords.
Keyword Efficiency Index (KEI) (applies to Rank Tracker only): Consider this index to assess the effectiveness of the keywords.
Off-page SEO Checklist
Including Off-Page SEO in your checklist is essential for a comprehensive SEO strategy.
While Technical SEO and On-Page SEO, which involve optimising your website’s structure, content, and user experience, contribute to an SEO-friendly website, achieving higher rankings on Google requires more.
This is where off-page SEO steps in to assist. In simple terms, off-page SEO involves promoting your website through various techniques to persuade search engine algorithms that your site deserves a superior position in search results.
Attaining higher rankings results in increased organic traffic, which is the ultimate objective for all website owners. Off-page SEO is not optional but a component of your overall SEO strategy.
The primary objective of off-page SEO is to acquire high-quality inbound links or backlinks from relevant websites across the Internet.
These links serve as a vote of confidence and are considered by search engine algorithms. However, it is crucial to note that the number of links is not the sole determining factor; the links’ quality and relevance can boost your rankings.
Engaging in improper off-page SEO practices, such as purchasing links, participating in link exchanges, or violating Google webmaster guidelines, can have severe consequences.
Your website may face penalties from Google, either manually or algorithmically, resulting in the loss of rankings and traffic.
To ensure effective off-page SEO, here is a checklist to follow:
Get links from high-authority websites
Obtaining links that positively impact your search engine rankings is a crucial element in the off-page SEO checklist. Although it is a complex and time-intensive process, it holds significant importance.
Review your link profile to identify and remove bad links
When engaging in link building for your website, there are instances where complications can arise. It is possible to acquire ‘undesirable links’ that could potentially lead to difficulties or consequences.
Therefore, it is advisable to frequently assess your link profile and promptly address any necessary actions.
Local SEO Checklist
In addition to the techniques mentioned earlier, there is a specialised aspect of search engine optimisation (SEO) known as Local SEO.
Local SEO involves optimising your website to achieve higher rankings on popular search engines, specifically for searches related to your geographical area, city, or country.
While the items mentioned in this SEO checklist are beneficial for Local SEO, there are additional optimisations to consider to improve your website’s visibility for location-specific searches.
The primary objective of local SEO is to attain higher rankings for search queries that are location-specific, such as “Italian restaurants near me,” “dentists in Kuala Lumpur,” or “wedding photographers in Cheras.”
Below is a checklist for Local SEO:
Optimise your logo for local SEO
While it may not be the most crucial factor in local SEO, every small contribution matters.
Utilise the ALT text of your logo to provide additional information about the geographical location of your business.
Add NAP information (Name, Address, Phone Number) on ALL your pages
Providing Google with any information regarding your location is valuable for improving Local SEO.
Ensure that your website includes comprehensive address details (including street number, postcode, state, country, telephone number, fax number, and email) as visible text, rather than an image, in a prominent location on all pages.
Make sure that NAP information is consistent across all channels
Consistency is critical when it comes to presenting your name, address, and phone number on various online platforms. It’s crucial to ensure that the information and formatting remain consistent across channels like your website, Google Business Profile page, and Facebook.
Add a Google map to the contact information page
Ensure that your “Contact Us” page includes an embedded Google map and textual information displaying your company’s name, physical address, and telephone number.
Register your company with Google Business Profile
This aspect is of utmost significance if you aim for your business to be visible in the Google Maps snippet within search results and on Google Maps itself.
Use Schema to give more information about your local business to Google
Selecting the suitable schema for your specific local business category is essential. Additional details about local business schemas can be found on Google’s website and schema.org.
Encourage and reply to every single review on all platforms
Having genuine reviews is vital for enhancing your local SEO rankings.
To boost your business’s online presence, motivating customers to share their feedback across various platforms is essential, with Google Business Profile being particularly significant. Equally important is your prompt response to all reviews, regardless of whether they are positive or negative, across all platforms.
To encourage customers, consider offering incentives such as a 5% discount on their next purchase or utilising SMS or email reminders to kindly ask them to leave a review on their preferred platform.
Mobile SEO Checklist
A specific factor drove Google’s decision to create a mobile-first index. Essentially, introducing this index means that Google will prioritize the mobile version of a website when determining its ranking.
Consequently, if your website lacks optimisation for mobile devices, your rankings will gradually decline, resulting in a significant decrease in traffic.
When reviewing the mobile SEO checklist, ensuring that your mobile website encompasses all the content on your desktop site is essential. This entails optimizing the desktop version’s titles, descriptions, text content, images, videos, internal links, and other elements.
While having a responsive website is a significant initial step, it is crucial to understand that mobile-friendly SEO extends beyond having a design that adapts to different devices.
Here is a checklist to guide you through mobile SEO considerations:
Run the Google mobile-friendly test
The Google mobile-friendly test is a complimentary tool provided by Google that assesses your website and offers suggestions on enhancing its mobile compatibility. This test examines fundamental issues related to mobile usability, such as tiny font sizes, serving as a beneficial initial step.
Check your mobile speed using different tools
The speed at which your website loads on mobile devices is crucial. Your goal is to ensure that it loads in under 3 seconds. While achieving this may not be easy and might require the assistance of a developer, the effort is definitely worthwhile.
To improve your page speed, there are several guidelines to follow. Implementing lazy loading for images and optimising the file size of your images will significantly contribute to this goal. If you haven’t done so already, prioritise these tasks.
To assess the loading time of your website on mobile, you can utilize the following tools:
Google PageSpeed Insights
Google Mobile Speed Test
GTMetrix
Additionally, make sure to review the speed reports (found under Enhancements) in the Google Search Console.
Check popup usage on mobile
Google penalises mobile websites that excessively utilise popups and banner advertisements.
To begin with, it is crucial to avoid incorporating popups on mobile devices and ensure sufficient content is visible to the user before displaying any ads.
Check that your CTA on mobile is visible and easy to access
CTA buttons and messages play a crucial role in the success of a website. It is vital to ensure that your website receives valuable traffic, especially from mobile users.
Since a significant portion of your traffic comes from mobile devices, it is vital to ensure that mobile users can easily view and access your CTA buttons and messages.
Adjust your mobile design to achieve this, such as strategically placing CTAs in visible locations. For example, utilising sticky footers can be an effective way to accomplish this goal. You can experience this firsthand by accessing my website on a mobile device.
Content SEO Checklist
If your goal is to achieve a high ranking on Google, it is essential to emphasise the importance of creating unique content with content SEO.
Enhance the quality of your content by implementing the following strategies:
Focus on Creating In-Depth Content
Here are the benefits of producing detailed content:
Google tends to prioritise and rank content that thoroughly covers a specific topic.
In-depth content offers extensive and valuable information to those searching for it.
There is great potential for acquiring numerous backlinks.
Remember to always consider the search intent of your target audience when creating high-quality content. Avoid merely producing lengthy content without providing value.
Update Your Old Content
Regular content audits are essential to assess and improve your website’s performance. Eliminate content that lacks visibility, lacks value, is duplicated, or is of poor quality.
Rather than creating new content, update your existing content to enhance your search engine rankings.
Ease everything with iMarketing
Attempting to cover every aspect of SEO in a single checklist is impossible. What truly counts is implementing these strategies and consistently expanding your knowledge in the field of SEO.
If you’re seeking SEO assistance, our dedicated SEO experts from iMarketing are here to support you. With extensive experience in optimising websites for Malaysian companies, you can rely on us to assist you in devising an effective SEO company Malaysia strategy that attracts more customers to your business.
If you’re eager to delve deeper into the realm of SEO, feel free to contact us online immediately. Our SEO strategists are available to discuss our comprehensive SEO solutions with you.