Scalebloom’s S.E.O. Checklist

The basics

Things to do yourself

• Have social media profiles on the 5 major social media sites (Facebook, X, Instagram, Youtube, & Linkedin), and provide the links to your developer to add to your website footer and schema markup. Your social media profiles should also contain links to your website.
• ‘About’ page best practices: Your ‘About’ page should contain a 1-3 sentence paragraph describing the brand with just facts (service, location, age, etc.). This helps Google understand your brand’s place in their ‘Knowledge Graph’. No marketing language in this paragraph; stick to facts. You may use marketing language further down the page.
  • Why is this important? Search your brand name on Google. Click on the vertical ellipsis (3 vertical dots) to the right of your domain name on your site’s search result. This will open the right-side panel. Under ‘About the source’, click on ‘More about this page’. This will show the verified information Google has about your website. The easiest way of giving Google this information is your Google Business Profile. The second easiest is your website’s ‘About’ page. The third step is having profiles on major business aggregator sites like ZoomInfo, Capterra, Crunchbase, and Glassdoor. Adding your profile links to these sites to your ‘About’ page can provide additional benefit.
  • What to do: If your ‘About’ page doesn’t already have this factual paragraph, write one and send it to your developer to add. Also create profiles on major business aggregator sites.
• Policy pages: Provide your developer with content for policy pages. ‘Privacy policy’ is the most important but also consider a ‘terms of service’ page and ‘editorial guidelines’ page.
• Backlinks from SERP co-occupants. A SERP (search engine results page) co-occupant is a website page that ranks for the same ‘search query’ you’re targeting for one of your pages.
  • Acquiring backlinks from these co-occupants may significantly boost your page’s ranking compared to other types of backlinks.
  • SERP co-occupants often include directory-style websites such as Yelp, Better Business Bureau (BBB), HomeAdvisor, and similar platforms. These and other non-direct business competitors may frequently appear for your target search queries.
  • To get started, perform searches using various possible ‘search queries’ you wish to rank for and list every non-direct business competitor that you see in the first 3-4 pages, such as directories, news sites, educational sites, government sites, industry associations, informational blogs, forums, review sites, community sites, etc.

Things to request from your developer

• Add a ‘contact’ page. You should have a contact page even if you use a different main ‘Call-to-action’ such as an estimate or booking form.
• Add a ‘careers’ page to signal your company’s legitimacy to Google.
• Contact info in footer. At least phone & email, but address helps if available.
• Google Lighthouse scores: Get passing scores on Google Lighthouse reports.
• Create a sitemap for you to submit to your ‘Google Search Console’ account.
• Blog post best practices – only applicable if you’re blogging.
  • Display ‘Breadcrumbs’
  • Display ‘Author byline’ and ‘author box ‘with linked ‘author page’ and social media links.
  • Display ‘Published date’ & ‘Last updated date’.
  • Use schema markup for all of the above.

Targeting specific ‘search queries’

1. Tell your SEO provider what kind of ‘search queries’ you wish to rank for. For local businesses, this usually means letting them know your services/products and target locations.
2. Based on the types of search queries you wish to rank for, your SEO provider should provide a ‘Keyword research report’ containing:
   • Various search queries, grouped by similarity scores in their SERP results (Known as ‘Keyword clustering’ in the SEO industry).
   • Estimated monthly search volume per search query and per SERP group (cluster).
   • The recommended primary keyword for each SERP group (cluster), i.e., the keyword most likely to represent the topic based on Google’s Knowledge Graph, industry-standard terminology, and/or search volume.
   • SERP opportunities, if available. An example of a SERP opportunity is a SERP where the result pages would gain an algorithmic ranking boost by containing a video, yet some or all of the top results do not contain a video. Thus, your page would gain an advantage by adding a video (all pages generally benefit by adding a video, but some SERPs give pages with videos a much higher boost than others). Other such elements include image galleries, tables, charts, PDFs, etc.
3. Deciding what pages to make: To avoid keyword cannibalization, you should create a page for each SERP group (cluster) you want to rank for, not for individual search queries. Since page content creation can be costly, you can prioritize the SERP groups (clusters) based on SERP opportunities, search volume, or business value.
4. Content briefs: Ask your SEO provider for a content brief for the first SERP group (cluster) you wish to target.
5. Content creation: Gather the content according to the content brief’s instructions. Then, provide the content to your developer to upload to your website. The developer should also follow the content brief’s instructions, such as adding any schema markup, interlinking, etc.
6. Content publicization: Post links to your new content on other websites, such as social media sites. Initial direct traffic is believed to help rankings, but only if Google detects positive user engagement metrics on the page (via Chrome browser data).
7. Repeat step 4 (content brief) for your next target SERP group.
8. Consider new search query ideas regularly. Send ideas to your SEO provider so they can update your Keyword research report.