An SEO checklist is a necessary part of content marketing strategies for businesses. 

With so many small companies being hit hard by the pandemic, more organizations are joining the blogging community.

For SMBs, content marketing requires going beyond creating excellent content—you also need to optimize for search engines.

Whether you are a seasoned marketing blogger or a brand new one, it’s important to know what the latest SEO rules are and how you can adapt your blog accordingly for marketing success.

Below, we share the ultimate SEO checklist—a complete guide that you can refer to whenever you create new content.

Why Do You Need an SEO Checklist?

For first-timers creating a blog, the process can be daunting. Blogs aren’t just about throwing words together, especially when they’re meant to promote your business.

An SEO checklist is a useful resource for building a blog—the steps you encounter in this article will help you design your blog and structure your content.

In turn, optimizing your content for search engines will increase your organic ranking on search engine results pages (SERP).

The goal is to reach the top spot on page one. According to these SEO statistics, the top-ranked page gets 24.46% of all clicks, with 70% of users never clicking through to page two.

How do you reach that lucrative top spot? By following our SEO checklist. 

Defining Your Keywords

Source: Venngage

Once you create your website, you need to start building your content.

Writing high-quality blogs used to be enough to land you a page one ranking on Google—but as marketers have learned the hard way, that no longer works.

Instead, your focus needs to be on using the right keywords to reach your audience.

You can find keywords related to your business by using Google to search for your products or services. Put yourself in the user’s shoes—what would they type to find you?

There are tools to define keywords but you can easily do a bit of manual research to find the right ones for you.

Having researched popular searches on Google, create a master list of the keywords you have found.

Whittle down that list to the keywords you can use for your content. Remember that keywords don’t just have to be one word—they can easily be phrases.

These long-tail keywords will bring you more views because they answer search queries directly.

Use a mind map to brainstorm and track keywords, like in the example below—that will help you choose the ones that work best for your audience.

Source: Venngage

How to Use Keywords

Now that you have your keywords, you need to incorporate them into your content. This step in the SEO checklist can be tricky.

The first mistake novice bloggers make is to use the keyword as many times as possible in their posts.

This is called keyword stuffing, and instead of boosting your SERP, it will lead to penalties that will set your page views back, resulting in a ranking drop for your site.

Instead, you have to use your keywords in specific areas:

  • SEO blog title—preferably near the front 
  • The first paragraph—again, as close to the beginning of the paragraph as possible
  • URL—but keep your URL short, to a maximum five words
  • In the alt text of images
  • In subheadings—but not in all of them
  • Through the body of the text—but not in every single paragraph
  • The meta description 

Using keywords according to the above instructions will also help to structure your content.

At the end of the day, while keywords are important for Google rankings, they can’t replace well-written and interesting content.

Your blog posts must be of interest to readers so that they stay on the page and engage with it—those are significant factors in improving your rankings. 

Competitor Keyword Analysis

Having your keywords is a starting point in your SEO checklist—it also helps to look at how your competitors are using the same keywords.

Check search engine results for the keywords you are aiming for—what are the first page results? 

Look at the headlines, featured snippets, tags, content length, visuals, and the ‘people also ask’ section to direct your strategy.

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This will give you a fair idea of how your content should be structured—and how you can create content that is better than your competitors’ for that keyword.

You will also need to look at what sites are currently linking to your competitors. This is great information not just for content creation but for building backlinks (more on that later).

Use a tool like Ahrefs or Moz to study the SERPs of competitors’ posts—check the backlinks according to domain authority. 

The higher the DA, the more lucrative it is—but the site linking to you should be relevant. This ensures that Google understands how you fit into your industry.

Now you can find sites that could potentially link to your content—especially if they have round-up posts featuring numerous competitors. Adding you won’t be an issue for the site.

Defining Blog Length

The ideal length of blog content has been widely debated for years. The consensus at the moment is that content between 1500-3000 words performs well.

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Longer content means people stay on your page longer—which improves your SEO ranking. That’s why it’s important to include blog length in your SEO checklist.

But there are some important factors to consider when writing long-form content.

First of all, does your content need to be that long? Don’t add words just for the sake of it—write to answer your readers’ query.

Also, remember that the longer the content, the more taxing it is to create—a 1000-word piece can be faster and easier to put together than a 3000-word in-depth guide.

The more long-form content you create, the more work you will have to put in. Your productivity will wane after the first two pieces and you will eventually burn out.

Instead, write smaller pieces, with the occasional piece that is 2000 words or longer. 

If you can cover a topic in a short post, do it. You will get the page views and rankings if your content does its job of answering user’s questions. 

Blog Visuals

Visual communication is a key aspect of content marketing in 2020—that is why visuals need to be a part of your SEO checklist. 

Images can help your content and site rank on search engines—they don’t exist only to beautify your content.  

Visuals act as a source of attraction for users but with the correct optimization, images like the graphic below can rank on Google image search, thus boosting your site’s overall ranking.

Source: Venngage

Certain kinds of visual content make your content stand out from the crowd of blogs:

  • Infographics
  • Charts and Graphs
  • GIFs
  • Header or featured image
  • Memes
  • Screenshots
  • Videos

Putting some effort into creating or using strong, relevant visuals will help your blog rank on Google.

Visual SEO Checklist

Visuals have become an important part of increasing rankings on search engines. Attractive visuals can add to the user experience for your readers.

However, adding an image as a header isn’t enough to optimize your blog. Here’s a visual SEO checklist you can follow:

  • Use the correct dimensions—your CMS will have images with specified dimensions which you should take note of to resize your blog images 
  • Optimize image file sizes—large files lead to pages loading slowly, which is also penalized by Google
  • Captions and image sources—always include image credits to add credibility to your content
  • Always include a featured image—this makes the blog post and the blog section of your site more attractive
  • Break up your post with visuals—try and include an image for every 300 words of text to improve readability
  • All visuals should include descriptive alt text/ alt tags—these should feature your keywords and a description of the image to help them rank on Google

Here’s a visual checklist you can refer to in the future.

Optimizing visuals should be a priority because it makes your content more readable for all users and increases your SERP score.

Linking for SEO

For small businesses entering the blogging sphere, linking can feel confusing. 

There are a few types of linking to include in your SEO checklist:

Internal linking

When you create content, link to other pages on your site. Also, ensure that the anchor text you use matches the URL of the page you’re linking to. 

Your blog posts should always include internal links to relevant areas of your website—this will encourage readers to delve further into your site and eventually make a purchase.

However, don’t link to everything on your site. The link should be contextual, adding to the ideas around it. 

External links

External links are from outside your site that you can link to within your content.

You might be wondering, if you link to external sources, doesn’t that mean that readers will leave your page when they click a link?

You can’t be afraid to use external links in your content—because they place your site in your industry. 

Plus, the higher the authority of the content you link out to, the better your ranking will be. 

Google will recognize that you are linking out to reputed sources—search engines reward sites that connect to already established pages. 

In simpler terms, if you’re linking out to an authoritative site, then you know what makes good content, which means you know your subject matter.

Link Building

Link building refers to external sites that link to your content on their pages. While linking to sites within your content is in your control, what you can’t control is who links to you.

But link building is a crucial step in your SEO checklist. 

The more backlinks your content receives from authoritative sites, the higher your SERP rank will be, according to these link building statistics.

To accomplish this step, you will need to create a backlink strategy—this can be advanced for a new blogger but it is worth doing.

A few methods for earning backlinks include:

  • Cold outreach—using tools like the aforementioned Ahrefs and Hunter.io, you can create a list of possible contacts who may add your links to their site
  • Guest posting—write posts for external sites where you can include your site links
  • Broken links—find links to your keywords that are broken and contact sites to replace those links with yours 

Links within your post and to your post can improve the ranking not just of the individual blogs but of the whole website. It does take some time but the benefits can’t be underestimated.

Responsive Design

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Wondering why responsive design is on this SEO checklist? Think of when you last accessed a blog post—was it on your laptop, or your phone?

57% of all organic search trends occur on mobile phones. Users are discovering and reading more content on mobile devices, which means your blog needs to be tailored for mobile use.

That is why responsive design is so important—if your blog is structured for laptop viewing, it will be distorted and unreadable on smaller screens.

This will result in users leaving your blog—which will impact your SERP, leading to a lower rank on Google.

Keep in mind that you don’t just need new visitors to your blog. You need people to come back to your blog and stay on it.

Website builders like Weebly, WordPress, and Wix are equipped with responsive design themes, so small businesses can use them easily to create a mobile-friendly blog.

Blog Accessibility

More users are online now than ever before—and that includes people of varying abilities. 

Brands have often failed to acknowledge users with impairments—but that can no longer stand. 

Not only does this approach alienate a large section of potential customers, but it also makes your blog feel exclusive.

There are numerous ways to create a blog with accessible design:

  • Use contrasting colors—this makes the content easier to see for people with color-blindness
  • Add descriptions and alt text to image files—screen readers will pick these up and relay them to visually impaired users 
  • Break up paragraphs—this makes the content less dense on the page, making it easier for everyone to read
  • Include fewer navigation buttons and make navigation from page to page—and back again—simpler and intuitive
  • Organize your blog headers with H1, H2, H3, and H4 tags—headers create a hierarchy, like in the layout below, making it easier for screen readers to relay the content

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Create content that is accessible to users who have visual, auditory, or mobility impairments. This will increase your client base and establish your brand as one for the modern age.

Blog Promotion

Promoting your content, like in the example below, improves your SEO for obvious reasons—the more you share your content, the more people see it and engage with it.

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There are several promotion methods to include on your SEO checklist so you can improve traffic to your site:

  • Share your blogs on social media channels
  • Invite influencers to share your posts
  • Create a vlog based on the content
  • Design an infographic that condenses the blog
  • Group blogs together to create a white paper or ebook
  • Repurpose your blog using webinar software

Promoting your blog can make a major impact on your SEO ranking—don’t leave your content to do all the work by itself.

Key Takeaways: Use This SEO Checklist to Create a Successful Blog

The above 10-step guide will help small businesses begin building their blogs and getting more traffic to their websites.

Some of the steps are undoubtedly easier to execute than others—but with time and practice, even novice bloggers can get the eyeballs they need on their content.

Ronita Mohan is a content marketer at Venngage, the online infographic maker and design platform. Ronita regularly writes about digital marketing, visual design, and small business growth.