The Ultimate SEO Checklist: Drive More Website Traffic, Generate More Leads, and Rank Above Your Competition on Google

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is perhaps the most complex strategy in the marketing industry today. With so many moving parts, there’s not just one right way to approach it. In this article, we’ll cover the basic fundamentals to optimizing your website to rank higher on Google, drive more website traffic, and generate qualified leads.

TOC

1. The Three Stages of SEO

2. How to Build Authority

3. How to Establish Relevance

4. The Ultimate SEO Checklist

The complete SEO checklist from Semrush.

Before we dive into how you can optimize your website for Google, it’s important to understand how SEO works. There are three stages to SEO that will determine how your website ranks on the search results and how many user impressions you’ll get each day.

The Three Stages of SEO

Before you can start ranking on Google, it’s important that you focus on each of these steps in order, one at a time.

1. Discovery

2. Authority

3. Relevance

So, what do each of these steps mean?

Discovery is the process of Google finding your website and all of your webpages. Every time you add a new webpage, Google has to find it. This process can be sped up by submitting your sitemaps to Google Search Console, or requesting that it be indexed on the search results pages.

Authority is what Google uses to determine how reliable and trustworthy your site is over other similar sites. While you can pursue strategies to help improve your site’s authority, it’s important to remember that domains over a year old have much faster success with these strategies.

Relevance is where Google determines how relevant to a search query your website is. This step is the most well-known step, since most small businesses skip the first two steps and go straight to this one. Relevance is where the keywords on your website help signal to Google what your site is about and who should see it.

How to Build Authority

Building authority with Google is much easier for domains that are over a year old. There are plenty of ways you can build your authority, but we’ll cover the most common here.

1. Backlink building - This is where you get links to your website from other external domains. For example, whenever you create a profile on an online directory like Yelp, you have the option to link your website to the profile. This link counts as an external linking domain and tells Google that your website is reliable enough that Yelp references its visitors to your site. It’s essential to note that the quality of your backlinks override the quantity. Make sure you are getting backlinks from reliable domains with a high domain authority themselves, and disavow any links from spam sites.

2. Set up Google My Business - Google offers an option for businesses to create and claim a profile the lists their company on Google. These profile listings allow businesses to appear on Google Maps, at the top of Google Search, and to encourage action and showcase reviews. Posting to your Google Business profile once a week can indicate to Google that you are active and ready to engage new customers.

3. Link to external domains - Not only do you want to gain links from other domains, but you want to link your own content to relevant, reliable domains as well. This tells Google that you share similar resources with other reliable websites that are already trusted by Google. It also indicates that you are referencing similar information that the other external site (which is hopefully already ranked on Google) is talking about. This helps close the circle around the keywords, topics, and search users you want to rank for when you are establishing relevance.

4. Social queues - The greatest benefit to social media is not only the ability to engage with your customers in real-time, but the ability to distribute content from your website across several different platforms. The more website content that you have linked to social media, the more important it is to establish an engaging presence on that platform. Social signals tell Google that the more engagement posts with your linked website content get, the more valuable the content (and your website) is to similar users.

How to Establish Relevance

You would think that establishing relevance is the easiest step to this massive equation, but it’s quite the contrary. Keywords are not the only determining factor to your website’s relevance. The entire format of your website can influence how relevant your site appears to Google.

1. Keywords and topics - The keywords and topics you cover in your content are the most important factor to establishing relevance. It’s not the number of times you use each keyword that counts, however. In order to adequately implement keywords, you must identify and use different variations of those keywords and in different context. You can use keyword tools like WordStream’s free keyword analysis tool to identify how popular certain keywords are and what different variations of similar keywords might look like.

2. Anchor text - Remember those backlinks we went over earlier? Well, every time an external domain links back to your site, it’s important that the linked text contains keywords that you want to rank for. For example, if I want my website to rank for digital marketing services, I’ll make sure the linked text (called anchor text) is the phrase digital marketing services. This tells Google that not only are external domains linking to my site, but they’re referencing my site because I am relevant to the topic in the text.

3. Image tags - Tagging your images and videos with alternate text tells Google that the visual content you share on your website is also relevant to your targeted keywords. Google is also more likely to queue a visual content like images or videos when a high-volume keyword is searched. Google understands how much their search users love visual content, so they want to provide the best and most relevant content for them.

4. URL parameters - The URL parameters you choose should include the keyword topics covered on that page. For example, our webpage that covers social media marketing services includes all those keywords in the URL, so Google can verify beyond the shadow of a doubt that users searching for those services will find the page relevant and valuable.

5. Headlines and descriptions - The metadata that you provide to Google that determines the headlines and descriptions that appear in Google Search results has to include keywords and be relevant to the content on that indexed page. At the same time, it must also appeal to humans by highlighting benefits and providing value, or no users will click on your website.

The Ultimate SEO Checklist

If you aren’t sure where to start or need a list to keep track of every SEO element, you can download our FREE SEO Checklist to get an in-depth list of SEO tasks to start ranking your website on Google. (Guides and checklists like these are why we have been recognized as one of the Top 30 Local SEO Agencies.)