85-point checklist for your SEO projects
Keep track of your project and see which tasks you have to delegate to which person
SEO projects are often tedious and complex. In 2019, the very basic optimizations just won’t cut it anymore. The time you could outpace your competitors by simply writing some appealing meta titles is well and truly over. If you want to stay on top of your game, you have to realize that attention to small details makes the difference.
For years, SEO has been a story that strictly focussed around content and marketing. If technical aspects came into the picture, people often turned to black hat or grey hat solutions in an attempt to fool the search engines. All these techniques have been debunked and rightly so. But this uncovered an inconvenient reality for marketeers chasing easy money. Search engine optimization can and will only be successful if you build a website completely around it. Every aspect, both technical and contextual, has to meet ever tighter scrutiny. This makes it more difficult to keep track of the workflow because it requires a close cooperation between technical and marketing people.
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Dealing with different scenarios
If you are an SEO / Project manager, you will certainly run into bottlenecks from time to time. Commercial people can ask your help to make estimations for an offer. Often it is also unclear where the technical part ends and the contextual part begins. Especially in larger-scale projects or big agencies it is easy to loose an overview because it involves more people and larger project groups. In a worst case scenario, poor communication or misunderstandings can lead to situations where one person nullifies the work of someone else involved.
It is therefore paramount to determine who is responsible for which aspect of the project. Expectation management is equally important to avoid frustration at the customer’s side.
Different scenarios can occur:
- Someone asks you to do SEO on an existing website but wants an estimation first of the usefulness and the costs. In such a case it is important to see if it is even worth the effort. Do you want to start writing great content on a technically outdated website or on a website that does not meet elemental requirements?
- You have to do SEO on a brand new website, yet to be made. It is important to keep track of the process and have clear communication with the technical people, both inside or outside your company. That way, they can build the website around SEO. It is equally important to determine where a developer’s responsability ends and a content manager’s task begins.
- You have to do SEO on an existing website. In such cases you have to make it clear to the customer which elements you take with you in the project: strictly content or also technical optimisations? If the latter is the case: do you have access to all the resources?
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Our 85-point checklist comes to the rescue
To make your life easier, we came up with an 85-point checklist for your SEO projects. You can use it in every scenario. We composed it based on a wide range of reliable and renowned sources which are also mentioned.
The checklist follows a logical flow from development over publication to follow-up. It takes the involvement of several people into account. It makes a distinction between tasks that a technical person (developer) has to do and non-technical tasks (to do by a SEO specialist, content manager, webmaster,…). We assume you use the checklist on a website with a well-known CMS and that non-technical persons have enough access rights to install additional extensions or plug-ins.