When was the time you’ve checked your SEO marketing plan strategy?

Right from the beginning of business inception through to the development stages of any business marketing, web design, and digital marketing, Search Engine Optimization or SEO techniques, should be the general context of an SEO Marketing Plan, especially for small businesses. Whether you’re starting a new business or new website, making a new brand or a rebrand, or recovering from disastrous business odds or a penalty, including SEO beginners, marketers, and content creators, you would surely need these SEO Marketing Plan checklist items for a great marketing edge for your business. A collective list of SEO marketing plan strategies dissected into one comprehensive SEO Marketing Plan checklist to help optimize your small business online.

Make SEO Marketing Plan as your long term business solution

The SEO process can be a struggle, that you need to do organically, using White-Hat SEO or get it unpaid, and increased website traffic from the search engine result pages (SERPs). And when you have done the SEO process to attain a sustained SEO success of your website, search engines like Bing and Google find, scan, crawl, and index your site. It transforms your SEO strategy/ plan into your best online presence roadmap, a search engine marketing blueprint, and your best online practices for an improved triple-bottom-line – SEO success, high conversion rates, and increased online revenue. Explore more of these best SEO marketing solutions that strike a balance between clear website design, digital content integration, and search engine optimization techniques for your growing or small business.

Here is the best SEO marketing plan guide that we have customized for the benefit of small businesses, a start-up online business, SEO beginners, and new websites. Consider this as your straightforward guide on SEO technique and basic knowledge on how to understand search engines like Bing and Google. Good SEO news and kick-off point for you to discover the high potentials to increase the ranking and search visibility of your growing or small business start-up. So start checking the fitness of this SEO Marketing Plan to your small business. You can tailor this to the specific needs of your website or business. You may add other considerations that this checklist may have missed to list down.

1. Catalog Calls To Action

You have to document which webpage type needs, which (CTA) Calls To Action to use. Your CTA enables Category Pages to drive people to click for more information, Product Pages to compel people to add them to cart, and Cart web pages to drive checkouts or buy outright. When you catalog your CTA, it indicates the customer’s “next steps” to do, which is what you want to happen. CTA provides specific instructions such as “Call Now,” “Find More,” “Read More,” “Email Us to Help You,” to invoke prompt responses from customers. You can use best CTA techniques such as the options to use a numbered button, be creative or unique as possible, know the compatibility of your devices, take it as an advantage for your customers, use words that provoke their urge or emotion, and be clear and concise. Think of all the best CTA buttons you can select from numerous online favorites.

2. Social Media Strategy

When you engage in social media, brand awareness would be the first thing you need to consider about your company’s social media strategy. Promote your business campaign on social media platforms to help build stronger customer relationships. When you make an engaging social media campaign, it sets you apart from the online competition. Your branding plays a vital role as it differentiates and reinforces your business commitment. Likewise, it enables your business to exercise the utmost concern to your customer interests (especially the customer after-sales), that it is not money above else but a socially symbiotic supplier-customer partnership. A lot of social media tools can help you do this – use personalized experience, responsive chatbots, and consistent but diverse content strategies to advocate your brand, product profile, channels. You just have to consider this as an investment, though.

3. Catalog keyword targets

You need to begin your catalog by listing your ideal keywords to target or match the search engine queries that will likely bring relevant traffic to your website. Your target keywords need to satisfy search volume, high relevance, strong conversion value, and reasonable competition. Narrow the list, write, and optimize your desired content based on your keyword catalog. As much as possible, reduce your keyword targets and make these are your high-valued or focused keywords. You have to take a vantage position to identify your ideal target keyword for each webpage for search engines by measuring keyword metrics and monitor the impact of keywords (intentional SEO) on your website. Remember that to achieve your SEO marketing strategy, you need to measure and discard anything that you cannot measure. Tools such as Google AdWords, Ahrefs, Keyword Surfer, or a similar service can be your ally when you catalog your best keywords for similarity, search volume, and correlation.

4. Checked email linking structures?

Your email linking structure contains clickable texts that can open, and structured to provide a new email in the reader’s default browser such as Gmail or Outlook. These email links are used and are consistent with canonicals in the webpages that they refer to., and can significantly help you when you want emails on specific topics to go to a designated element or webpage or company email account. Maintaining a considerable number of email links has no hard and fast rules as to how many email links there should be. But a formal email can keep links into it to three or fewer, or if there is a dire need, you may have five links to the maximum. Your email structure can have links on its subject line, body text, and signature as you desired applicable and friendly to your reader.

5. Checked for review and rating spam?

To carry out and review the site’s ratings and reviews, you have to catalog the types of issues of spam you encounter. Identify these spams to reduce anomalies in the electronic messaging systems. There are a lot of SEO content reviews, and rating spam checkers or checklist guides that are available online, but using all of these would not give you the desired checking. You have to define your unique content and create it within a considerable and substantial length to indicate for a review and rating. You can use tools like Google alerts, MOZ fresh web explorer or other seomoz software and those that can get your review and rating spam checked, as well as explain the decision criteria used to select and tag spam and fraud detections. This forms part of your SEO marketing’s trust propagation in terms of task-adaptivity and collaboration between users and existing technology.

6. Is the new website updated frequently?

Google search engines will know the update interval for a website, and this influences often the search engines crawl the web pages. Meaning, frequent updates of your website and optimizing it with blogs, infographics, articles, downloads, and new web pages, enables search engines to drop a visit and index your website. When search engines crawl your website as frequently as other sites would have, your website gains the opportunity to rank high on the content you provided to the crawlers. Say, update your website with postings or blogs at least two to three times a week, and make sure you have not made unnecessary changes, redesign, or additions on your site’s structure. The same happens to your business marketing, and the more frequent you send updates to your customers and prospects, the more you can match their search queries.

7. Reading Level

The reading level of your content is important to determine its readability and suitability for the prospective audience. This SEO Marketing Plan, for instance, would be suitable for its potential readers only, and can serve as SEO guide for SEO beginners (basic reading level), small businesses/ start-up organizations (basic to intermediate reading level), or SEO content marketers/ content creators (advanced reading level). The reading level of this content can be hard to understand for ordinary readers. So simply, each reading level tells us the ease with which a reader can understand the written content.

So the reading level mainly depends on the content’s complexity of its vocabulary, syntax, and its presentation, such as its typographic aspects (i.e., font size, line height, and line length). You can check the reading level using a Readability Checker, one of Google’s Tools and Chrome Extensions. In the readability checker, you just have to provide the body of text (or all, a part of a web page or a few texts). After that, it will give you the readability score based on the Flesch-Kincaid readability index, a quick and easy readability test of your work, the most flexible assessment software so far. A right reading level provides a numerical score of 60 or higher for your text, document, or website content to get easily read by most people.

8. Checked for publish dates and last updated dates in content?

When you visit or open a website and see its web pages for the first time, you would notice different dates, publications, or updated date formats. Did you wonder that the date formats on the web page are zoned for the region of the site you have visited? Or is it zoned for your region? You can also check whether these dates are real or correctly formatted with the usual content. You can do a standard character sort of a list of dates, to give you a chronologically arranged order of dates. The date format dd.mm.(yy)yy is traditionally a Danish date format, while the format yyyy-mm-dd is the international form though this is not commonly in use. The only countries that use the date format mm/dd/yyyy are the US, Philippines, Palau, Canada, and Micronesia, according to Wikipedia.

9. Catalog site’s keyword niches?

You can use a keyword research tool such as Google AdWords Keyword Planner, Keyword Surfer, Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, Keyword Everywhere, and a lot more to find keyword niches that the domain or website is a member of. After you have selected the website or domain’s industry niche, you can start to catalog the site’s keyword niche to determine how competitive its niche keywords are. To name a few of these keyword niches that are highly profitable online are Fitness and Weight Loss, Internet Services, Virtual Assistance, Dating, and a lot more that can make an excellent catalog of your site’s keyword niches.

10. Catalog types of supplemental content?

In the world wide web and websites, Americans alone consume around 3,138,420 GB of data every day where marketers play their part to feed the needs of those consumers with a bombardment of a massive volume of content in search engines, social media, mobile, and other online platforms. List down the supplemental content being applied to your website to gain mileage over big content. When you arrange it in a classified order, it will enable you to emulate the design principles of the big content that come in a different format and apply the same principles to drive traffic to your website. In using the basic principles, it is essential to segregate these supplemental content from a wide array of supplemental content for ease of online searches and add high-value and utility to your main content piece. When a robust supplemental content is cataloged correctly, this leads to Google’s user experience for a high-quality page (as per their Search Quality Raters Guidelines), and by cataloging it, your supplementary content will no longer distract the purpose of your webpage.

11. Glossary of site’s brand terms?

To write a glossary of your site’s brand terms, list down every one of the known brands being referenced on the site and ensure that these are all being consistently taken care of. Start your glossary by making a list of terms you used in your text that your readers may be familiar with. Write a checklist summary, such as this marketing plan, with 2 to 4 sentences that describe each term. Use only simple words and avoid overly technical languages.

12. Developed marketing personas and targets?

Build your marketing personas to help improve your market segmentation. Try to understand who your website is targeting and how best to engage these target markets on your site. Just remember that your marketing personas, a fictional character is not the whole thing of your marketing, but it represents a segment of your target market. When you have correctly developed your marketing persona, it gives you an outline of a typical member of that target market segment or readers of your website. They are fictional characters derived from behavioral data and knowledge that you’ve gained from understanding them on a personal level. It enriches target prospects and identifies similar behavior trends that result in commonly achieved goals.

13. Checked content freshness?

Keeping your website content fresh requires an update? Yes, this is needed to keep your website appealing and engaging at all times. A basic web content optimization can include an SEO Content Calendar as a kick-off point. Within this SEO calendar or Google Calendar to optimize your website content by bringing and remaking the older contents to date or a new purpose, take note of the keyword data, so when you need to update its web design, you can enrich this keyword catalog. Check your image SEO or google photos, and other graphical contents as well. Add these all up to your optimization techniques to increase the website’s functionality, including other SEO tips/ optimization resources you would need to reinforce content freshness.

14. Page topic search volume

Align your page topic search volume by checking your targeted keywords towards keywords that will drive higher demand for search traffic volume of your website. Determine if your website topics are derived from this search demand. When you are able to align your page topic search volume, it can give you a realistic picture of where Google has people searches, how to go, what to do, where to go, and what to buy. Your on-page optimization can show Google searches at the very moment a search matches products or services that you have. Whether they’re on desktop or mobile, well-aligned page topics can turn search volume to valuable customers. Your search volume data, say for 12 months is a critical element of your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy or, likewise, this SEO Marketing Plan checklist.

15. Link Building Strategy

Ask yourself, what is my website’s link building strategy, and how do I make it? The reason why a link building strategy is on top of your growth SEO checklist, as it helps easy navigation of your website and places your site to high authority domains that generate traffic to your website. For your website to get a useful link, for example, you have a step-by-step process to get backlinks from and place outbound links to relevant websites vis-a-vis your site. Small businesses, marketers, and business owners should take an interest in link building strategies as an organic form of driving navigational and referral traffic, and increase their site’s authority over time. The more backlinks your website has earned, the higher rankings and search engine marketing leads your website generates. So simply follow these internal linking, backlinking and outbound links steps – make internal and outbound links and ask for backlinks, build relationships to earn backlinks, give testimonials, site commenting and a good guest post, start a blog of your niche, and lastly, register your website to trustworthy directories.

16. Identify pages that receive no traffic.

List down the pages that are invisible to searches or those that do not produce organic traffic to your website. You can learn this quickly by using Google Analytics to identify website pages that are getting zero traffic. When you do this, you are able to catalog and filter out those pages that Google Analytics is not able to report, and will give you the fastest way to get rid of those web pages having no traffic while improving the overall page ranking of your website to boost your organic search traffic. Organic traffic refers to the searchers that visit your website as a result of “unpaid” search results. Hence, organic traffic is the opposite of paid traffic through paid ads. So start finding these invisible pages in Google Analytics as well as check the content performance of each website page.

17. Check for category naming issues.

Many naming issues may affect the search engine ranking of your website. The naming of different categories that searchers or shoppers, for instance, use to look for them, such as the “Gift and delights.” Have you tried searching for delights? Semantically and grammatically, there is no issue. However, when you do a singular search on each of them, it is lexically different when you check for the naming aspects of your website pages. So better catalog them, and put a brief introductory phrase or paragraph to describe each webpage. This way can make word-finding easy for your searchers and search engines. A page that has naming issues become ambiguous and may cause difficulties to search engines when they crawl your webpages.

18. Catalog negative reviews?

To catalog negative reviews of your website, you need to do an audit of the website’s online reviews. Subsequently, write a corrective action plan to correct the issues publicly from the results of such examinations. Customers provide SEO value to your website through online reviews. Most of these customers pay more considerable attention to negative reviews as much as they do for positive reviews in knowing your website or business. Know the context and issues of these customers to align your corrective actions to reinforce a strong control of your website reviews to achieve desired business outcomes and resolve cost issues effectively. When you catalog the negative reviews, assess their impact in terms of severity and likelihood to provide a realistic view of your business and more human trust than just gaining all five-star positive ratings. When you have effectively cataloged the negative reviews, you will have an overall dashboard on the level of customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction that your website has.

19. Used Quora to find pain points for the target audience?

There are selected ways that are known to determine the pain for the target audience or prospects, and there is no single standard approach, though. Some of the most common sources or methods to get those pain points can include pop-up surveys, Q&A platforms or forums, commenting sites, social media tracking, and a lot more to consider in this regard. Let’s take pop-up surveys or sites that do “question and answer” on common problems for website visitors. Quora, in this instance, a Q&A platform to ask questions and connect with contributors of unique insights and quality answers, a place to gain and share knowledge of what matters most to the pain points of the target audience of your website or business that you may have not even considered yet.

20. Checked if the site has a companion blog?

You need to check if a blog is embedded in the website or another website, and why should they be. Both ways work, but here is how a companion blog drives traffic to your website or links to relevant websites that allow your site to gain high referral authority. When you embed a blog post to your website, say in WordPress, it refers visitor traffic directly into it. It can be a highly strategic link building approach. You may also check if there is a fit or interest to place a niche-related blog on a relevant website. Follow their blogroll to know where you can make use of your blog to direct inbound traffic from their website to yours. Also, check on how their website reads your blog to increase your chances of being reviewed. There are a lot of sites where you can do blogs of your niche, and most agree that it is not a good idea to have both embed blogs on your website or another or the same blog on different sites.

21. Checked for email outreach?

An “email outreach” is when you contact people via email to network, generate leads, follow on specific deals, get links to your website, promote your product or service, find prospects or partners, increase your influencers, disseminate newsletters or updates, maintain or build customer relations – these are basic examples of Be aware, though, not to contain your email with subject lines that can land your email outreach into the trash folder. Check the proper placement and management of email registration, email newsletter, and email newsletter subscription. Various email subscribers and plugins such as WordPress are available online or from WordPress Plugin Developer sites that you can use to effectively handle your email outreach.

22. Catalog of site’s page types?

Listing all of the site’s web page types being applied to your website is as important as a design plan or business roadmap of a designer or small business owner. When you craft your website or business, I am sure all you want to make sure is to have the business or site’s goal in mind. Checking and cataloging your site’s page types will be your easiest way to promote and advertise what your website is all about in search engine result pages and prospect visitors. Being familiar with your site’s web page types can help you decide which will meet your needs and the context of your customers. In that way, you are familiarizing and understanding the choices of both your competitors and customers so you can create a perfect format for each brand you would want to develop for each customer base that you are targeting.

23. Check the review submission process?

Does your website or business have a hard time securing customers or shoppers to submit their reviews, so you have to work hard on earning great reviews first. Is it too hard for shoppers to submit reviews? Consistency is a matter of trust that the website or business offer you send to your customers would gain the submission of product or service review. One best way to secure a prompt review submission process is via profile, onsite-log-in customer reviews, service confirmation, and with the use of a customer review software or applications that provide a one or two-step review process. Most often, you may not be aware of this until you log-in yourself and submit a review after confirming your approval of your user experience on the site, or when you agree on the site’s offer. It is worth checking to help build trust as customers are getting smarter nowadays to know what’s authentic from what is fake if you press harder on your customer review submission process as part of your continual improvement!

24. Supplemental Content Strategy

The strength of your content strategy is what your web site’s supplemental content plan supports your site in general. It is your web page supportive content that helps increase site traffic and navigation between external links and your website’s pages. Better know the basics of your content strategy first (and it should be part of your website SEO design), to focus more on the planning, delivery, and optimization of your supplemental content. It shall include relevant text, graphics, images, and multimedia on your webpages. Further, it can be a difficult task. Still, it is better to define your goal or branding based upon user-generated content when you develop or optimize your website or business content design. So check for your supplemental content strategy now and decide what page supportive content is crucial to create or optimize your business or site’s overall success.

25. Are product descriptions unique or syndicated?

One web page content aspect that you need to check is your product descriptions, whether your product names are distinct, copy custom, or are they copied from suppliers or manufacturers. One way to check for your product description is to create a product database directory or file folder to save you enormous effort and adequate time. Rather than manually creating these product description folders as you need them along the way. When changing and updating vendor and manufacturer names, make sure to copy not only the recent updates on manufacturer parts and specifications to a custom field. Include to reflect and distribute both unique and syndicated product data feed across multiple platforms and market sites while satisfying each of their unique product requirements. Such a way, it can synchronize product data on various web page content portals, channels, and customer searches via search engine results.

26. Mobile strategy

Nowadays, mobile strategy is part of the new normal landscape, leaving the conventional digital workspace or corporate environment. So better check your company’s or website’s mobile strategy and how this strategy incorporates mobile compatibility and the use of mobile devices into your business process strategy. Meaning, you have to revisit your strategic business direction, vision, mobile marketing user engagement, procurement and buying actions, brand differentiation from competitors, resource mobilization, and investment budget to make your business accessible conventionally and virtually.

Your mobile marketing lies upon your mobile strategy to utilize a multi-channel digital content marketing integration that is aimed at bridging your business to your prospective customers. That all can be done via the customer’s smartphones, phablets, and other mobile devices via websites, email, short message services (SMS), multimedia message services (MMS), social media, and other mobile apps. Only making everything accessible from an office and desktop computers to any mobile device anywhere, all the time. Make a “mobile-first strategy” as your top priority for business development or website development trends for excellent customer experience.

27. Bad words and images

Make sure you have examined your website for bad language and images. These are blacklisted words by Google that you need to list down to protect your website and your brand. Your website or business language can be a little less formal, but using bad words and profane images is a disastrous marketing mistake. Make use of moderation tools or software to do profanity filtering of your text, image, and video contents as well as to detect nudity on your website. Most online platforms are now utilizing profanity filter apps to make your site clean of bad words and images, and replace them with funny ones. Profanity filter or language filter or swear filter can modify and remove words deemed offensive by the site admin or online community such as in custom-programmed commenting sites, forum community, live streams, online gaming, and chat rooms; and even enable you to activate or switch on your site’s “Block offensive words” or “block offensive sites” options.

28. Identify Top Performing Content

You were able to list down those pages that do not produce organic traffic or simply pages with non-performing content. This time, you have to list your site’s top-performing pages. Identify your top-performing pages that are seen by your customers at this very moment that they are searching for their queries on Google and match your website’s primary and supplemental content. Check which content on your website is the best-performing among your website content. You can check this on your content menu and select the “pages” tab under your “site content.” You can use Google Analytics and other online apps that offer the same to identify and assess your site’s top-performing content. Eventually, google analytics can pinpoint which of your web page content that your visitors stay longest. Which among these contents lead visitors or searchers to look deeper into your website and look for more content or pages.

29. Checked for affiliate links?

Check whether the site is using an affiliate tracking URLs to determine clicks of these affiliate links. A click to appear in the Google Analytics interface takes up to 24 hours. Tracking your affiliate links through the clicks provides data that allows you to create your goals, funnels, and reports. Affiliate links are usually any URL or hyperlink but contain a unique site or affiliate ID, offer page ID, the landing page ID, and other additional tidbits of information that are useful on your advertising. Affiliates or referring websites of your website send you traffic for increased ranking or tidbits of information to increase the chances of conversion. Basically, this additional information allows customers to land on the correct page.

30. Checked for clickbait and click-worthy headlines?

Write a clickbait headline, something like you readers want to know, what and when to expect, and when they do click that headline, the pages can inspire that click and allow the content to satisfy the reader’s expectations. Generally, motivated readers direct their attention to your worthy headlines and lead to positive returns of your benefits-driven headlines. Your headlines have to reflect the results of the psychology behind effective clickbait headlines that focus on the benefits. A basic example of a clickbait goes this way, “Your Expectation is our ___________.” The “your expectation is our” headline teases the reader but does not satisfy their desire to know, but triggers them to click anyway, and that’s what a clickbait headline works.

31. Cataloged Types of Main Content?

You would surely want your customers to take in the main content of your web pages to provide them with a classified listing of your website products or services on a quick view. When you catalog the kinds of main content being used on your website, you can satisfy this product profile view that your customers would want for a sneak peek. It should comprise text teasers, engaging quality of your images and videos, good product descriptions, attractive page layout, good use of page space and promotion of product features, and include as well the type of the device those customers would be using in a snapshot. When you catalog the types of the main content on your website, you can lay down your most effective online sales tools as part of your website’s intrinsic qualities. Let’s think and bear in mind to resolve these intrinsic factors of your website when creating or optimizing a catalog for the types of the main content of your optimized website contents as a holistic optimization approach.

32. External Linking Strategy

Which external linking methods are being employed by their domain? Your external linking strategy is one of the best SEO techniques you can apply to your website. It is imperative that you have to check closely which of the external linking methods are being employed by your website and the domain you are referring to. Your external linking strategy needs to include backlinks and outbound links so that these external links can indicate your related content, point these links to your web resource, and enable search engines to better understand your niche, index trust and increase ranking in your website.

33. Check Titles for value propositions

Frequently check the titles of your value propositions on your web pages to enable search result link text. Your value proposition is your unique description of your brand, a statement that clearly paints the engaging picture of what your business or website product or service is. It is inadequate for your website to rank well on search engine result pages (SERPs) when your web page title needs to win the click from the search volume of high competition. You can utilize website plugins to optimize your value propositions to keep that spark alive. Your value proposition is the first thing that readers or visitors see on your website. So checking and optimizing the title of your value proposition makes that initial text or image to mean spark of interest from your visitors and lead them to view and stay longest in your web content. Check out various examples that are available online.

34. Catalog testimonials?

Testimonials work as your living proof of how your business or website satisfies the expectations of your customer. So, continue growing your base of usable testimonials as these become your creative element in your product catalog and support your value propositions. Realistically, you may never anticipate knowing if they’ll be necessary until you reach the situation where these testimonials work as your SEO value proposition in the form of your website’s supplemental marketing content.

35. Domain Name and branding concerns that might affect CTR

A reasonable click-through rate or CTR on Google AdWords paid search ads is about 2%, which shows that a CTR with lower than this level indicates problems with the domain name or brand of your business or website. A low-level CTR means a lack of relevance for the viewers or readers of your ad and can affect the placement of your future ads while a CTR that is above this level would tell that your business or domain name and branding is at its best. Well enough, it can leverage on your engaging display creativity and ad relevance for your viewers’ impressions. However, that may skew a bit when CTR results vary significantly and are abnormally high. Ads variation positioning, therefore, is a top consideration to improve your ad clicks and impressions to regain organic search traffic for your website. You can set-up, test, and manage your ad variations in Google Ads and make it easy for you to test your domain name, headlines, or branding descriptions.

36. Check for past penalties and reconsideration requests?

Check whether the website has a history of prior reconsideration requests and penalties. Take note that Google indicates to see that your website takes good-faith actions to resolve a problem that got it into trouble, and not just merely clicking that “Request a Review” button without even making any single step to fix the issue that the website has been penalized. Once you do that reconsideration request, you are adding another trouble, as this will only be rejected. Instead, do what is necessary to show Google of your resolution to that issue or problem. Make every desirable effort, such as any means possible, to remove unnatural links before your request from Google. While for spammy links, you directly request removal of these spams from Google and then disavowing the remaining spammy links. The more you know of the site’s history and past activities, the better so be familiar with the most common reasons or grounds to get penalized and several reasons a reconsideration request may fail.

37. Catalog content mediums used?

Your business or website can be drowning on content medium or marketing content. Personally, you would not even dare visit a website or a library without a product listing or a catalog of its contents. So the organization of your website content is vital to get content mediums used on your website into easy access and retrieval of text or words, images, and videos for the easy use of your website visitors. Catalog the types of content being created for site visitors. Your catalog does not need to be fancy. Just have to be fun and user-friendly, though, so it can drive a massive boost in traffic. Using mediums, by the way, may incur your business with considerable cost. For some, it is free to publish content with them. So choose wisely by making a catalog of those content mediums either your website has already used, or still planning to use for your content postings or distribution to your followers.

38. Content Creation Strategy

Your content creation strategy is your website roadmap. You can benchmark this with other websites and check what their site is using on their content creation approach. Make it as your launching pad in creating your content strategy and integrate SEO into it to have a strong SEO content strategy in place that makes your website unique among its competitors. Your content creation strategy should start with a clear definition of your goal – for developing an SEO Content Marketing Plan, for example, researching for your branding or marketing persona, analyzing your content, content ideas, the type of content you want to create, as well as the content management system or CMS of your website.

39. Audio & video has been transcribed?

Check whether you have your website’s audio tracks and video recordings been migrated into text content. Make sure that quality and accuracy are not hampered as these are all crucial when it comes to choosing an app to transcribe your audio or video recordings. For instance, you can use the Voice Typing option from Tools Menu of your Google Docs to transcribe an uploaded audio file directly into the text. While playing the audio file on your computer through a speaker, click on the mic in the box that opens to record the text into your document. The translation process of your video and audio into text is done with automatic speech recognition technology, trained human transcriptionists, and /or a combination of both. You can also employ the use of any automatic transcription software available online for easy audio and video transcription and to properly organize your audio/ video files and send directly to the transcription software, ensuring accuracy and no quality distortion.

40. Checked for an editorial calendar?

Get a content editorial calendar ready for keeping the site fresh and keeping the visitors captivated. An editorial content calendar serves as your guide to plant out specific marketing methods to make sure marketing efforts are aligned to the same end goal you have in mind for your website or business. Make this editorial calendar accessible to the team for task and project role complements. Check for the information on your editorial calendar to include but not limited to blog posts, infographics, images, videos, and graphical-user-interfaces. It should list down the content types that have to be published based on your content strategy, train and coach team leaders to be responsible for the creation and publication of the content, and the scheduling of the content creation and publication dates.

41. Customer Communication Strategy

To communicate your business or website content to your customers online needs you to outline which strategy your site is employing to engage your site visitors or audience, and this needs some creative and practical ideas. Interactive and engaging ideas that can convince your target audience to choose you over the others. You can build an online community or group, host or co-create online meetings or webinars (in Zoom, Google Hangout, Skype, GoToMeeting, and other online meeting tools), solve a problem and celebrate together with them, offer exclusive content and other proactive marketing methods to interface with your diverse audience.

Creating a “sticky” website, where visitors keep coming back for more, requires SEO to keep visitors engaged and allow them to know that the site is active and adequately optimized for an effective client communication strategy. Make it in a way that shows empathetic listening of your customer welfare and that your business is communicating in a way that understands well what they actually mean instead of what they are merely saying or expecting.

42. Image strategy

In choosing an image strategy for your business or website, you have to do a strategic approach to address imagery context and issues of your website and interested parties such as your visitors or customers. The strategic approach that your image strategy needs to take has to be in place during the web design process and at the early stage of your corporate business marketing or overall SEO marketing strategy. Keep in mind that image strategy is not just image optimization that deals mostly in reducing image file sizes or increasing the loading speed of your website image for google search, but an image SEO strategy that gets your product and decorative images to improve visibility of your website in Google and other image search engines, as well as continual improvement of your SEO strategies.

43. Content Update Strategy

Repurpose your website’s top-performing content to update its marketing channels and extend its reach to a broader span of audience base. When you can do this, you have deployed a low-risk competition strategy and test the ability of your top-performing content to prove itself with your audience further. A content update strategy shall make use of your relevant and usable web content that is structured and optimized for natural search to improve the user experience of your website. Fresh quality content indicates to search engine robots that your content is relevant, and it deserves a periodic crawl and ranking visibility to search engine result pages (SERPs). Regular content updating is critical to the overall success of your website, so when you publish a blog or landing page, make sure that these contents are well-received to gain SEO value and customer-demand traction. Rewriting your content slightly and promoting it on relevant sites or high authority domains, social media channels, and other online platforms can reach a newer audience base with the same basic content. Do the rewriting and repurposing of your content when you have at least five inbound links to republish a piece of content to a new website.

44. Spelling and grammar

Check the spelling and grammar of your web content and make the comparative review base on a sample of recent articles to make it relevant. Carefully proof-read content for spell check and eliminate grammatical errors. Note that for content or article to be grammatically correct, it has to contain statements that the subject and verb are parallel, meaning both must be singular or plural. In short, the subject and verb must agree with one another in their tenses. To do a simple spelling and grammar check, on your Google Docs, click the “Tools” menu and select “Spelling and grammar,” then click “spelling and grammar check.” It will allow you step-by-step grammar and spelling suggestions, and it’s up to you whether to accept or ignore the program’s suggestions. Also, you can get started with Grammarly to make your online writing clear and compelling not only for spelling and grammar, as well as make it stunning and professionally crafted for overall content correctness, clarity, engagement, delivery, and plagiarism. You can also use other Online Spell Check tools to get your online writing with a quick and simple clean-up from spelling and grammar errors.

45. Content Quality Strategy

A content quality strategy may define the content delivery as it provides value to solve a pain point of your website readers, and at the same time, may tell a story about your business or website in general on how it achieves sustained success for both ends of the supply chain and for continual improvement of your website SEO. Content strategy Focus the quality of your content on the planning, creation, delivery, and governance and make sure to include the words, images, and multimedia. Better define your quality content approach that upholds accuracy, credibility, and adherence to the content house style or Google Content Policy.

46. List link building Strategy

Check what is the site’s list acquisition approach to make content marketing an effective customer acquisition method for your small business. Your external link building plays a mainstay role in increasing search engine visibility. So, when you list down your link building efforts across (horizontal, vertical, congeneric & conglomerate) multi-level customer acquisition, it should include content outreach, the building of useful tools, email campaigns, social media interactions, site commenting, guest posting and online customer relations. The list must identify a comprehensive line-up and describe a link building program to manage risks and mitigate these risks while meeting the business or website objectives. Some of the widely-used link building strategies, to name a few, are the Referral System (i.e., Dropbox), Generate leads with custom interactive content (such as Shopify), Craft personalized email campaigns (like Amazon), and Focus on online community building (e.g., Instagram/ Facebook).

47. Check for auto-generated content

Check whether your website or domain uses auto-generated site content, and when it does, make sure to take care of it to drive rankings and add sufficient value to your website visibility to search engines. When your site uses auto-generated content that is generated programmatically, it also creates an auto-generated channel via algorithms to collect trending and popular posts or topics. This is true to Youtube as Google’s support page says that Youtube collects viral video posts by topics that have a significant presence on the site. Auto-generated emails are another example, which is carefully planned to be distributed to a list of subscribers at specific time intervals, and as a response to the visitor’s action on a website. Auto-generated content affects a site’s ranking as it is intended to manipulate search rankings, and such content may not help users. Google may take action on such content that stitches or combines it from different web pages with adding less value to the site. You may employ ghostwriters who are experts on the content subjects that you may want to generate automatically.

48. List link building Strategy

Check what is the site’s list acquisition approach to make content marketing an effective customer acquisition method for your small business. Your external link building plays a mainstay role in increasing search engine visibility. So when you list down your link building efforts across (horizontal, vertical, congeneric & conglomerate) multi-level customer acquisition, it should include content outreach, the building of useful tools, email campaigns, social media interactions, site commenting, guest posting and online customer relations. The list must identify a comprehensive line-up and describe a link building program to manage risks and mitigate these risks while meeting the business or website objectives. Some of the widely-used link building strategies, to name a few, are the Referral System (i.e., Dropbox), Generate leads with custom interactive content (eg., Shopify), Craft personalized email campaigns (ex: Amazon), and Focus on online community building on Instagram/ Facebook.

49. Check for auto-generated content

50. Identified Competitors?

Identifying key competitors, as well as making a catalog of all competitors to your business or website, can be done in several ways. Google comes in handy into this business intelligence gathering when you look to catalog your key competitors and expand your product listings. You have to catalog all your competitors as direct, indirect, perceived/ replacement, and SERP listings. Keyword research is best used to identify a real online world competition and top players. You can solicit feedback from your customers as well as check online communities or forum platforms. Using the research data, evaluate the relative strength of your key competitors. You can make the results thereafter as your keyword tags or brand term choices, and rank your competitors in your listings for subsequent marketing steps.

51. Check for transcriptions of audio and video

Check for your web site’s media resources’ use of audio and video transcriptions as this is another vital marketing strategy you can use to boost your online visibility and take hold of your strong Google search engine rankings. The audio and video transcriptions translate your audio into text and create text transcripts for various content development, optimization, and learning integrations as part of your website SEO best practices to promote brand awareness and high-conversion rates of generating leads into sales.

52. Checked for A/B testing on-site (GA experiments or optimized)

The A/B Testing is also known as split testing, which is a method of comparing two variants of a webpage or applications against each other to determine better performance between the two-page versions. So check and keep an eye out for A/B testing as well as understand what discoveries have been made so far on your website. Essentially, AB testing takes website optimization to another level and enables other components of your web content to engage with various user or website visitor environments and know the external factors that affect your overall website performance. Hence, A/B testing helps prevent unnecessary external risks when you target your resources for maximum effect and efficiency, which eventually helps increase ROI regardless of the conversion or performance metrics of the website as a form of continual improvement that is now an SEO Trend.

53. Check above the fold ad counts?

Check if there are too many advertisements “above the fold” on the page, and this must be highly considered when designing or redesigning your website to visually test and place different aspects of your website’s above the fold ad. You can see the “above the fold ad” on your webpage when it first loads as this are visible in a browser window. Users engage more with the content of your “above the fold ad” than below the fold to see the key site functions and content related to your business or website goals as it appears at the top of the web page. Remember that you have 8 seconds or less to captivate and retain your audience, so every second and every scroll of your “above the fold ad” counts. Google Ads Manager Help can best assist you on checking the “above the fold ad” counts of your website Ensure that your “above the fold ad” makes sense when placed at the top of the web page to clearly describe value proposition and also engage users to continue scrolling your web page content.

54. Check for Guest Posts

Audit your guest post program if it is in use to check whether it is gaining a relevant way to gain high-quality links. Guest posting or guest blogging is an outreach approach of your website link building strategy, as you can tap into existing high authority domains, relevant audiences, and introduce your brand to a wide community of readers. You also need to know how to find, qualify and list the best guest posting sites. Then write content that fits your target audience or site to deploy a high-quality guest posting. Make sure to reach out for their editors in a way that it gets you visible. Guest posting or guest blogging is an SEO tactic that is powerful and useful to grow your online visibility and business marketing strategies. And ensure you are making a guest post that is original.

55. User profiles and user-submitted content checked?

When users log-on to your website, they will be taken into the profile dashboard and will create their user-generated content. Check this out by doing a review of the site’s user-profiles and user-submitted articles to list down the types of issues you come across as you review it. Take note that user-generated content is good input to your SEO process. Make sure to include this in your content creation and optimization techniques. There are online apps and WordPress plugins that you can use to allow beautiful User Registration and User Profile Building interfaces to your website.

56. Checked syndicated content usage?

Check if the content being used in your website is coming from syndicated sources and when you republish your content on third-party sites to determine your exposure. Content syndication happens when a website republishes a web-based content from another website source. Any kind of digital content can be integrated and syndicated, such as blog posts, articles, infographics, videos, and a lot more. In a way, content syndication results in content-publishing exchange as a kind of a barter arrangement and continual improvement. You are able to publish your syndicated content while the third-party website gets free relevant content. In all of this content syndication, what is important is that you are making a consensual exchange of original and useful content.

57. Has the website been involved with DMCA actions?

Check if the website has a past record of receiving DMCA violation notices so you can start taking down the infringing material in question as soon as possible. A Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice informs a company or provider of web hosting, search engine, or internet service that they are hosting or linking to a material that has copyright infringement issues. DMCA applies to websites hosted in the US and is bound to adhere to copyright law. In case your website receives a DMCA notice, you have to review and confirm the alleged copyright infringement listed on the takedown notice. Either way, if you can confirm that there is copyright infringement or there is none, you should respond accordingly and never ignore any notices. It may escalate to willful infringement acts, and if found guilty, you may incur costly payment for copyright infringement damages.

58. Checked for thin content?

Your website or business is created with an end goal in mind and is bound to satisfy its reasons for existence. Check if there is enough content to fulfill this rationale to prevent your audience or customers from suffering from such thin content and make sure to repurpose it with the desired content value. The first thing to do on how to check for thin content is to identify the quality of resolution that the reader needs relevant to their intent or whatever it is that brings them to the particular web page of your website. You can do this checking by using an SEO crawler to find pages with the least word count. This content can potentially cause internal duplicate content issues, your backlinks, and content loss or if anything is being stolen. These factors cause your website’s thin content that affects customer satisfaction and eventually influences overall search visibility, impression, and conversion rates of your website.

59. Check titles of most visited pages.

You can use Google Analytics to check for titles of the most visited pages on your website. It’s important to check the page titles of your highest-traffic pages and be sure they are listed and optimized for CTR, conversion, and keyword relevance. To do a thorough checking, you need to define what it means to be popular among your most visited pages, which you can see through factors such as search results for last year, page content that was able to gain most sites, or social media traffic. Maybe you just like to know what has been viewed the most. You need to define your time frame in Google Analytics, so set this changes up as far back as you want to measure and the end date to the latest date possible to make a conclusive check. Alternatively, you can use some sort of tool to identify the most popular posts or titles of your most visited or top pages to carry out an SEO continual improvement.

60. Does site content pass Copyscape?

Make sure that your website’s content is original over the web, and it has SEO value so it will not be viral for a moment, and it does not just pass by; instead, it will flourish further on. Your website content must provide value that the customer wants, cites reliable web sources, makes newsworthy content itself, everything is optimized, it has mobile interfaces, and a website that an audience or customer can go deeper. To authenticate your website, it should pass Copyscape, a plagiarism checker tool that provides free text searches of your website, including Docx or all Text files, and URL searches. Other online plagiarism checker tools you can use include Duplichecker, Siteliner, PlagSpotter, and a lot more available on the internet.

61. Check for product naming issues

Review your site whether your Product titles reflect how searchers discover them. Look for abstract titles or overly artistic naming as it often eliminates a product’s SEO value, which is considered one of the most valuable assets of your website. Product names share the power in brand names that comes from the fact that they can lend you credibility and quality to set and achieve customer expectations. However, the haphazard decision-making causes product naming issues, so it is essential to test name ideas for clarity and correctness, and eventually, an impression that lasts more than a lifetime. Such as the case of Apple that has iPad, iPhone, iPod, and Mac; Nike, and many other strong product names that transcend the physical environment, continual improvement is now an SEO trend.

62. Video Strategy

Check what your website’s video plan is, and if there is none, make one. You can benchmark from some of the best video websites online that you can use at the inception of your original video strategy. These sites, to name a few, are Youtube, Vimeo, Jetpack Video, Wistia, Vidyard, and a lot more. Make sure that your video strategy includes essential content elements such as short compelling (under two minutes) video, gives personality to your website or business while boosting it with SEO, can accompany and build a bond with your visitors or customers, and can encourage visitors to repetitively hangout to your website longer and longer. When you define your value proposition why you are creating it, you also define its purpose of existence.

63. Internal Linking Strategy

List down your internal linking strategies and identify which the domain is using internal linking strategies. It should connect your content and give Google an idea of the structure of your website. Assess your internal linking strategies to determine which content is relevant and which of them are most informative and valuable. In this way, you can provide both Google and your users or visitors an easy to understand website content which will increase your chance of ranking on search engines. Your internal links connect one page to another in the same domain, and in a way, it provides user-friendly website navigation. When you make or remake your internal linking strategy, make sure it will help organize, track, and optimize your links to see significant business returns, boost sales and continual improvement in your search engine rankings.

64. Citing references and sources.

Check if citations and references are being properly made on your website. Check as well your original sources to clear up any uncertainties and prevent infringement issues later on. This is one of the challenges in integrating your content strategy into your overall website design and content structure. Check whether your website’s in-text citation for another website or webpage is properly linked and test the URL to make sure it goes to the corresponding reference element or web page when you need to specify in your statements. Follow the recommended writing style by your site or domain platform to prevent confusing content as to who is the author of a website or how a proper citation is when citing references or sources.

65. Does the website syndicate content properly?

Make sure that the content syndication of your website is configured properly. This is the best advantage of your content optimization to make it scalable into an SEO best value. From repurposing your content to rewriting it and republishing the same content to a third-party website can leverage your website contents multiple times. Check whether your republication is syndicated to relevant publications from your website content as well as from other high authority domains. So make sure to write original content for all relevant websites that syndicate its contents to its partners. Get active on social media sites and republish your blog content to mediums and professional business platforms such as LinkedIn to help it reach out to a broader audience.

66. Google News

Your website needs to produce high-quality content and comply with Google News Content Policies to be automatically considered for Top Google News stories or qualify for the News Tab of Google Search. Google no longer requires publishers to submit their site to be eligible for the Google News app and website. So having more content means more chances for Google to have more websites to publish their ads, which is the core of where Google has reached nowadays. Again, always have the original content on your website.

67. Check average word counts?

Check whether your webpage contents and texts are too big or too small for the intended purpose of your website. Make a word count, and use a recommended font so you would know whether your content is thin or sufficient for the website’s existence. Search engines will likely be more critical on the content of your web pages. The general assumption is that articles of 300 words or more are less likely to be at risk for infringing on “thin” content. You can simply check your word count by placing the cursor into your text box above or enable “display word count while typing” in your Tools tab. Also, for an overall display view, you may want to have the most legible fonts for your website. Mostly used website fonts are Arial, Courier, and Verdana. Choices of font sizes and font types also vary – at a 10-point size, most would prefer Verdana, while only a few prefer Times New Roman. At 12-point size, mostly prefer Arial, and a little less to none prefers Times New Roman.

Conclusion

Whether you are a business owner, website developer, copywriter, marketer, usability assessor, or SEO expert, chances are you already have plenty of SEO Marketing strategies on your mind. Thanks to this SEO Marketing Plan as it will save you the hassle and will help streamline your planning and prioritization as novices and experts alike enjoy using this SEO checklist.

You now have a blueprint on how your overall marketing plan or SEO Marketing Plan will look like as you captivate all of these SEO Marketing strategies to entice your prospective customer towards your small business. You may also add some tips and techniques should there be more than this checklist may have missed to list down.

Perhaps, it does matter now what you will say or what your SEO Marketing Plan translates it to your business SEO or website value proposition to engage your prospective business clients or website visitors. Your website or business marketing will bridge your message across the online platforms and convey the need to access and understand the context of your business or site vis-a-vis the target audience and their expectations as your most important foreground. And if you are writing a new article or republishing your product listing or blog post, and you don’t want to write at a 5th or 7th-grade reading level. So, make sure that your SEO marketing techniques are not only just content, but it is a quality resolution to address the pain points of your readers or customers as demographically appropriate as possible. When your audience expects a specific type of writing, failure to meet that expectation can be jarring as they may become occupied with another interest, or stacked on the style of your web contents, which causes it to lose much of its value. It can be hard to write your SEO marketing content consistently at a certain reading level, and it is contrary to your writing style. But having this tool, this SEO Marketing Plan, it has let you check your content as you create it. And so you can fine-tune your writing during the process instead of completing it afterward to serve the very purpose of your content marketing to satisfy the context and expectations of your readers and customers, compelling them to stay longer to your content, and it is there when they need it. This is a continual improvement of your SEO techniques that evolve into the new normal, especially for small businesses.

Make this SEO Marketing Plan as your business growth strategy. Use this SEO Marketing checklist to ensure a higher ranking and visibility to promote brand awareness and holistic SEO approach for your website or small business. Make this SEO plan as your SEO value proposition that is custom-made to your optimization needs and scale-up your small business to SEO. So let your learnings from this SEO Marketing Plan embarks you into the search engine optimization strategies and have it work for your small business.

When you have effectively carried out your SEO Marketing Plan, you will have an overall dashboard of your website or business marketing, a roadmap towards customer satisfaction, or achieving sustained success. Where, how, and when to get a sustained continuity and success of your website or business, it lies ahead of your SEO marketing strategies as an integral part of your small business.

Best SEO Marketing Plan Checklist For 2020