Do you use check­lists when work­ing on SEO cam­paigns or when audit­ing a site? Or do you fig­ure that check­lists are for begin­ners and you’ll be fine as you’ve done this plen­ty of times before?

If, like me, much of your expe­ri­ence is from work­ing agency side you’ll be used to repeat­ing the same tasks again and again. As you progress you may be able to del­e­gate these but they still need to be done.

The risk is that you’ll become com­pla­cent and some­thing will slip your mind. In this post I’ll attempt to con­vince you to use check­lists and I’ll pro­vide some exam­ples to get start­ed with.

Beyond Best Practice

Con­trary to what you might read on blogs or in LinkedIn Pulse arti­cles, SEO isn’t just about best prac­tice. If you could get to the top of the SERPs by fol­low­ing a few best prac­tice grid­lines the SEO indus­try wouldn’t real­ly exist – any­one can fol­low guide­lines.

SEO is actu­al­ly about over­com­ing chal­lenges, exper­i­ment­ing and find­ing your own way. What works for one site won’t work for all and there­fore a good SEO is con­stant­ly test­ing. Learn­ing new skills and tech­niques is a vital part of being an SEO and those who don’t devel­op strug­gle to get results.

Despite the fact that SEO is com­plex and con­stant­ly evolv­ing a sim­ple best-prac­tice check­list should be some­thing you use on a reg­u­lar basis.

Why Use a Checklist

If you Google “check­lists” one of the results you’ll find on the first page is a site by Atul Gawande who lit­er­al­ly wrote the book on check­lists. The Check­list Man­i­festo was pub­lished in 2009. In it, Gawande shows that errors of inep­ti­tude (where we should know bet­ter) are eas­i­ly avoid­ed by fol­low­ing sim­ple check­lists.

Gawande explains the impact that check­lists have had on the med­ical pro­fes­sion. Con­vinc­ing high­ly trained sur­geons that they need­ed to fol­low basic best-prac­tice check­lists was a strug­gle but one that has paid off. Research in the UK has shown that the use of check­lists has reduced surgery-relat­ed deaths by 40%. It turns out that mak­ing a sur­geon tick off a check­list item which says “have you checked you haven’t left your sur­gi­cal tools inside the patient” is a great way of mak­ing sure they haven’t.

But I’m Not a Surgeon

SEO isn’t brain surgery (which is lucky when you con­sid­er how many peo­ple who claim to be SEO experts actu­al­ly are) but there is still the poten­tial for SEO to go real­ly, real­ly wrong. Any­one who’s seen the impact of a mis­take in a robots.txt file or a botched migra­tion, can attest that it’s the small things which are eas­i­ly missed can have a big impact on a busi­ness.

What Can Go Wrong

Last month I saw a site where the entire list of redi­rects added for a site migra­tion weren’t work­ing because of a typo in the .htac­cess file. This is easy to do (I’ve done it numer­ous times) but it’s eas­i­ly resolved by check­ing all the redi­rects once you think you’re done. I know this because it’s on my Migra­tion check­list.

The long term impact of not hav­ing any redi­rects from your migra­tion in place could be the loss of sev­er­al years’ worth of site author­i­ty. Of course, you would prob­a­bly spot this even­tu­al­ly but at this point you would have a very unhap­py client or boss who will be very keen for you to fix the prob­lem very soon. It’s at this point you wish you had used a check­list.

Consistency

As well as pre­vent­ing you from caus­ing unnec­es­sary issues a check­list can help you and your team to ensure that noth­ing is missed. If there are mul­ti­ple peo­ple work­ing on a cam­paign it’s easy for every­one to assume that some­one else has cov­ered the best prac­tice bits. With a check­list you can be sure that every­thing is up to scratch before mov­ing on to the more inter­est­ing exper­i­men­tal, prob­lem solv­ing SEO.

Check­lists also help less expe­ri­enced mem­bers of staff who may be unfa­mil­iar with the tasks they’re being asked to com­plete. They’ll still need sup­port and train­ing but a list can help them to break up tasks and hit the ground run­ning.

Where to start

There are lots of SEO check­lists you can use but you might find that none of them is com­pre­hen­sive enough to cov­er all bases. It might be that you need to com­bine mul­ti­ple lists or use some as a basis for your own list.

At Optix we use the fol­low­ing lists for SEO cam­paigns:

• SEO Set­up Check­list
• Site Migra­tion Check­list
• Google Ana­lyt­ics Audit Check­list
• Key­word Research Check­list (this one is more of a process than a tra­di­tion­al check­list)
• Con­tent Mar­ket­ing Set­up Check­list
• Out­reach Set­up Check­list
• On Site Opti­mi­sa­tion Check­list

You might not need to use this many straight away but hope­ful­ly I’ve con­vinced you that using a check­list can help you reduce risk, improve con­sis­ten­cy and get bet­ter results.