SEOQuality Assured! How to Create a Universal SEO QA Checklist

Quality Assured! How to Create a Universal SEO QA Checklist

Introducing the universal SEO QA checklist, especially designed to be used by anyone on the team from IT to an admin to the SEOs.

If you’ve ever had a “facepalm” moment in SEO at least once in your career after launching a new page, such as it going live with an unwanted no-index tag, don’t worry, you’re not alone. SEOs are busier than ever, juggling a whole host of strategies and tactics. In all the hustle and bustle, small things can slip past even the most vigilant of us. In-house SEOs also frequently face the issue of well-meaning internal IT and web developer teams not being completely au fait with SEO and thus inadvertently committing many an SEO sin.

So what’s a busy, over-stretched SEO to do?

good-bad-checklist

Enter the universal SEO QA checklist, especially designed to be used by anyone on the team from IT to an admin to the SEOs. By serving multiple teams with one single document, the QA process becomes flexible, fast and simple to do, increasing the chances of its adoption company-wide. This document will be your ally, silently nagging the IT team to double-check the on-page SEO elements on your behalf.

Creating an SEO QA document that can be used by non-SEOs simply involves adding a brief element of explanation, to convey the why, what and how, helping to ensure that things turn out just the way you want. Keeping it as brief as possible is always universally appreciated!

Here’s a sample, very basic checklist which can be edited and customized to meet the needs of your team:

URL

  • All lowercase, separated by hyphens (-)
  • Short, relevant and descriptive of content
  • www vs non-www redirecting properly
  • URL without the / at the end redirecting to version with / (or vice versa)
  • Proper usage of http:// and https://

Page Source:

1. Meta Content

  • Page title: Each title needs to be unique and no longer than 60-80 characters
  • Description: Each description needs to be unique and no longer than 155 characters
  • Open Graph tags (if using)
    • This is a set of specific tags for Facebook
      • Og:title, og:type, og:url, og:description, og:image

2. Robots Control

  • If page is supposed to be indexed: Index, Follow
  • If page is NOT supposed to be indexed: Noindex, Follow
  • If page is NOT supposed to be indexed or crawlable: Noindex, Nofollow

3. Canonical Tag

  • Canonical tag should be the full URL in all lower case.  
    • Example: http://www.website.com/
      • So instead of: http://www.WebSite.com, it should be: http://www.website.com/

4. H1 Tag

  • Only 1 H1 tag on the page
  • Copy is descriptive and helpful for user

5. Analytics

  • All analytics and tracking code is accurate and consistent with rest of site

Page Content:

  • Check all links to make sure they are functioning and directing to the correct pages
  • Make sure all the content on the page is spelled correctly and there are no grammar errors
  • Ensure that Social Share Buttons are functioning correctly

Media

  • All images need to have Alt attributes
  • File names of any type of media should describe what that media is   a. File names should be lower case, separated by hyphens
  • Text content should not render as images

The recommended process when using this document to reduce the occurrence of errors is to have IT review their work against it and then another person, whether an admin or yourself, doing another round of checks against it.

Do you have other recommendations or tips you’d like to add? Please share them in the comments below.

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