SEO checklist for 1-person teams
At Whalesync, we believe content is essential. It gives us a way to spread the word about our product while sharing ideas we think will be helpful to others. While companies like Hubspot have dedicated content teams, if you're like us, you may only have a single person responsible for the process.
With limited resources, we needed to find 80/20 solutions for our content/SEO strategy. Having waded through a sea of articles and playbooks, we identified a few top resources that work for us. Below are a few of our favorite content/SEO resources and a simple SEO checklist we run new content through. The checklist is just a small piece of the work necessary to rank on Google. I hope that it can serve as a kickstart for other individuals trying SEO on their own.
SEO / Content Resources
- (Austin Allred) SEO is Not Hard --- A step-by-step SEO Tutorial for beginners that will get you ranked every single time
- (Steve Klein) Content marketing for founding teams
- (Clearbit) Data-Driven SEO: Content That Ranks
- (Semrush) How to Create an Effective SEO Strategy
SEO Checklist
Title & Meta
[ ] Ensure target keyword is in the <title> tag (name) at the front
[ ] Ensure target keyword is in the <meta> description (short description) at the front
[ ] Try to make Title Tag <65 characters
[ ] Ensure target keyword is in the slug
In-Post
[ ] Ensure target keyword is in the first <h1>
[ ] Put your keyword or synonyms in other header tags (<h2>, <h3>, etc.)
[ ] Check that the length of the post is in the ballpark (minimum 300 words)
[ ] Ensure target keyword appears in the first paragraph of the post
[ ] Your keyword (or synonyms --- Google recognizes them now) is used other times throughout the page (your keyword density is between .5% and 2.5%)
[ ] Add <alt> tags to all the images in the blog post that contain target keyword
[ ] Tinypng all the images
Links
[ ] Add links to this article (where relevant) to past articles
Editing
[ ] Edit using the Hemingway Editor
[ ] Edit using Grammarly
*Note - we don't always do everything on the list. For example, this piece does not check every box (😅). The reason is that our number one priority with content is to share something valuable or interesting. Secondarily, we look for ways to make that content visible to more people using SEO.
Indie hackers selling to indie hackers?
I'd add on the Newsletter that @RobertoDigital does for the SEO/Content resources - a great source for people
https://rankmakers.net/
Thanks, very valuable!
This is just what I needed. Thanks for sharing!
Short and actionable - thanks a lot for the post!
After reading this, I'm going to update my website 😅
and hey I used Grammarly for witting this comment, hope it is right.
thank you!
Thank you really helpful
Thanks for this list, I've created a checklist on Interact List for everyone to use
very cool!
Thanks Matthew, appreciate it 👍
Thank you!
This was really helpful! I'm going to make this a Notion template internally now. :D
Ha - we have a Notion template for this as well :)
I've been searching for an easy checklist! Thanks a million Matthew! You're a lifesaver.
No problem!
This.. this is it. Thank you!
Thanks a ton for this, Matthew! :)
Great post 🙌
Creating a SEO Checklist for On-page and Off Page gives clarity to purpose. For On-Page SEO there are different elements in checklist like meta tags, meta descriptions, integrating it to analytics and webmasters tool to get insight into traffic to your website.
As a one person team it gets tough to develop high quality content and optimize it for search engine.
For more insights into SEO Checklist check out <a href="https://www.mediasearchgroup.com/search-engine-optimization.php"> SEO services</a>
I would add to do the research on the keyword you want to rank for. In the end, there is only one first page of Google search results and only one spot number one.
If you want to overtake that number one spot your piece of content needs to provide a better, more in-depth, more up-to-date answer than what is currently already out there.
So figure out what makes them so special and how you can provide more value with your piece of content.
If you're interested, wrote a piece about determining if a certain keyword is worth your while, to begin with or if you should better use your time on a different keyword/topic first that will give you a better chance of ranking and potential traffic here:
https://usergrowth.io/blog/creating-a-content-calendar/
Figuring out if you can do better is one of the steps, but I start by figuring out the traffic potential, before finding out there might be a potential gap to fill.
I have learned SEO from a lot of failures and stupid paid and free courses.
Just want to tell you that 90% of the tactics you will learn never work.
Some things you should know about SEO is that...No how much better SEO you do on new website it will not rank, Old website with HIGH DA PA rank easily.
KEywords stuffing still a most important tactic which all the tutors depromote but believe me it still works...
Last one will make you sad that- for the one year write for Google not for audience.
If you want to know more then you can contact me on my website contact form
www.tiniw.com
Is it worth creating content on medium for SEO and plugging my products or not in your opinion?
I've found it to be worthwhile for spreading the word about my product, but not necessarily beneficial from an SEO perspective.
Copying a post to Medium takes minimal effort and they have built-in distribution which can help your post get seen. They also let you use a "canonical link" so you don't mess up SEO on your site. For those reasons, it's a no-brainer to add it to Medium after putting in hours to write a post.
That being said, I don't think it impacts our SEO rankings much.