SEO Checklists – Friend or Foe?

This was a great question posed by Chris Lever during our Tech SEO Panel at HiveMCR. If you missed the event, here’s a more detailed take on the discussion.

What Are SEO Checklists Good For?

SEO checklists definitely have their place within an SEO workflow, particularly in teams with mixed experience levels. For junior SEOs, checklists offer structured guidance, ensuring consistency and completeness of basic SEO tasks. They are especially helpful when there’s an understanding that a senior SEO will review, guide or refine the outputs. 

For experienced SEOs, checklists serve as a valuable aide-memoire. We all have off-days...

Crucially, the output of an SEO checklist should never be seen as the final deliverable - it's a starting point, a baseline for getting the job done.

Checklists also play an essential role in quality assurance. Managers and team leaders can use them to verify critical steps have been completed, providing reassurance that essential tasks haven't been overlooked, especially when working on complex projects or across large teams.

For more experienced SEOs, checklists serve as a valuable aide-memoire. We all have off-days, in these scenarios, a checklist acts as a quick reference point, helping us stay on track and remember best practices without needing to reinvent the wheel.

Can SEO Checklists Keep Up with the Changing Pace of SEO?

If we consider an SEO Checklist as finished and somehow exhaustive, it cannot keep up with the changing pace of SEO. Far from it.

There is an irony sometimes that SEO checklist creation can be a form of “box-ticking”.

Lists need to be organic and seen more as “working documents”. There is an irony sometimes that SEO checklist creation can be a form of “box-ticking”. I.e. we have an SEO process because we have a list for each activity we do regularly. This isn’t a bad idea in theory, but if creating a list is ticking the box of a larger list it starts to miss the point.

Sometimes you just won’t need a list and in others you will not repeat a task enough times to justify the creation of it!

Why Do SEO Checklists Fail, and How Can We Improve Them?

SEO checklists fail when they're rigid, outdated, or overly complicated. To make them genuinely valuable, we must adopt a mindset of continual testing, learning and refining. Checklists should be regularly revisited, updated, and pruned. 

Any step that adds negligible value should be removed. Remember, complexity does not inherently equate to effectiveness.

To enhance your checklists further:

• Regularly seek feedback from users to understand practical challenges.

• Empathise with your audience, understanding their level of expertise and their specific needs.

• Maintain clarity and simplicity to ensure usability.

• Embrace flexibility-recognise when a task no longer fits or when it needs a new approach.

When Should We NOT Use Checklists?

Despite their usefulness, SEO checklists should never be the entirety of your strategy, training or final deliverable.

They are tools, not solutions.

Be wary of checklists sold as definitive blueprints or master plans for success.

Be wary of checklists sold as definitive blueprints or master plans for success. These lists are often oversold, outdated, excessively detailed without practical justification… or simply inaccurate. 

Always assess critically whether a given list genuinely aligns with your needs and objectives.

Generic checklists, not tailored to your specific context, often cause more harm than good. Blindly following a generic checklist-especially one generated by tools like ChatGPT without further validation-is risky. 

Any checklist you use must be validated, regularly reviewed and tailored to fit your specific circumstances.

Final Thoughts

I use SEO checklists, they can be useful. I sometimes have days off and need to check my work. They can be really useful. If I were to train anyone on SEO I would use lists to guide their process, but I would also teach them to think critically once they get more used to the basic concepts.

Saying “SEO checklists suck!” ... is shorthand for “bad SEO checklists suck”

Throwing junior SEOs into critical thinking and theory too early is overkill -  or just unproductive - but keeping people relying on lists without understanding why they’re doing what they’re doing will ultimately inhibit their growth.

Saying “SEO checklists suck!” and moving on is either shorthand for “bad SEO checklists suck” - which I agree with - or it is in my opinion missing a lot of the benefits and at worse gate-keeping the knowledge from others.