The SEO checklist you need for your new business website

Building a brand-new website for your business is an exciting stage in its creation.

Your website is going to be one of your primary sources of new custom so, once it’s up and running, you better make sure it’s optimised for search by having a good SEO strategy in place. Taking this into consideration will ensure your long-term success in search rankings.

For the uninitiated, SEO can be a bewildering prospect, with countless shifting rules, grey areas and regularly refined algorithms. But it doesn’t have to be daunting…

Here’s your SEO checklist:

• Set up tracking and analytics tools
• Keyword research
• Make sure you’re on social media
• Site speed check
• Technical SEO audit

For the uninitiated, what does this all mean? Read on to find out:

Set up tracking and analytics tools

Tracking a range of metrics is vital if you want to ensure your site is ranking highly in search engine results you need to have the right tracking and analytics tools in place from the beginning.

These will enable you to assess the performance of your site on a range of metrics, discover any weaknesses and improve on them.

Google Analytics is one of the most commonly-used tools and is available on a freemium model, but other, more comprehensive tools can also be purchased.

What metrics do you need to check? Below is a list of the most important:

• Organic traffic – breakdown of how much traffic is coming through search engines such as Google and Bing
• Other traffic – the percentage of traffic from various sources such as email, other web pages or paid for campaigns
• Bounce rate – the percentage of visitors that leave after viewing one page
• Conversion rate – how many site visitors take action such as filling in a form or becoming customers
• Click-through rate – the percentage of visitors that click on links on your pages

Keyword research

This is the cornerstone of good SEO. Find out what your customers are searching for and make sure those terms are included in your website.

This in an ongoing process, allowing you to continually refine your content and tailor on-page SEO towards your audience with powerful keywords.

Again, there are a variety of useful tools for keyword research including SEMRush, Moz, and Google Keyword Planner.

But be shrewd; don’t cram them in unnaturally or you risk being penalised.

Make sure you’re on social media

This may seem obvious but creating a successful social media presence will directly benefit your website.

It’s debated how much impact backlinks to your website from credible sources has on SEO, but your company’s social media profiles certainly rank in search results.

Additionally, more and more people use social media sites as their primary source for search. People may first discover you through Facebook or Twitter so make sure you have a solid presence across social platforms. Have obvious links between various social media sites and your own websites.

Site speed check

A slow site is a conversion killer. In a world of super-fast broadband and instant internet gratification, visitors are likely to grow impatient and bounce if they don’t get a slick and speedy experience.

Use an online tool to assess site speed and suggest improvements. Wix, for example, offers a simple, hassle-free solution – SEO Wiz – which can help you make your site more SEO-friendly.

Slow pages can be caused by large, high quality images, too much external media, overly-dense code, and an excess of plugins.

Conduct a full technical SEO audit

A full technical SEO audit should be undertaken regularly to check your site and its content are up to scratch and performing well or not being penalised in searches. There are a variety of tools available online to help you do this.

Schedule an audit in, discover problems or weaknesses that could be detrimental to SEO and address them promptly.

Possible errors include:

• Crawl errors – these happen when search engines are not able to access a URL from your website causing it to abandon the request
• Faulty links – dead links (ones that lead to an unavailable webpage) are detrimental to SEO as search engines crawl your links for ranking purposes
• Duplicate content – duplicate content can be caused on your website by URL variations or if you have HTTP and HTTPS or www. And non-www. pages. A search engine will have trouble telling which is the original and therefore more relevant

Wix is a cloud-based web development platform that provides a fast and easy solution for building HTML5 and mobile sites, whether you’re an expert or a beginner. It’s SEO Wiz can create a tailored plan for boosting your website’s SEO ranking.