2023 Onsite SEO Checklist

While onsite SEO factors are not the only one to impact the rankings of your website on search engines, they are still really important.

If you are new to SEO, this checklist will help you to understand which elements you should optimise on your website for 2019.

However, you have to keep in mind what the goal of search is : to provide relevant, great content and a great user experience to users when they ask.

john muller seo checklist

Friends SEO’s experts, this checklist is not-exhaustive and if you think I’m missing some key elements, please share that with us in the comment section 🙂

What is onsite SEO ?

Onsite SEO relates to everything you can do on your website in order to influence your website rankings. It can be on the technical or content sides.

Discover my 2019 Onsite SEO checklist

Indexation

  • Is your website indexed by Google ? Use the command “site:” on Google’s search bar to check it
  • Is there any “noindex” tags on your important pages ?
  • Does the robots.txt files block search engines from crawling part of your sites ?

Website architecture

  • pages are organised in silo and in a logical manner
  • do you have a page for each keywords that you are targeted ?
  • the website is not using subdomains

Title tags

  • include the main keywords
  • contain the brand as a suffix
  • is less than 512px lenght or 70 characters max
  • must be unique
  • don’t include comma or other special characters

Meta-description

  • include the main keywords
  • is between 140 and 155 characters long
  • describe what’s on the page
  • include a call to action

URLs

  • don’t include stop words
  • words are separated using hyphens “-“
  • don’t contain any underscore “_”
  • only use lowercase
  • avoid dynamic URLs
  • use a logical structure
  • contain the main keyword if possible
  • are short

Redirections

  • Non-www to www 301 redirect
  • HTTP to HTTPS 301 redirect
  • correct use of 3XX
  • no redirect chains
  • clean up of 4XX pages
  • personalised 404 page

Headings

  • only one H1 per page
  • H1 is text
  • H1 contain keywords
  • H1 help users understand the topic of the page
  • Proper use of H2/H3/H4

Content

  • target one topic / keyword
  • use synonyms
  • use a natural language / optimised for voice search
  • avoid keywords stuffing
  • is not duplicated
  • include at least 2 internal links
  • include at least 1 external link to an authority website
  • bring value to the user
  • more thorough and more detailled than organic competitors

SSL / HTTPS

  • SSL certificate and HTTPS protocole are used
  • HTTP to HTTPS 301 redirect
  • HTTPS version is canonicalised

Main navigation

  • Include most important pages

Page Speed

  • website have at least 70/100 score on Google Page Speed
  • pages take less than 3 seconds to load
  • have you considered using Google AMP ?
  • Is GZIP compression enable ?
  • Do you using browser caching capabilites ?
  • Are CSS and JS files minified ?
  • Images should be compressed
  • Render-blocking elements should be deffered
  • have you considered using a CDN ?

Sitemap

  • is the sitemap declared in robots.txt ?
  • does the sitemap has been submitted to Google & Bing Search Console ?
  • does it include all the important pages of your website ?

Images

  • have a proper alt tag ?
  • are properly sized ?
  • are optimised ?

Structured Data

  • Do you use structured data ? (person, article, recipes, events, travel…)
  • Does it pass Google structured data test

Mobile Friendliness

  • are every pages mobile friendly ?
  • no interstitials popup

Internal linking

  • the anchor help users to know what to expect on the destination page
  • maximum 100 links per page
  • pages are linked by topics

Robots.txt

  • back office pages are blocked
  • important resources are accessible (CSS, JS, images…)
  • important pages are crawlable

User Experience

  • bounce rate is under 65%
  • design include breadcrumbs
  • blog post display publication date
  • blog post page suggest similar content
  • do you have social sharing buttons ?

Other optimisations

  • Check if former pages are still indexed
  • Cloacking : ensure you don’t have any hidden content on your pages

Engagement metrics

  • Organic CTR (Using search console data): do people click on my listing?
  • Bounce rate: do people stick on my website?
  • Average time spent: do people spend enough time on my website

Google EAT Update

If you focus on creating the best and the most thorought content for your users, no doubt you will benefits on the last Google update.

Bear in mind that creating one really good page is better than splitting it into various poor quality ones.

Stay up-to-date with the latests SEO trends

SEO is changing everyday. If you want to improve your skills you need to read regularly.

Here are a few of the top SEO blogs:

 

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