SEO & Website Checklist

Is your website ready for the SERPs?

Over the last couple of months, we’ve been asked to produce an SEO and website checklist for our clients for when a website goes live. A lot of ‘SEO’ work overlaps with website development meaning we can work closely with developers to ensure your website is ready for the SERPs to crawl.

One of the first things a developer should do once launching your website is setting up a Google Analytics account and putting a Google Analytics code on the website in order for you to track where your website traffic is coming from and how people are engaging with your website.

Once Google Analytics has been set-up, it is then important that conversion tracking is implemented in order to track ROI as well as to see where conversions are being made on the website. If you are selling a transactional product online, we can set-up e-commerce tracking to pull through values sold online. For lead generation websites, we can set-up goals in the form of contact forms being filled in, newsletter sign-ups or someone clicking on the phone number to make a call to the business.

Another tool that should be set-up inline with the website launching is Google Search Console. This is where you should submit your XML sitemap and also where you can get Google to fetch and crawl your website. This is where you’ll be able to check if you have any 404 errors, web errors and what search terms your website is appearing for along with positions of keywords and CTR. This will give you peace of mind that all your pages are being indexed by Google and also that your website is correctly set up with canonical references.

Prior to your website going live, your website should have been tested across all devices (desktop, tablet and mobile) and well as different browsers (safari, chrome, firefox) and different models of devices (mac vs computer, windows vs apple).

At the development stage and optimisation stage of your website process, the following should have been completed, based on in-depth keyword research to give your website the best chance of being found within the SERPs.

• Is there enough rich and engaging content on each page?
• Is the URL structure search friendly?
• Have you declared the language of the page?
• Have you specified an encoding for each page?
• Have you written meta descriptions for every page?
• Are page title unique and SEO friendly?
• Have you created H1 & H2 tags?
• Do all images have alt tags?
• Is Robots.txt set-up correctly?
• Is the load speed of your website okay?

For any help in making sure your website is fully optimised, or for help in creating a long term SEO strategy, get in touch with us today.