SEO Checklist and Keyword Research Template

Rank #1 on search engines and get found faster

Make sure your keyword research, blogging, and technical SEO are optimized to drive more web traffic.

Keyword Research

To start, research keywords that have high search volume, low competition.
You can use Google Keyword Planner or Keyword Everywhere for free or you may want to use
one of the industry trusted search tools like:
● Ahrefs
● Moz
● Semrush
These tools are an investment, so you may either stick with Google Keyword Planner or try a
free trial of the tools to start.
Make a copy of this document for your keyword research. After researching
keywords for your industry/niche, assign the keyword a ranking between 1-10. You want to go
after the 10’s first.

On-Page SEO

Next, focus on on-page SEO. This is the practice of optimizing elements of your website.
On-page SEO includes:
● Optimizing each webpage with your keywords
● Writing compelling page titles (under 60 characters)
● Writing meta descriptions (under 155 characters)
● Include keywords in URL
● Ensure images have alt text and lenames
● Add schema markup to get rich snippets. follow this Getting Started guide by
schema.org.
If you’re new to SEO, this is a lot of new terminology and actions. The Shopify Help Centre can
provide additional context and support if you get stuck.
Content Marketing Strategy:
Before you ocially launch, you can start developing blog content to start ranking your content
in search engines.
A strategy that works is to aim to start ranking for the lower intent keywords with your blog
content which will be easier. Then once you gain attention from the search engine, you can
start focusing on ranking for higher intent keywords.

This will help you start to gain clout with the search engines which may help you rank higher
(and be discovered by more customers).
Here are a few ideas for to develop your content marketing strategy:
● Brainstorm customer questions
● Help customers get more value out of the product (i.e. recipes, how-to, tips and tricks)
● Use keyword research to match questions with search terms

Off-Page SEO

Now it’s time to focus on increasing traffic to your store with o-page SEO. Off-page SEO
include actions you take outside of your website that will impact your search engine results
pages (SERPs).
Here are effective off-page strategies to focus on: