When we talk about search engine optimization (SEO), it’s important to understand the sheer importance of catering to the likes of Google and other search engines.
Approximately 8.5 billion queries are run through Google daily, and 68% of all online experiences start with a search engine query.
This means that technical SEO is essential for web agencies to become more discoverable online and to draw more on-site conversions.
With this in mind, let’s take a look at your very own personal SEO checklist, consisting of 34 key considerations that every web agency should take into account:
Getting Started
To begin, let’s explore some one-time processes that can do your SEO credentials the world of good when setting up your web agency:
1. Find a Suitable Web Host
The very first consideration you’ll need to take into account is the need for a suitable web host that can ensure your website remains active and accessible at all times without struggling under bandwidth pressures or high visitor volumes.
Getting set up with a fast and secure web hosting provider will help to maintain your domain authority (DA) and domain rating (DR) as high as possible without experiencing penalties due to prolonged periods of downtime.
2. Structure Your Website
It’s going to be difficult for both visitors and search engine crawlers to navigate your pages if you don’t have a plan for your website’s structure.
The best websites adopt a simplistic navigation structure where all pages are accessible within three clicks. To do this, create a menu system where each area of your site is easy to access from a single submenu.
By structuring your website, you can help to ensure that no pages are left orphaned and undiscoverable for Google’s crawlers.
3. Utilize an SEO-Focused Plugin
If you’re setting up your web agency’s website using WordPress, it’s essential that you add an SEO plugin to assist you in optimizing your pages, creating sitemaps, and setting up meta tags.
There are plenty of great options available to you and it could be worth testing a few plugins out to see which ones are most suitable for your management style and needs.
Plugins like Yoast SEO, Rank Math, and The SEO Framework can all offer ongoing assistance for all of your website edits to ensure maximum optimization.
4. Setup Google Search Console
Another key consideration for every web agency is Google Search Console (GSC), which is a highly powerful SEO tool that can help users track their site’s performance in Google Search.
GSC is entirely free to use and provides actionable insights into which keywords are performing best, website errors that need cleaning up, and analysis of your Core Web Vitals scores.
Additionally, it’s possible to submit your sitemap to Google Search Console for ease of navigation and categorization by Google’s crawlers.
5. Begin Using Bing Webmaster Tools
Rounding off the SEO tool roll call is Bing Webmaster Tools. One major error that many website owners make is disregarding the importance of Bing as a search engine.
Sure, Bing receives far fewer queries than Google each day, but it still has more than 100 million daily active users which can really help to bolster your website traffic and overall performance.
Bing’s Webmaster Tools is an excellent resource for data that can be used for further optimization, making this free tool a vital consideration.
6. Create Your Sitemap
Now it’s time to create your sitemap. These tell search engines where to find your website’s most important pages.
If search engine crawlers don’t know whether your pages exist, they won’t index them, meaning that creating an easy-to-navigate sitemap is essential.
Your sitemap will usually be discoverable at one of the following URLs:
/sitemap.xml
/sitemap_index.xml
/sitemap
If you’re unable to find your sitemap here, you can check your robots.txt file, accessible at [website address]/robots.txt as you can usually find its location listed there.
7. Is Your Site Indexable?
One commonly misunderstood aspect of Google is that nobody searches the web when they enter a query into the search engine; they’re actually exploring results from Google’s index of pages on the internet.
This means that your agency won’t be visible if Google hasn’t managed to index it.
While Google has the power to index all websites unless you disallow indexing, it’s important to consult your webmaster tools to ensure that you haven’t accidentally disallowed crawlers or accumulated ‘noindex page in sitemap’ errors.
8. Make Sure Your Pages are Mobile Friendly
Using Google Search Console, you can check the Mobile Usability report for your website. This helps to check how mobile-friendly your pages are to ensure that you’re well-catered to all visitors.
61.95% of all online traffic is conducted by mobile, and ensuring that your website is as functional as possible for smartphones is a key consideration.
9. Check Your Loading Times
Using platforms like Google’s and Ahrefs’ Core Web Vitals report, it’s possible to view your page speed performance to better understand your website’s loading times.
Page speed has been a key factor for websites for many years on both desktop and mobile, and you could be needlessly harming an otherwise high-quality site by failing to consider optimizing its speed.
10. Compress Your Images
One of the most effective ways to improve your page speed is by compressing images. This shrinks the size of the pictures you use on your site to ensure that loading times are faster and more effective.
There are many image compression websites available for web agencies, and ShortPixel is one option that allows users to compress up to 100 images per month for free and as many as 50 images at a time.
11. Setup Your Google Business Profile
Another easy measure to take to improve your SEO credentials is to set up a Google Business Profile for free. These can show up both in Google searches and on Google Maps.
If your agency has a storefront or a presence in a local area, be sure to register your Google Business Profile to boost your visibility online.
12. Open a Free Account with StoryChief
Consider signing up for a free StoryChief account. It can assist with comparing and contrasting your SEO strategies with your competitors, monitoring your website's SEO performance, gaining valuable insights, and receiving actionable recommendations to increase your traffic.
Building Your SEO Credentials
Now, let’s take a look at how to nurture your search engine optimization strategies on-site through a number of different techniques:
13. Target Competitor Backlinks
The beauty of competitor backlinks is that we already know they work, and they’re straightforward to replicate.
Platforms like Ahrefs are great resources when it comes to targeting competitor backlinks and using its Link Intersect report, it’s possible to enter competitor homepages to identify local directories and other backlinks that are easy to add your website to.
14. Audit Broken Links
Another feature that platforms like Ahrefs and Google Analytics provide is insight into broken links that can harm your website’s SEO.
Broken links can hinder the user experience of your pages and interrupt your site authority. Both Ahrefs’ Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics can crawl your websites and hunt down 404-page load errors.
15. Salvage Underperforming Content
If you don’t keep your pages up to date, it can harm your overall website ranking on Google. With this in mind, you should constantly use Google Analytics to identify your weakest pages in terms of URL ranking and traffic and seek to update them to generate more traffic from search queries.
16. Discover Long-Tail Keyword Opportunities
Long-tail keywords are great because they generally involve lower competition against other websites and can help to anticipate exactly what your target audience is looking for.
Even better, is that it only takes a couple of seconds to discover long-tail keyword opportunities with Google Suggestions.
Simply enter a keyword into Google, and rather than entering it as a query, simply wait to see which long-tail suggestions come through.
These Google Suggest keywords are based on popular search terms surrounding keywords, and by opting to rank for them on your website, you can build your authority.
17. Schedule Crawls
Using Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, it’s possible to schedule crawls to regularly check for technical issues that are undermining your SEO.
Factors like broken links or sudden losses of traffic can be automatically scanned and identified, along with suggestions to improve the SEO performance of your website.
18. Conduct Social Listening
Social media is a treasure trove of information about your business and wider industry. Web agencies should be constantly checking for brand mentions and industry commentaries to understand wider audience sentiment towards the agency and its reputation.
This can help you understand the questions people are asking about your agency on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X, and you can actively build your traffic by seeking to answer these unstructured queries in an FAQ section or within your content.
19. Identify the Relevant Questions People are Asking
While Google Suggestions can be good for uncovering user questions surrounding your industry as SEO opportunities, platforms like Ahrefs offer insights into the types of queries users are running on Google while offering a search difficulty for each term.
By using Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer and looking for the relevant questions being asked with the lowest keyword difficulty, you can create content that answers these queries in a bid to help your target audience and boost your SERPs performance.
20. Check Keyword Difficulty
As we’ve already touched on, keyword difficulty is the term given to how hard it is for a website to rank for a certain keyword in Google’s SERPs. The higher the difficulty, the harder it is to rank.
Ahrefs supplies a traffic light-colored keyword difficulty rating within its Keywords Explorer, and this can help you target keywords that experience high volumes of queries without large numbers of websites attempting to rank for them.
On-Page SEO
There are plenty of on-page SEO considerations for web agencies to take into account, too. This part of your ultimate checklist includes:
21. Shrink Your URLs
Keep your page URLs as short as possible. According to Backlinko’s analysis of 11.8 million Google search results, shorter URLs consistently rank among the top pages within its SERPs.
22. Simplify Your Content
To give your SERPs the best chance to reach the front page of Google, you need all of your traffic to have a positive on-site experience.
This means simplifying your content by removing industry jargon that could impact its inclusivity and avoiding writing at a complex level.
Additionally, simplifying your content can help prevent harmful bouncebacks as visitors navigate to your pages and decide to leave within the first few seconds.
23. Build Reputable Links
No two backlinks are the same, and it’s for this reason that it’s important to prioritize building reputable backlinks to high DA and DR websites.
This can be achieved in a number of ways. Guest blogging can be a great approach whereby you contribute content to high-reputation external websites featuring backlinks to your own pages.
Alternatively, you can seek to get your business located in local directories that are relevant to your industry.
24. Add Keywords Early
Be sure to place your keywords at the very front of your title tag whenever possible. This can help you teach crawlers exactly what your content is about and inform prospective visitors scrolling through Google’s results pages precisely what you’re discussing.
25. Use Images for Engagement
If you’re creating long-form content, you must incorporate images to boost engagement wherever possible.
Your SEO will be complemented by longer visitor time spent on pages, and engaging images can make your credentials stronger.
26. Use Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
You’ll also need to consider precisely how your website and pages appear as Google results. Title tags and meta descriptions show up in Google’s search results to help users learn about what a page will cover in terms of topic.
It’s for this reason that you’ll want to create title tags and meta descriptions to support all your content when publishing it.
Here, it’s worth keeping your tags and descriptions short, punchy, and complementing the likely user search intent for the topic.
27. Internal Links Improve Navigation
Another important rule to follow revolves around your internal linking. By adding more links to relevant pages throughout your website, you can improve how users navigate through it.
This can help to improve the time your visitors spend on pages and the performance of crawlers that will help to understand your website on behalf of Google.
As a rule of thumb, looking to add at least four internal links per blog post can be a great way of boosting the interconnectivity of your pages.
28. Add Schema Markup
Schema markup helps to influence the appearance of your website in search results pages.
Offering a more impressive visual representation of your business online, schema markup can add structured data like user ratings, essential information, and contact details to improve conversion rates.
It’s possible to write your schema markups or use a dedicated plugin to pick up the slack on your behalf. Yoast, for instance, can automate this process effectively.
29. Remove Underutilized Pages
If you find that your pages have become irrelevant as your site has developed, it could be worth removing them altogether as opposed to updating them. This can help to prevent them from penalizing your website’s authority.
Good SEO Practice
Now, let’s take a look at some good housekeeping practices to help boost your web agency’s reputation online:
30. Build Links with Outreach
Whether you’re interested in guest blogging to boost your website’s reputation with backlinks or simply want your web agency to be included in a list that’s been published online, conducting outreach can really improve your backlink profile.
By getting in touch with editors at high-quality publications to suggest some of your own content or a mention in a list that’s been published, you can generate reputable backlinks that will improve Google’s perception of your DA and DR.
31. Quote Reputable Industry Figures
By quoting thought leaders in your industry, you can not only offer more valuable information to your visitors, but you could also help open up networking opportunities among your fellow industry leaders.
Don’t stuff your content with mentions, but adding positive insight from a key influencer in your industry can be a great way of putting your website on their radar. You may even get a free backlink in return.
32. Add Testimonials
Nothing beats good social proof in SEO, and adding positive user testimonials helps to build trust with your leads because it focuses on positive information that’s coming from satisfied customers.
33. Grow Your Reputation with Guest Blogging
As we’ve already touched on, guest blogging is a great way to boost your online reputation. This is because your content can feature backlinks to your web agency while being published in some of your industry’s biggest publications.
Look for reputable websites that feature quality blog sections and send outreach emails to their editors offering an article idea that you’re willing to contribute to them. This can help you set up a strong backlink that will boost your reputation in the eyes of Google’s crawlers.
34. Curate Content
Curating content is a great time-saving strategy for websites because it means you can use pre-existing content like reviews, online engagement, and key industry topics that you can showcase or add your unique perspective to.
This helps you add more content to your website without having to strategize it, and it can help build audience engagement on a more comprehensive level.
Building a Sustainable Website
This SEO checklist helps to provide you with all the tools you need to get your web agency off the ground and build its way through Google’s SERPs. However, it’s important to avoid resting on your laurels at any stage.
Continually work on auditing your pages for any inefficiencies that may occur. The SEO landscape is dynamic, and things can change very quickly. By keeping your ear to the ground and constantly discovering new efficiencies, you can outmaneuver your competitors and rank higher.
