You are about to launch a new beautiful site with gorgeous design and content. Everything looks perfect but wait a minute, are you sure your website is ready to go public? Surely you have tested that your site is functioning correctly, but is it optimized to capture organic traffic?

Before launching your site is an excellent time to double-check if your website is SEO-Friendly. Use the following checklist to make sure that your site is in good shape for SEO!

SEO Checklist for a successful website launch

1. Web Performance – Check how fast your website load from mobile

• Your website passes Google’s PageSpeed Insights test
• Test your site’s load time speed using http://webpagetest.org/
• Images and videos load quickly
• The site is serving cached pages
• HTML files are compressed
• Javascript and CSS are compressed
• Use a CDN (content delivery network) to accelerate the site’s loading speed. CDN is a group of servers geographically distributed that work together to deliver Internet content as quickly as possible to users.

2. Ready for Mobile First Index

To check out whether your site is mobile friendly or not, you can use tools like  Mobile-Friendly Test or get a few mobile devices and test your website by yourself.

• Your mobile site is free of intrusive interstitials (popup ads that lead to bad user experience)
• Your videos (if applicable) are mobile friendly. Check whether your video player is optimized for mobile.
• Javascript & CSS are crawlable by search engines spiders
• You can easily open any clickable element with your thumb

Depending on your site’s configuration, you’ll need to check the following items.

Web responsive design

• Your content adjusts to screen resolution and size (CSS Media queries / mobile stylesheets is running smoothly)
• Your website’s viewport (which controls the width of a webpage for the device a user is viewing) is configured correctly.
• You can use Mobile-Friendly Test to see if you have a viewport configured. Submit your URL, and if it is not configured, it will tell you.
• There are no mobile usability errors in Google Search Console.

Dynamic serving

• Vary-HTTP header is implemented and working correctly (Mobile-Friendly Test )
• There are no mobile usability errors ( Mobile-Friendly Test )

Separate mobile site

• It is also possible to access the desktop site from the mobile
• You are indicating the relationship between your desktop and mobiles URLs with a <link> tag that includes the elements rel=”canonical” and rel=”alternate”
• There are no Robots.txt issues, blocking your mobile site. (Google Search Console & FandangoSEO)
• The mobile site has been also added in Google Search Console & FandangoSEO
• Your mobile website is https by default. (Validate that your canonical, redirect 301, rel alternate are performing correctly)
• There are no 404 errors
• Same structured data on the mobile site as in the desktop version    

3. Content

• You have several articles (posts or content) in stock ready to be published during the following weeks. This work will guarantee you can post new quality content, which will boost your SEO.
• There is no thin content
• There is no empty, short or duplicated headers, meta descriptions or titles
• Your category pages are optimized with the keywords you want to rank for
• You are using long-tail keywords to rank on specific topics

4. Set Google Analytics & Search Console

• Use Google Analytics and Search Console to study your site traffic and your users’ behavior

5. Check Accessibility (Crawl & UX)

• Crawl your site with FandangoSEO and make sure you have good accessibility
• It has a quick loading time
• It is responsive on mobile devices
• Title tags and content matches users intent
• It has a proper header structure (h1, h2, h3, etc…)
• All images contain Alt Text
• All links contain Anchor Text that describes the page content
• All your videos include a transcription (text-based description of a video file)
• You have HTML Sitemap

6. Schema, rich snippets, open graph

• There are no pages without schema
• Your site has rich snippets
• Your website has the Open Graph installed. This makes your site a rich object in a social graph

Remember that you can download this checklist to follow this step-by-step guide.

Now you are ready to launch your brand new website and start climbing to the top of Google search results!!

We hope you find it helpful. Let us know in the comments if any questions arise. We’d also like to hear from you if you can think of anything else to add to this list. 🙂

Last Updated on September 22, 2020 by Hannah Dango