39 effective steps to rank better in google search.

Clickbait titles. Love 'em or hate 'em.
Fact is, you just clicked on one and I have 5 more seconds to hold your attention.

So without further ado, here are almost 40 steps you can take to make your website rank better in search engines.

SEO Basics:

• Set up GSC and Bing Webmaster Tools
• Set up Google Analytics (GA)
• Install and configure an SEO plugin (WordPress)
• Generate and submit a sitemap to GSC and Bing
• Create a Robots.txt
• Check Webmaster Tools for any manual actions
• Make sure the site is indexed
• Keyword Research:
• Identify the competitors
• Find the main keywords
• Find long-tail keyword variations
• Create a keyword map
• Analyze the page intent of ranked results
• Make a list of questions being asked
• Check the target keyword difficulty

Technical SEO:

• Ensure the site is using HTTPS
• Check for duplicate versions of the site
• Check for crawl errors and fix them
• Improve site speed
• Check for broken internal and external links
• Find and fix HTTP links on HTTPS pages
• Use SEO-friendly URL structure
• Add schema markup
• Check the page depth
• Check for redirects (301 & 302)

On-Site + Content SEO

• Check & fix duplicate or missing title tags
• Check & fix duplicate or missing meta descriptions
• Find & fix multiple H1 tags
• Improve title tags, meta descriptions and page content
• Perform a content audit and prune low performing content
• Add alt tags to images
• Improve internal linking
• Check for keyword cannibalisation
• Update content to ensure its still relevant

Off-Site SEO

• Audit competitor backlinks
• Perform link intersect analysis
• Find and reach out to unlinked mentions
• Look for new link building opportunities
• Optimise Google My Business listing (GMB)