An SEO Checklist

I thought it could be good to make something practical that people can work through, because across various SEO guides there's often not much of an underlying structure and if you've got a brand new website then it might be hard to figure out what the most important things to do are.

So this post is going to be a list of things you should get sorted, in priority order. If you hear a suggestion and you've already done it, then awesome, but I'd still advise double checking your work to see if there's anything you can improve.

Okay, so lets kick it off, with:

Number 1: Your Google Maps Listing

Your Google Maps, or Google Business, listing is a key part of your online presence and you should be very familiar with it. For local searchers there's a good chance the Maps results will show before any other listings so if you're not in there, you're missing out.

If you've not got a Google Maps listing, or you're not sure if you do, then go to Google.com/Business and follow the steps to get set up. If you do have one, then you need to make sure that all of its data is up to date. Like, does it list your website? Is the website address accurate? What about your phone number, address, or opening times? Have you uploaded any photos? Do you have any reviews?

You should take stock of what things on your Maps listing are incomplete or look empty - like if you don't have any reviews, then make getting some a priority. Even one or two looks a lot better than none.

Number 2: Google Search Console

Next most important is another Google product, Google Search Console. This is a control panel for your domain that will tell you a bunch of useful things about your website. Ideally, someone should be keeping an eye on this control panel on your behalf. If I'm hosting your website, I'm doing it and if you ask me I'll invite your Google account to be an admin too.

Search Console will tell you a lot about how Google views your pages - which ones are indexed, what search terms they show up for, and how many clicks you're getting. You might learn through here that your site shows up for search terms you weren't expecting, and it can give you inspiration for areas worth improving.

Number 3: Good Homepage

Give your homepage a thorough read. This page is going to get the most traffic out of every page on your site so it should represent you well and give visitors somewhere clear to learn more about whichever aspect of your business they're interested in.

At a minimum it should give a run down of the main services and products you offer, explain why you're a good choice, and link through to your contact form, or booking page, or wherever else is most valuable to send your visitors to.

Number 4: Contact Page

After your homepage, the next most important page on your site is probably your contact page, where people can get in touch with you. Firstly, you need to make sure that this page is easy to find from your homepage, and then you need to make sure that the ways it tells visitors to contact you are accurate. If people visit your business at its address, then you should make sure your opening times are accurate and easy to understand, and that you provide clear instructions for finding you.

Number 5: Calls To Action

Speaking of contact forms - a "call to action" is the point on your site where you ask the visitor to move forwards with their order. Ideally, these should be really really obvious, so visitors who are scanning the page's text can find the next step really easily.

Give the main pages on your site a scan and make sure they've got a call to action somewhere reasonably obvious. And, make sure that the CTA asks the visitor to do the most useful thing! For example, if you've got a contact form or booking system on your site, you ought to be sending visitors there - letting them know they can email you is fine, but you should direct them towards the contact method that has the least amount of friction, which is probably your contact form or booking system.

Number 6: Site Functionality

There's no point sending people to your website if it's broken, so you should give all of your site's important functionality a test to make sure it actually works. If you've got a contact form you should send yourself a message and check that you receive it. If you've got a booking system, you should try and book something as a visitor. You should click through each your pages and make sure you've not got any filler or test data in there, like "Lorem Ipsum" text, and that each page accurately describes the thing it's meant to be about.

If you've got empty or broken pages on your site, delete them. You can always re-add them later.

Number 7: Social Media Profiles and Other Links

Ideally your site should link to all of your important social media profiles, review sites, and any other places important for your industry. So, things like Facebook, Google Maps, Tripadvisor, TrustPilot, or Checkatrade - anything that visitors are likely to recognise, all of these should be linked to prominently from your site. You should make it really easy for a visitor to check out your reviews, or your recent activity, or your food hygiene scores, or your public liability insurance, or whatever other thing they might want to check to reassure themselves that you're trusted and worth spending money with.

Like with the empty pages, if you've got social media icons on your site for websites you don't have a profile on, delete them! Everything on your site should work - including links to social profiles.

Number 8: Secure Logins

I was a bit hesitant about including this because it's not really specific to your website, but anyway, it's likely that you'll have to create a bunch of different accounts on various websites for things related to your business. Like you might have a Facebook account, a Google account, a Tripadvisor account, a domain name account, a Paypal account, you get the idea. You should be using unique passwords for each of these accounts, and the passwords should be random and complicated - ideally really big long strings of random letters.

When a website is hacked and its users and passwords are leaked, hackers use scripts to try those same email addresses and passwords on loads of other important sites because they know lots of people use the same password for everything. If they break into your Facebook page they might use it for spam, which is embarassing, but if they got into places like your domain name or your Paypal account they could cause material problems for your business. The only way to protect against this password is to never reuse the same password for multiple sites.

There are two methods for using random passwords I recommend - the first is a password manager, like Bitwarden at Bitwarden.com or 1Password at 1Password.com. These securely create and backup new passwords and hide them behind a single master password, so you only need to remember one. And the other option is just writing your passwords down in a notepad and keeping it somewhere safe in your house.

Number 9: Site Content and Meta Tags

It feels a bit weird to be all the way at nine before mentioning the website content, but eh. There's really no point worrying about the text until the fundamentals are in order.

At the bare minimum you should check that each page has a meta title, that the page starts with a heading, and that the content of the page mentions the thing it's about at least once. This really isn't much but I'm surprised by how often I see pages on websites that are almost empty, and really even two sentences looks much more reassuring to visitors and search engines than nothing at all.

For a deeper dive into writing content you might wanna check out my other guides about keywords, writing a good product page, and using AI, but in terms of a "go live" checklist, I think just making sure there's something down will do.

Number 10: Site Navigation

Any visitor to your site that doesn't land on the exact thing they want is going to have to deal with your site's navigation, so you should make sure that this behaves really intuitively. Check your site on both desktop and mobile and make sure that each item on the navigation is visible, that it describes its destination well, that you're not going to overwhelm visitors with choice, and that the order of items makes sense. As a guide for order, I think people expect to see a "Home" or "About" link first, and a "Contact" last, but this is your call - as long as you've considered it.

If you'd like help implementing this SEO checklist for your website, get in touch.