Use this Checklist to Rank your website on Google

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This article is written by Olumuyiwa Elegbede

Ranking a new website is a very tough task, but it’s not impossible. As a Search Engine Optimisation specialist, you must tick some important boxes for your site to rank in search engines like Google and Bing. Millions of both old and new sites are competing to be seen daily by searchers and potential clients and getting to the top of search results is the main goal of all site owners and SEOs. The three major areas of SEO (Technical, On-Page and Off-page) form the basis for getting seen online.

In this article, we are going to analyse the checklist you could use to rank your website.

1. Keyword Research:

• Identify your competitors – Use tools such as SEMrush and similarweb to know who and where your competitors are. What kind of marketing strategy they are implementing.
• Gather Ranking keywords – You can gather keywords in your niche that are ranking high organically in search engines and the ones that are ranking high for pay per click.
• Find long-tail keyword variations – This helps the searchers get their questions answered in detail by using broad match e.g. Bright red women shoe.
• Come up with solid Frequently Asked Questions – At least 10 FAQs to answer the questions about your products or services. You could use Google search bar or SEMrush to research this.
• Take note of the target keywords difficulty level – Always try out keywords that are not difficult to rank.

2. On-Page SEO:

• Fix duplicate and missing meta descriptions – Having duplicate or missing meta descriptions will drastically affect your website SEO negatively.
• Fix multiple H1 tags – Always look out for multiple H1 Tags, it confuses the Google when crawling your website.
• Add alt tags to images – Alt tags help the search engine understand what your image is all about.
• Implement internal linking – Linking to other posts or pages on your website improve your ranking. At least 3 internal links on a page.
• Update content regularly for Google crawling and indexing.
• Improve title tags and meta descriptions – This will help the search engine understand what your website and business is all about.
• Check for keyword cannibalisation.

3. Off-page SEO:

• Write guest post on top ranking websites – Check for high Domain authority websites to publish articles and features, make sure you include your own website links.
• Feature on a podcast – There are many marketing and SEO podcasts on YouTube. You can ask the host to feature you to talk about your brand.
• Start a podcast – You can start your own podcast, talking about your brand, products and services.
• List your website on quality directories – There are many quality directories you can list your website like yahoo, Bing etc.
• Create Google Business page – Getting a business page on Google ads to your business credibility and improves your ranking.
• Audit competitor backlinks – You can do this on SEMrush to target the backlinks your competitors are using.
• Exchange links with partner websites – You can partner with websites in your niche to exchange links.

4. SEO Basics

• Set up Google Analytics for your website – It allows you to measure the traffic, know the keywords people are using to land on your page.
• Set up Google Search Console – Link your website to GSC to index your posts and pages. Google tells you if there’s any error or broken links via the search console.
• Submit your website sitemap to Google and Bing – Sitemap is basically the amount of internal links on your website. Create your sitemap and submit it to Google, there are several plugins to create a sitemap.
• Create a Robots.txt – This is placed in the root directory of your website to inform search engine crawlers which sections or pages of the website to crawl;
• Index all the pages using GSC URL inspection.
• Install and activate SEO plugin e.g. Yoast SEO
• Check Google search console regularly for any possible site error.

Overall, getting to the top of Google ranking requires a long-term and complete method that combines a couple of techniques and tactics.

By following the above listed methods, it is certain that your website will have a good standing on google. It is essential to continue to be up to date with Google’s algorithm updates to be sure that your website continues to appear on search engines.

About the Author: Olumuyiwa Elegbede is a Google-certified digital marketing expert and an associate member of The Chartered Institute of Marketing, UK. He is a tech enthusiast who enjoys reading and doing research and has worked with many tech companies ranging from B2C to B2B. He is a master’s degree holder in Data Science and Analytics from the University of East Anglia, UK, and loves to teach digital marketing and analysis in his spare time.