On-Page SEO Checklist For New Websites

We understand that you have launched your new website and you are excited about how to bring organic traffic to the website. But, in order to get new visitors to your newly launched website you need to make sure that it is optimized well enough to be indexed by the search engine.

Assuming that you have already implemented basic technical optimizations on the website like below, as having technical issues on your website can undermine all your other SEO efforts:

1. Adding robots.txt file with allowing every bot and disallowing specific URLs
2. Implementing sitemap.xml and submitting that to GSC
3. Making the website load fast in both desktop and mobile
4. Make sure that website is mobile responsive
5. Ensuring the website is crawlable and indexable

We are going to help you with the part of website optimization that lays the foundation of your website performance in search engines like Google and that is on-page optimization.

From optimizing the content, mapping keywords, optimizing meta and heading tags, etc to optimization of internal linking structure & user navigation, every element counts in on-site optimization.

This blog will walk you through a specifically designed, on-page seo checklist for new website owners and help them improve their website average position in the SERP. 

The On-Page SEO Checklist Every New Website Needs

1. Finding target keywords

Keyword research is the foundation layer of every on-page SEO strategy. It is this stage where you decide what keywords to target on which page of your website. 

Having a new website, the first thing you should be clear about is your goals. This means, you need to be clear if you just want to attract organic visitors on your website or also want them to convert and bring revenue to your business. These goals decide if you should be targeting broad keywords or long term phrases.

Before jumping to any keyword research tool like, Semrush, SERanking, Ahrefs, etc you should know these terms:

• Search volume: This explains the number of users searching for a particular term in a single month
• Keyword difficulty: Explains the difficulty to rank on the SERP top 10 results for the particular keyword, where 0 means very low difficulty and 100 means very high.
• Search intent: Understanding what is user trying to find from the SERP

GetSetRank Suggestion

• Go for keywords that will directly add monetary value to your business.
• Find keywords with low keyword difficulty and medium search volume, for example, a keyword “X” has KD of 10 and Search Volume of “100”, this is a perfect keyword to target if it sync with your business goals
• Find long tail keywords rather than broad keywords, for example, rather than going for a keyword “SEO strategy” you should go with keywords like “SEO strategy for new websites”.
• If you already have a list of your competitor websites, copy their URL, put it in site explorer tool of the SEO tool you have, check the organic keywords they ranking on, put on the filter that suit your needs, & there it is, the list of keywords for you that you can target.

After the keyword research part is done, keyword mapping comes into play where you will have to assign the target & secondary keywords to pages to make users as well as search engine crawlers understand that the page is targeted for this particular keyword.

2. Optimizing meta tags and heading tags

a.) Meta Tags

Meta tags include title and description of your page that appears on SERP. Optimization of meta tags is necessary to make searchers and crawlers understand what keyword is targeted in the page and what they will be finding in this page.

See how Zendesk has written a completely optimized meta tag for its blog. 

1. Target keyword “call center scripts” is in the first half of the title length
2. The title length is within character limit i.e within 50-60 characters
3. The title clearly explains what the user will be finding in the blog
4. The description clearly explains what the blog is going to provide the users
5. The description length is within the word limit i.e 150-160 characters.

Note: If Google finds any heading or description in your content that is more relevant than your meta title and description as per the search intent, it will make that appear in SERP.

b.) Heading Tags

Heading tags are the headlines that your users see when they visit your page or blog post. 

The heading tags are divided into 6 parts, starting from H1 to H6 where H1 is the first and most important heading on your page while H6 is the last and least important.

By structuring your page content with properly optimized headings, you give search engine crawlers as well as users a signal to navigate the page in a structure and understand the content of the page.

To create properly optimized subheadings you need to follow some best practices, which are given below:

1. There should be only one H1 on the page
2. The H1 should have the target keyword of the page
3. The sub headings should have secondary keywords of the page
4. To make your content appear in AI overviews, try to create headings in question form
5. Create a proper hierarchy in the page content, from H1 at first to other according to the herirarchy 
6. The headings should be short, clear, and descriptive

Note: In case your title tags are exceeding the character limit as per the SERP and one of your heading tags is more descriptive and explains the complete blog, Google will automatically make that appear in the SERP as the title.

3. Creating SEO optimized URL slugs

Trust me, it’s a virtue if you are creating URL slugs for content pages on your new website and you already know how to make them SEO optimized. This avoids a lot of redirects in the later stages of optimization of the website.

Just in case you don’t know what URL slug is, it is the last part of the URL that explains what the page is about. 

For example, check the image below, it will clearly help you understand what URL slug is.

Creating URL slugs is an easy but also crucial part of this on-page optimization checklist for new websites, especially for new websites to avoid wasting efforts during later stages.

You cannot believe I have wasted around 15-20 days for a website whose 250-300 URLs were not optimized properly by their previous SEO. Just after the optimization was done, the website saw a growth of 10% in their clicks as well as impressions. No new content published, no revamps done, no content optimization, just pure URL optimization.

Here are the few best practices that you need to follow while creating URL slugs for your new website pages:

1. URL slug should be short and descriptive
2. Don’t include numbers in the slug
3. The slug should have target keyword in it
4. Only dash (-) should be used to separate words

Just in case you want to change the URL of your page later, make sure you apply a 301 redirect to it.

4. Improve site navigation with proper internal linking 

Internal linking is the most important part of this checklist of on-page optimization for new websites after Keyword research and content optimization.

Having a robust internal linking structure of the website, you can let the users and crawlers navigate through the website seamlessly reducing the click depth to less than 3. 

With a great internal linking strategy:

1. Users will find related content more quickly
2. Give search engine crawlers a positive signal about how the pages are connected to each other
3. Passes link juice from one page to another page, helping in improving the overall ranking of the website on SERP
4. Reduces bounce rate of the website
5. Improves engagement rate and time of the website

Now, the question is how can you implement a great internal linking strategy on a new website.

Before implementation, you need to know about what anchors you should be choosing, as while doing internal linking, anchors and target URLs matter the most. So here are some best practices you should keep in mind while implementation of internal linking strategy effectively:

1. Anchor texts should be contextual and doesn’t seem unnatural
2. The anchor texts should clearly explain what the users will find the target page
3. The anchor texts shouldn’t be too long (not more than 4-5 words)
4. Don’t use anchors like “Click here”, “View more” as they don’t really explain what the user will be finding inside the page
5. Avoid linking to a page more than one time from a single page

5. Making content user as well as search engine friendly

A content that drives users, answers their queries, and guides the users to make an action is the definition of what effective content is.

With effective content, you will experience:

• High conversion rate on the website
• High engagement time and rate on the website
• Lower bounce rate on the website
• High revenue generating potential of the website

Even though you are creating good content, in order to get it ranked in SERP, you need to optimize it for search engine crawlers too. Below are best practices that you need to follow to create quality content that is optimized for search engines also:

• Analyze search intent and create content accordingly
• Include primary keywords in headings and body of the content, but not overdo it
• Create headings in form of questions
• Structure the content in the form that is easier for users to consume, like include bullets and pointers, provide headings and subheadings, etc
• Provide answers to the questions directly so that your content gets a chance to appear in AI overviews and featured snippets
• Improve readability by using active tense and dividing the content in small paras of 2-3 lines each
• Include properly optimized images to reduce text overdose and improve engagement on the website
• Introduce table of contents on the side bars to improve navigation inside the blog post

6. Keyword inclusion at the right places (Naturally)

Let’s say, you are a BPO trainer and have to train the new employees about best practices in contact center and are looking for a blog about “IVR Best Practices” on Google and a website appears in front of you that doesn’t have the keyword “IVR Best Practices” in its title, would you click that?

Obviously, NO.

Similarly, that’s how Google crawlers work too. If the crawler won’t find the targeted keyword in the headings, subheadings, and body of the content it will assume that the content is not relevant to the search query, which in turn will not help you content rank in SERP.

Now, this doesn’t mean that you have to include target keywords everywhere without them making any sense, this is a bad practice in SEO and is called Keyword Stuffing.

You have to contextually include the targeted keyword and secondary keyword in:

• Title of the page
• First para of the content
• Headings and subheadings
• Body of the content at suitable places where it fits naturally

Trust me, this is one of the most important tasks in this on-page SEO checklist for new websites.

7. Making website visually engaging by adding visual content

Not including visually appealing content like, infographics, photos, gifs, videos will make your content difficult to consume by the users.

An overdose of text to the user can overwhelm the users which can lead to less engagement and increase bounce rate.

In order to fix this, you need to add visual content (Infographics, CTAs, YouTube Embedded Videos, etc) to the website and suitable intervals to break the continuation of text which can cause fatigue to the readers.

Also, if you are lacking suitable images to add to your blog, use visually appealing CTAs like done by Zendesk below.

Conclusion

The above 7-points are enough for a new website to give a kickstart to their SEO journey. There are more advanced tasks in on-page SEO checklists like Schema Markups, User Interface Improvement, etc for websites but that can be implemented at the later stages.

If you have already onboarded a SEO tool like Ahrefs, Semrush, Ubersuggest, etc they can help you a lot by giving you on-page SEO improvement suggestions, which can take you a hell of time.

Why wait then? Start your website optimization journey today.