SEO Checklist 2019: Get More Organic Traffic (Step-by-Step)

The next thing to check for is a robots.txt file. A robots.txt file is important because it gives instructions to search engines on where they can and cannot go on your site. For example, you may not want them to crawl certain pages or directories like a cart for an e-commerce store, or RSS feeds. So you’d add that to your robots.txt file. If you’re unsure if you have a robots.txt file, just go to your domain.com/robots.txt. If you see a plain text file like this, then you’re good to go. If you see anything else, then Google, “robots.txt generator,” and create one.

The last couple of things you should do is setup Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Google Analytics can give you insightful data on how your visitors interact with your website. For example, analyzing bounce rates and time on page can give you an idea of user experience and engagement. Google Search Console on the other hand is a must-have tool for all webmasters. You can track your performance in search and see the keywords that you’re ranking for. So take a screenshot of the basics and let’s move on to the next subsection on our checklist.

Choosing a topic with high search traffic potential and doing some basic on‐page SEO is important. But all of your efforts will be in vain if your content isn’t up to par. Here are a few things you can add to your to-do list when creating your content.

The first thing is to write an engaging introduction. The purpose of the intro is to let your readers know they’re in the right place and that your page will solve the reason for them being there. Fail to do so and your readers will be gone fast. Start with something that resonates with the reader, build trust or credibility, and promise a solution to the user’s problem.

Second, focus on readability. Let’s talk about readability in two categories.

The first is visual comprehension. When a reader lands on your page the first thing they’re going to process is how your page looks. And if they land on a big wall of text in 10pt font, they’ll likely get overwhelmed and leave. Instead, break your content into pieces by writing in short sentences and short paragraphs. Other visual assets you can add are images to separate paragraphs. But don’t just throw in stock photos for the sake of faking visual appeal. Put some effort into creating or finding images that will enhance the reader’s experience. These tips will help increase your chances of turning visitors into readers.

Now, the other category in readability is reading comprehension. According to a study, 50% of the US population reads below an 8th-grader level. Which means that if you’re writing at a higher level, you’re alienating half the population as well as non-native speakers. There’s a free tool called Hemingway Editor.
Just paste your content in there and it’ll give you a readability score. If you’re the type to write academically and struggle to lower your readability score, a great tip you can use is to write as you speak.

The last part of the content checklist is to ensure your content solves the reason for the searcher’s query. Great content is content that solve a user’s problem. For example, if you have a post on productivity tips, try and go beyond things like “sleep less,” and “hustle.” Someone searching for productivity tips probably wants practical and actionable information they can try right away. They want to know how they can measure whether their productivity levels are increasing. If your content solves their original problem and answers the questions that might come to mind as they’re reading, then you probably have some decent content. And if it doesn’t, you might need to re-hit the drawing board. So here’s what the final content checklist looks like.
Take a screenshot and let’s move on to the next section.

When it comes to white-hat link building, you’ll have to pony up and do some email outreach. Now, outreach isn’t about begging for links. In the words of the late Eric Ward: “Links aren’t things. A link represents something somebody finds valuable. A link represents something someone wants to share. A link represents the human manifestation of a desire to let someone else know about something useful.” And there are a few strategies you can use to promote your valuable, shareworthy, and useful content. Now, I’ll be focusing mostly on the prospecting part.

The first thing you can do is look at who’s linking to the top-ranking pages for your target keyword. These will likely be the most relevant link prospects seeing as they’ve already linked to a competing article on the same topic.

The final link building tactic that works well is guest posting.

Now, these three techniques are great to use for new and existing content. But there are a couple of other link building strategies that work more effectively if you do the prospecting beforehand.

And these are the Skyscraper Technique and Broken Link Building. Prospecting before you create content guarantees you’ll have a list of people to promote your new piece to. Here’s your final link building checklist you should go through.
Take a screenshot and let’s move on

At this point, you should have a solid SEO checklist you can rinse and repeat for each new page you create. But as you create more pages, there’ll likely be technical SEO issues that go unnoticed. So I want to focus more on the domain level here to find and fix these issues. You can find these issues by asking your free Audit at Ultimate Index. The team will crawl your pages and search for over 100 predefined technical SEO issues. After the crawl has completed, you’ll see a list of issues we found on your site. Now, Site Audit is great for finding the issues on autopilot, but you’re still going to have to fix them. Let’s go through a few important ones you should fix.

First is page speed. Slow-loading pages are annoying for the user experience.
And as a result, Google has said that page speed is a ranking factor. You can use tools like Pingdom, GtMetrix or Google Pagespeed Insights, to measure the speed of a single page.

Next, we want to make sure that your website is mobile friendly. Google has a “mobile-friendly test” tool you can use. Just enter the URL you want to investigate and they’ll tell you whether your page is mobile friendly.

Next, you’ll want to ensure that you don’t have any external or internal broken links. If someone clicks on a link and ends up on a broken page, then that’s bad user experience.

On top of that, you’ll want to fix these because linking to broken pages is a waste of “link equity.” If you’re linking to any broken pages.
Since every site will have different technical SEO issues, I recommend using a tool to help you identify these issues and then tackle them one by one. Now, take a screenshot of the final technical SEO checklist.

And if there’s anything that I’ve missed that’s an absolute must-do on your SEO checklist, then let me know in the comments. So keep grinding away, start adding some satisfying checkmarks to your checklist.