[SEO basics Checklist]
Get a custom domain name
The premise behind branding is that you can take something straightforward, like a company name, and have customers identify it with particular emotions, memories, or ideas. For information-seeking search engine users, particularly those trying to find your business online for the first time, it’s crucial to brand your domain appropriately so that it corresponds with the name of your business.

Prior to choosing a domain name, consider your target audience and how they could search for you. Additionally, geographic indicators may be useful if another company uses your company name. The success of your website depends critically on how easy it is for users to find and utilise. Therefore, when choosing a domain name for your new website, make it straightforward and stay away from hyphens and numbers.

Set up important Google Accounts
Add Google Search Console to your website. It’s one of the most helpful and cost-free tools from Google that enables you to track, examine, and identify issues with the website. It has a ton of helpful features, including the ability to track your website’s performance on Google (such as how Googlebot crawls your website, how many pages have 404 (not found) errors, or whether you need to take any manual actions, etc.). It also displays the precise number of keywords for which your website ranks, as well as their CTR (click-through rate), number of impressions, and position on Google. It assists you in identifying any technical problem preventing your website from performing successfully on search engines.

Additionally, you may include Google Analytics code on your website. This is the most effective and well-liked free analytics tool from Google. It can help you understand how people find and use your website while also assisting you in developing a successful business strategy. Finding how many people visit each page of your website and what they are seeking are two of its unequalled qualities. It allows you to track objectives and KPIs by enabling you to construct customised reports using a “drag and drop” interface (key performance indicators).

Finally, it provides demographic data, such as age, gender, and location, along with statistics about your site’s bounce rate, time on site, and page views.

[On-Page SEO Checklist]
Keyword Research
For SEO, keyword research is crucial. It provides a wealth of insightful information on your competition and the kind of content you should produce. The main benefit of keyword research is that it enables you to discover what people are looking for online. As a result, conducting keyword research should be your first move when beginning a new SEO campaign.

In addition to employing keyword research tools to identify content opportunities, you can also use Google Search to locate hidden keyword treasures. To be more precise, Google Suggest can be a fantastic resource for long-tail keywords that are frequently used to obtain content online.

Page Optimisation
Meta tags, URL structure, headings, body content, pictures, and other elements are all part of on-page SEO optimisation for a website. This is crucial since it aids in the comprehension of your website and its contents by search engines. Search engines find it simpler to match your content to pertinent search queries when your on-page SEO optimisation is strong. The goal of on-page SEO is to improve your site’s exposure and rankings in search engines.

Internal links benefit users by exposing them to more content on your website, and they benefit search engine crawlers by assisting the robot in locating relevant pages. One of the simplest on-page SEO techniques you can employ to improve the ranking of your content is a strong internal linking strategy. Your internal links’ keyword relevance and topical authority for those terms can be improved by employing keyword-rich anchor text. Aside from building internal links, ensure that you follow the stated character limits on your titles and meta descriptions to get the green light on your SEO and solve on-page issues.

Content Marketing
An excellent digital marketing tactic is content marketing. Its major objective is to successfully draw in and keep your target audience by producing and sharing high-quality content that responds to the different concerns it is posing. The goal is to gain recognition and reputation by providing helpful and free material (blog articles, e-books). It enables you to get visitors to your website, create leads that you can turn into clients, and establish yourself as an authority in your industry.

Actually, increasing your natural referencing and thus your search engine rating is the main goal of content marketing. You can increase the number of entry points by publishing more blog posts of a specific length and calibre that cover topics relevant to your industry but are not explicitly addressed on your website. Because of this, your content must be produced in a way that is SEO-optimised in order to draw potential customers to it. You’ll raise your qualified traffic and boost your visibility.

Work with partners
If you’re thinking about ranking higher on search engines by getting links, don’t go out and get a bunch of low-quality or spammy links. That will only hurt your rankings because Google sees those as a sign that you’re not trustworthy and can’t be counted on to provide valuable information to users. Instead, focus on getting quality backlinks from reputable and authoritative sites. Also, try reaching out to influencers who have large social followings and ask them if they would mention your site at a fee! This is a good way to get high-quality links that will help you rank higher on search engines.

Analyse links earned by your competitors
You must learn how to use the competition when it comes to SEO. There is a significant probability that you will soon be able to use these same strategies by looking at the keywords that your rivals are ranking for and researching their tactics!

Here is a method for a straightforward link gap analysis:

Check out who is ranked for your target keyword on Google.
Pick two or three of the top-ranked URLs.
Find the pages that link to each of your competitors’ URLs by using a link research tool.

Mobile-Friendliness
Google has given priority to mobile indexation because more than 50% of all users globally browse the internet using their mobile devices. You want to make sure that your website is mobile-friendly. Typically, this is indicated in terms of utility and speed as well as design. Optimising for mobile-first indexing is incredibly crucial if you want to rank higher on search engines. Google gives mobile-friendly websites a higher rating than other websites. Lower ranks on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) are likely if your website isn’t mobile-friendly.

Page Load Speed
Time is of the essence on the internet. The average load time for a website on a 3G mobile network is 19 seconds, which is pretty slow for the entire world. According to testing, 50% of visitors will often leave a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. There are a few elements to take into account while discussing speed in order to make your site effective and simple for users to utilise. Higher conversion and lower bounce rates are correlated with faster loading times. You can quickly and easily analyse the loading time of your website with PageSpeed Insights.

Reduce Redirects
Redirects can help you avoid a lot of issues with broken sites and link equity/juice, but if you have a lot of them, they can also be very problematic. Your websites will load more slowly if there are many redirects. The longer it takes a user to reach the landing page, the more redirects there are.

Another point worth highlighting is that each page should only have one redirect; otherwise, a redirect loop may result. A redirect loop is a series of redirects that all lead to the same page, which is deceptive because the browser won’t know which page to display and will ultimately produce a really bad error.

If your website has 404 pages, there are several methods to modify them and provide instructions to users so you don’t lose them. Create a user-friendly page and direct the user there or to another pertinent and connected piece of material.

Simple Navigation Menu
The ability to navigate a website with ease is crucial while developing a website. Here are some pointers for navigating a website: Having a really imaginative and engaging website is useless if your visitors can’t use it and navigate through it to discover all of the crucial information they’re looking for. The way you explore and move about a website is the best way to think of navigation.

Your customers and visitors will remain satisfied and keep coming back if you make things clear and uncomplicated. Make sure your visitors can quickly get the information they need without having to go through tons of other content.

Handle Duplicate Content
Duplicate content from other websites is when there are two or more pages on your website that are exactly the same. Which page should be ranked and which should not can be confusing to Google. Original content is something that Google wants (and rewards) because it increases user experience while driving up the cost of SEO.

Content contains product information pages in addition to blog articles and editorial content. These all, in turn, improve user experience.

SEO may be challenging in the world of search engines, but it doesn’t have to be! If you employ these methods and techniques, you won’t have any trouble achieving high rankings on Google. If you stick with them, the benefits will come quickly.