SEO checklist

Digital Marketing, Marketing, SEO Marketing

My SEO Checklist 2023: How I Rank in 24 hours

  • by Julian Goldie
  • 80/20: 20% ranking factors to cover 80% of your traffic

The Content, index and backlinks system

  • the 3 main factors to diagnose any ranking issues 
  • not all pages that are ranked high on Google are good at all 3, so, say, you don’t have a lot of backlinks, but you have great content, you can still win (11:20)

I. Content

  • Brand awareness
  • Acquisition or lead generation
  • Growth from existing

Step 1: Make sure you're targeting low competition keywords (2:05)

Step 2: Create an outline of what you need to write about (3:00)

  • create an extremely clear outline, and in what order to create your content
    • Google the keyword you’re trying to rank for e.g. “best cat products” > Look at what headings your competitors have used > Use those headings in your article too
    • Google keyword > Scrape FAQs from Google from People Also Ask Section >
      Paste into bottom of your article and answer them

Step 3: Write the content under each heading (3:20)

  • Try to aim for more words than your competitors on Google for this keyword, with no fluff or filler.
  • use the following prompt and WePilot will scrap content from Google, and it will give you a content outline

Using WebPilot, create an outline for an article that will be 2,000 words on the keyword “KEYWORD (e.g. what is a penguin)” based on the top 10 results from Google.

Include every relevant heading possible. Keep the keyword density of the headings high.

For each section of the outline, include the word count.

Include FAQs section in the outline too, based on people also ask section from Google for the keyword.

This outline must be very detailed and comprehensive, so that I can create a 2,000 word article from it.

Generate a long list of LSI and NLP keywords related to my keyword. Also include any other words related to the keyword.

Give me a list of 3 relevant external links to include and the recommended anchor text. Make sure they’re not competing articles.

Step 4: Make sure your article matches the search intent of Google (4:45)

  • E.g. if the top ranking article on Google is a list post for your keyword, you would also make a list post.
  • If the top ranking article is a review page, you would also do product reviews.

Step 5: Mention the keyword you're trying to rank for, within your content, several times

  • This must feel “natural” not forced
    • You can use Yoast for free to measure this:
      • https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/
      • https://yoast.com/shopify/apps/yoast-seo/

Step 6: Make sure you include the keyword in the first sentence

Step 7: Try to put every sentence on a new line:

  • This makes it easier to read = Lower bounce rates = Better rankings + more revenue.

Step 8: Add pictures

  • Use https://unsplash.com/
  • don’t use copyrighted images (that’s why you should use Unsplash)

Step 9: If you can, embed some relevant videos from YouTube

Step 10: Format the text nicely

  • Add paragraphs, line spaces, insert links, include the YouTube videos

Step 11: Add meta descriptions with your keyword

  • E.g. your title/SEO title
  • A great plugin for this is Yoast: It’s free to use on WordPress and it helps you optimize your content

Step 12: Add relevant internal/external links

  • You want to link to relevant external/internal sites
  • https://youtu.be/rkBwFGWhVMU 

Step 13: Keyword optimization

  • Include keyword in URL
  • Include keyword in page title

II. Index (7:20)

  • Google does not automatically index every page you create, so make sure you check!
  • How to check
    • Google site:xxx.com/slug to make sure you post has been indexed
  • how to get your article indexed (8:10)
    • go to Google Search Console to request indexing (the video shows you how to do it)

III. Backlinks (9:25)

  • How many backlinks do I need to rank?  (10:05)
    • use Ahrefs (no free trial for this feature) or SEMRush (free trial)
    • Ahrefs > Keywords Explorer to figure out how many backlinks you need to rank the keyword (10:30)
    • you need less backlinks than you think 
      • it may show that it has a lot of backlinks, but some are poor quality backlinks which don’t count

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