In this day and age, it still astounds me that so many DJs don’t give SEO the attention that it deserves. Even in this new age of AI, your website and how it ranks is still the quickest path forward to booking more business… period.
Of course, it’s not cheap; it costs money if you’re going to hire a professional. If you’re a single-system operator, that expense might not be worth the spend. Fortunately, there’s nothing stopping you from doing it yourself, especially for those of you who know how to work a computer.
Should you be one of those people, here’s a refresher checklist on some important aspects. Here’s the beginners SEO checklist from Jordan St Jacques:
MEASUREMENT
- Google Analytics – The beginning of it all, GA allows you to measure the visitor activity on your website. Tip: Use the Google Site Kit plug-in if you’re using a WordPress site… it makes for setting this up extremely easy.
- Google Search Console – Going hand-in-hand with GA is the Google Search Console. Simply allow the Google Site Kit WP plug-in to set up your GSC profile, and wait for the emails to come right into your inbox when something needs to be fixed. GSC ensures that Google sees all your website content, and that nothing is getting skipped over due to any website errors that you might have.
- SEO Metrics Tools (Various) – GA and GSC are great (and free!) tools, but occasionally they don’t go far enough for those of you who take your website seriously. Some other tools I use are as follows;
- Auditzy – Extended per-page measurements of Core Web Vitals
- Nozzle – Insanely robust ranking measurement tool
OPTIMIZATION
- Google Business Profile. GBP is crucial for SEO because it significantly enhances local search visibility. By providing a comprehensive and verified business listing directly within Google Search and Maps, GBP allows businesses to appear prominently in the “local pack” – the top three business listings displayed for location-based queries. This direct presence offers a critical advantage, as it includes essential information like address, hours, phone number, website, and customer reviews, all of which are key ranking factors for local SEO. An optimized GBP not only improves organic search rankings by signaling relevance and proximity to Google, but also drives direct customer engagement through calls, website visits, and directions, making it an indispensable tool for attracting local customers and increasing foot traffic or service inquiries.
- Meta Values – These values, particularly meta titles and meta descriptions, are critical for SEO despite not being direct ranking factors in the same way content quality or backlinks are. While search engines like Google may sometimes rewrite meta descriptions, these values serve as your website’s “organic ad copy” in search results. A well-crafted meta title provides a concise, keyword-rich summary that influences whether a user clicks on your link. Similarly, an engaging meta description entices users to choose your result over competitors by accurately previewing the page’s content and sometimes including a call to action. Optimizing these meta values directly impacts click-through rate (CTR), which is a crucial indirect ranking signal. A higher CTR signals to search engines that your page is highly relevant and valuable to users, potentially leading to improved rankings. Beyond SERP snippets, other meta tags like the robots meta tag (controlling crawling and indexing) and social media meta tags (influencing how content appears when shared) also play a vital role in overall SEO performance and online visibility.
- Backlinks – They’re a foundational element of SEO, acting as “votes of confidence” from one website to another. When a reputable and relevant website links to your content, it signals to search engines like Google that your page is trustworthy, authoritative, and valuable. This is rooted in Google’s original PageRank algorithm, which weighted the number and quality of links pointing to a page. While the algorithm has evolved, high-quality backlinks remain a critical ranking factor, contributing significantly to a website’s overall authority and credibility. They not only help search engines discover and index your content more efficiently, but also drive referral traffic, enhance brand visibility, and ultimately lead to improved search engine rankings and organic traffic.
- Keywords – Fundamental to SEO because they represent the bridge between what users are searching for and the content you provide. By conducting thorough keyword research, businesses can identify the specific words and phrases their target audience uses when looking for products, services, or information online. Integrating these relevant keywords naturally into website content, meta titles, descriptions, and headings signals to search engines the topic and relevance of your pages. This helps search algorithms match your content with user queries, increasing the likelihood of ranking higher in search results and attracting qualified organic traffic. In essence, keywords enable search engines to understand what your content is about and connect it to the right audience, making them indispensable for online visibility and attracting potential customers.
- Competitors – Competitor analysis is paramount for SEO because it provides actionable insights into what’s working (and not working) for others in your industry. By meticulously examining the SEO strategies of top-ranking competitors – including their target keywords, content themes, backlink profiles, technical SEO, and user experience – you can identify opportunities to outperform them. This intelligence allows you to uncover untapped keyword niches, discover content gaps, identify high-quality link-building prospects, and even spot technical weaknesses on competitor sites that you can leverage. Ultimately, competitor analysis helps you refine your own SEO strategy, prioritize efforts, and allocate resources effectively to gain a competitive edge in search rankings, attract more qualified traffic, and achieve your business goals.
- Structured Data – Often referred to as Schema Markup, it’s vital for SEO because it provides explicit clues to search engines about the meaning and context of your website’s content. While it’s not a direct-ranking factor, it significantly enhances how your content is displayed in search results, making it eligible for “rich results” like star ratings, product prices, FAQs, or event details directly within the SERP. These visually appealing and informative snippets stand out, leading to a higher click-through rate (CTR). By helping search engines understand your content more deeply and categorize it accurately, structured data also improves the overall relevance of your pages for specific user queries, contributing to better visibility and a more compelling user experience, especially as search evolves towards entity-based and AI-powered results.
- Internal Linking – Crucial, yet often overlooked aspect of SEO, playing a vital role in both user experience and search-engine optimization. Strategically placed internal links connect related pages within your own website, helping search engines discover new content, understand the architecture of your site, and gauge the relative importance of different pages. By passing “link equity” (or “PageRank”) from strong, authoritative pages to weaker or newer ones, internal links help distribute ranking power throughout your site, boosting the SEO performance of less visible content. Furthermore, a well-structured internal linking strategy improves user navigation, encouraging visitors to explore more of your website, which can reduce bounce rates and increase time on site – both positive signals for search engine rankings. In essence, internal links create a logical flow for both users and crawlers, ultimately contributing to better indexing, improved rankings, and enhanced user engagement.
LLM/AI
- Google Overviews – AI Overviews (formerly SGE) are increasingly important for SEO because they fundamentally change how users interact with search results by providing AI-generated summaries directly at the top of the SERP, often above traditional organic listings. While this can lead to “zero-click” searches where users find their answer within the overview, it also presents a new opportunity for increased brand visibility. If your content is cited as a source within an AI Overview, even without a direct click, it establishes your brand as an authority and trusted resource, potentially leading to future direct searches or increased brand recognition. Therefore, optimizing for AI Overviews requires a strategic shift towards creating comprehensive, authoritative, well-structured, and easily digestible content that directly answers user queries, making it more likely for Google’s AI to select and feature your information.
- Google Knowledge Panel – This is vital for SEO because it offers a prominent, consolidated display of information about an entity (like a business, person, or organization) directly within the search engine results page (SERP). Appearing typically on the right side of desktop searches or near the top on mobile, these panels instantly provide users with key details, including descriptions, images, contact information, social profiles, and reviews. This prime real estate significantly boosts visibility and brand credibility, acting as a “Google endorsement” that instills trust in potential customers. By offering quick answers and rich information at a glance, Knowledge Panels can influence click-through rates, enhance user experience, and reinforce a brand’s authority, even if a user doesn’t directly click through to your website. Optimizing for a Knowledge Panel involves ensuring consistent and accurate information across the web, utilizing structured data (Schema Markup), and building a strong overall online presence.
- SEO AI Error Tools (Various) – Both of the following tools help you identify errors on your website, and provide recommendations on fixes:
- Screpy
- Alli AI
- Authority – In the context of SEO, signifies a website’s perceived trustworthiness, credibility, and expertise by search engines like Google. While there isn’t one single “authority score” Google uses, various signals contribute to it, most notably the quality and quantity of backlinks from other reputable websites. A high-authority website is more likely to rank well for competitive keywords because search engines view it as a reliable source of information. This trust is built over time through consistently producing high-quality, valuable content that earns natural endorsements (backlinks) from other authoritative sites. Ultimately, establishing strong authority helps a website stand out in a crowded digital landscape, leading to higher rankings, increased organic traffic, and a stronger brand presence.
- Mentions – Even when unlinked, these are increasingly vital for SEO because they act as strong signals of a brand’s authority, credibility, and relevance to search engines. Google’s algorithms are sophisticated enough to understand that when a brand is frequently discussed across various online platforms – including social media, news sites, blogs, and forums – it signifies genuine recognition and influence within its industry. These mentions contribute to what’s often referred to as “implied links,” suggesting that if people are talking about your brand, it’s likely a trusted entity. This organic buzz enhances your brand’s overall digital footprint, helps Google connect your brand to specific entities in its Knowledge Graph, and ultimately influences rankings by showing that your brand is respected and talked about, which are key indicators of expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T).
- Named Entity Recognition – NER is increasingly important for SEO because it enables search engines to move beyond simple keyword matching and truly understand the meaning, context, and relationships between concepts on a webpage. By identifying and categorizing “named entities” such as people, organizations, locations, dates, and products, NER allows search engines to build a richer, more accurate representation of your content. This deep understanding helps Google to better match your content to complex user queries, even those that don’t contain exact keywords, and to display more relevant rich results or AI Overviews. Optimizing for NER means creating comprehensive, well-structured content that clearly defines these entities and their connections, ultimately leading to improved topical authority, better visibility in semantic search, and a stronger alignment with user intent.
- Prompt Reverse Engineering – In the context of SEO, this is becoming increasingly important with the rise of AI-powered search results and generative AI content creation. While not a traditional SEO tactic like link building or keyword research, it involves analyzing successful AI-generated content (like Google’s AI Overviews) or high-performing AI-written articles to deduce the underlying prompts that produced them. This “reverse engineering” helps SEOs understand the specific instructions, tones, and structures that lead to optimal AI output that aligns with search engine preferences. By identifying the characteristics of prompts that yield authoritative, comprehensive, and semantically rich content, marketers can then craft more effective prompts for their own AI-assisted content creation, ensuring their output is better optimized for search visibility and user intent, especially in a landscape heavily influenced by large language models.
In Closing: Of course, these aspects are just a starting point, and real SEO goes even further than the above. Still, every DJ needs to have a baseline, and getting into these topics will serve you well. There are no shortcuts to great SEO, but if you take the time (or hire the right people), you’ll build a solid foundation to book more business.
Jordan St. Jacques is the President/Lead Digital Marketer at Digitera.Interactive in Ottawa, Ont., Canada.