You’ve come up with an amazing business idea and you’ve got a snazzy new website waiting to be launched. But before you go live, take some time to review our handy SEO checklist to make sure you’re not missing out on any SEO considerations that could impact the success of your site.

Here are 5 key things to tick off the list before going live.

1. Choose a keyword for each URL on your site

In the excitement of building a website, it can be easy to forget about keyword research. However, this is an important part of your SEO strategy so you should spend time conducting keyword research and create a list of the keywords you’d like to rank for.

When you are building your website, it is time to do some keyword research. Create the ideal list of keywords for traffic and low competition, and map all of these keyword to the URLs and the pages on your new site.

Imagine you are targeting the following phrases:

“best pizza in London”

“eating out in London”

This could be the potential keyword map for one page on your site:

Page URL: www.allaboutlondon.com/eatingout

Page Title: The best pizza you’ll eat in London

Designating appropriate keywords to your URL and page titles is one of the main things to get right for on-page optimisation, and will have a significant impact when you measure your page ranking against those keywords.

2. Accessibility, UX, and Crawling

The next things to take a look at are whether your site is accessible to search engines. You can use tools such as Screaming Frog or Google Search Console to scan your pages and make sure crawlers can get onto your pages and index them.

They will also flag whether you have duplicate content, thin content, pages that are perceived to have no content at all, or broken links.

The content must also be readily accessible through the various platforms – including mobile – and every browser. In today’s quick paced world, it must also load fast across all devices and browsers as the speed of your site can directly impact your ranking. You can test the speed of your site here.

The visuals, the design and the User Experience (UX) must also be attractive and easy to navigate to your visitors – with it being clear from the first instance what your site is about. This will keep your bounce rate down (when people land on your site and then leave straight away).

3. Setup of important services and tracking

Aside from having your website up and running, there’s several tools that you should also get set up. Firstly, Google Analytics is vital for tracking the traffic coming into your site, the visitors’ habits and how they found you in the first place. Google Alerts is another free tool that’s useful to use to see if your brand name gets mentioned anywhere on the internet.

You should also set up social media profiles before they get snapped up. Even if you don’t have any intentions of using them to begin with, you may change your strategy in the future and then you’ll wish you’d claimed them first.

As for retargeting and remarketing, again, you may not be thinking about paying for it straight away but you may as well go ahead and put the retargeting pixels from at least Facebook and Google onto your website so that those audiences are accessible to you in the future.

4. Use Rich Snippets, Schema and Open Graphs

If you have your on page all in order, it is time for a broader optimisation. Schema is a must if you want to help Google rank you semantically, and they’re required for any rich snippets to show up on the SERPs.

You should also capitalise on any content search opportunities, including how to get ranked in image searches. If you tag your site and images properly, you may find your images show up on searches that can add real value to your domain.

5. Link acquisition

The final step of your SEO strategy should be to foster relationships with influencers. Figuring out how to gain shares and links to your website should be included in your traffic growth plans as this will help to add value to your site.

The theory behind link acquisition is that when someone links to another website, they are effectively telling search engines a good resource. Otherwise, they wouldn’t link to it. It’s very difficult to build links to low-value webpages, so your link building campaign should start with content worth linking to.

We hope you’ve found this handy SEO checklist useful for your new website. If you’ve already launched your website, you can still take the time to correct any missing steps as soon as you can. At WP Tech Support we can help you stay visible to search engines and improve the overall performance of your website. Take a look at our monthly payment plans to choose the level of support that best suits your business requirements.