SEO - Search Engine Optimization
If you are looking for an SEO checklist that will help you to increase your site’s organic traffic and rank on Google, you have just found it. This checklist can be used as a reference point for ensuring that your site, whether it’s new or already existing, is on point with the latest best-practices and that you’re not being held back by issues that you have missed. We’ve covered 5 general areas in this video: SEO basics, KW research, Technical SEO, on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
Transcript
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If you’re looking for an SEO checklist that will help you increase your
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website’s organic traffic and rank on google well
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you’re in the right place. But since the actual checklist is like 41 points long
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and I would still love for you not to have white hair at the end of this video
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I cut it short to the 10 most important ones
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So if you want to read the full checklist, which I definitely suggest you
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do, I’ll leave it below in the description
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So take a look there and if you want to stay for the most
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important ones, let’s keep on with the video!
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Hey everyone, I’m Chiara from SEMrush and today we talk about an SEO checklist
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You can use this checklist to make sure that your website, whether it’s new
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or already existing, is up to the point with the latest best
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practices in SEO and that you’re not being held by any
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mistakes that you might have missed. Small disclaimer before we dive into the
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fun: in this video we’ll cover five main areas
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SEO basics, Keyword Research, Technical SEO,
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On-page and Off-page SEO so if you feel sure in any of these areas
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and want to skip to the next one I’ll leave the timestamps in the
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description so that you can check and go wherever you want, but I definitely
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suggest you stay throughout the whole video because all
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these points are extremely important to your website’s success.
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SEO basics If you haven’t got the basics covered
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your website will definitely struggle to rank for competitive terms
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so the next steps will be a little bit of a “housekeeping”
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but definitely you have to check them out because without those
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you can’t have a successful SEO strategy. Make sure you have set up Google Search
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Console and Google Analytics correctly. Google Search Console is an essential
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tool that provides you with invaluable insights into your site’s performance as
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well as a wealth of data that you can use to grow your site’s organic traffic
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and visibility, and if you have any doubts about it or
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you’re just unsure on how to set it up properly I’ll leave in the
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description below the ultimate guide to setting up Google Search Console that
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we made in SEMrush so take a look if you want. After Google
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Search Console let’s skip to Google Analytics: without
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the right data you can’t make the right decisions. Google
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Analytics as you probably know is a free analytics tool that allows you
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to view data and insights about how many people are
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visiting your site, who they are, and how they’re engaging
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with it. And just as for Google Search Console we
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also have a guide on how to set up correctly Google Analytics so if you
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have any doubts I’ll link that as well below in the
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description so take a look if you need it
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Generate and submit a sitemap The purpose of a sitemap is to help
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search engines understand which pages should be crawled on your
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website and which should not. It is just very simply a list
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of urls that specify your main content so that
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it gets crawled and indexed. A sitemap tells the crawler
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which files you think are important in your site
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and also provides valuable information about these files
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for example for pages: when the page was last updated,
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how often the page is changed, and any alternate language versions of a page
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Once you have generated your site map make sure that this is submitted to
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Google Search Console and Bing Webmasters tool
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If you don’t know how to create a site map well, guess what?
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I have a guide for you and I’ll leave it in the description
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and be sure to check it out because there are a lot of recommendations on
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sitemap generators. Create a robot.txt file
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Your robots.txt file is used to make search engine crawlers understand which
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pages and files they can or can’t request from your website
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most commonly it is used to prevent certain sections of your site from being
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crawled and it’s not intended to be used as a way to de-index
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a web page and stop it from showing on google
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you can find your site’s robots.txt file here
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and check whether you have it already in place
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if you don’t you can just google robots.txt generators
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and you’ll find tons of tools to help you that way
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Keyword Research Create a keyword map: once you have conducted a thorough keyword
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research and you have identified your target keywords (and if
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you want any suggestions or advice on that you should check the
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cards above or the description below for some
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super useful content) well, after you have found those
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you should definitely map them out. In its simplest form keyword mapping is
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a framework for the keywords you have chosen to target
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that mirrors your site’s structure driven by research. The ultimate goal of
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the maps are to help you discover where to
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optimize, what content to build, and where you can add new pages to
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attract more traffic. Technical SEO. Before we go on with the
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checklist I just want to tell you that the next few steps
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can all be checked in our Site Audit tool
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which is one of the most performing and most powerful tools in SEMrush
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so if you want to find out if your website has any trouble
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and if you want to know how to solve it you should definitely
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run a site audit with our tool. Improve your site speed
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I’ll say it as it is: slow website makes for poor user experience, in fact
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Google has recently confirmed an upcoming page experience update for 2021
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that is set to place an even greater focus upon user experience as a ranking
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factor than is currently the case. You need to
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make sure your site loads quickly and acknowledge that users
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continue to expect more. You will find slow loading pages flagged when you run
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a crawl using SEMrush Site Audit tool and can
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also gain more specific insights using Google’s page speed insights tool
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Make sure that your website is mobile friendly
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Mobile friendliness is a key factor in google’s
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upcoming user experience update but the real reason you should always check that
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your website is actually mobile friendly and
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optimized for mobile experience is that Google switched to mobile first
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indexing for all websites starting from mid-2019. If you’re not
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serving a mobile friendly experience you will find that your organic
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visibility suffers because of this: you can test your site’s
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mobile friendliness with google’s mobile friendly testing tool
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On-page seo and content Without great content and great on-page
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experience your website will definitely struggle to rank for any position in the
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google SERP so always make sure that you have the
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next few steps ticked in your checklist and make great content
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for users and not only for search engines
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Find and fix duplicate missing and truncated title tags
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Optimized title tags are the very basics
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of SEO, in fact, they’re often the first thing
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any SEO would take a look at to help a page to rank
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You see, a title tag informs search engines what the page is about and
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should be unique duplicate title tags shouldn’t be found
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and truncated title tags, which are the ones that are too long,
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will be cut off on the SERPs (you will see three dots after the title tag) and
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the part is gonna be missing and of course, you should also ensure the
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title tags are not missing all of these issues by the way can be
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found flagged in your Site Audit report and can be fixed by updating and
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improving your pages title tags Find and fix duplicate and missing meta
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description. While meta descriptions haven’t been
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used as a direct ranking factor for many years this is
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usually what shows beneath your site’s title tag on the serps, quite
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simply it is your meta description that
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encourages a user to click on your listing over someone else’s
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and can either positively or negatively affect your organic CTR
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If you don’t have a meta description in place Google will display
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part of your page’s content but this could include navigation text and other
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elements and be far from enticing. If you have
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duplicates there is a good chance that you are not presenting a unique
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description that encourages clicks. Run a content
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audit: prune, update, cannibalization
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I can’t stress enough how important it is to check the quality of your content
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of course I don’t mean just producing quality content, that
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should be the base, but you should also check if you’re in need of any pruning
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which is cutting all that is not needed or if you’re in need to check if you
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have any cannibalizing content on your website or if you should
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update any old existing ones. This is extremely important because you always
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need to provide the user with the best content you can give them: it doesn’t
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matter if it’s old or new it should be always updated, up to
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the point, and extremely helpful and useful. If you
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find any content on your website that it’s
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not useful, it’s not up to date anymore, and it’s not gonna give
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anything to the people that read that, well, cut it off
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It doesn’t have to be on your website. Off-page SEO: Analyze your competitor’s
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link profile If you don’t have any insights on your
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competitor’s link profile how can you set up a strategy to outrank
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them? Just as it is important to spend time
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analyzing your competitor’s content, you should also
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invest resources into digging deep into their link profile
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You can run any URL through the Backlink Analytics tool in SEMrush
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and you can analyze your competitor’s link profile and start to understand the
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overall quality and authority of the links that point to their site
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Are you missing out on links that your competitors are benefiting from
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but you’re not? You can definitely find that out
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using our Backlink Gap Tool. If there is, let’s say,
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a resource page that links to all others in your space except you
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a great starting point would be to reach out to ask to be added
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Bonus point for local SEO specialists: set up and optimize
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Google My Business. Off-page seo goes way beyond links even though
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we know they’re super important because they’re a huge ranking factor
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anyway if you’re running a local business you should definitely make sure
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that you’re listed on Google My Business. This is extremely important because if
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you’re not listed, well, let me just tell you that you’re
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probably gifting visits to your competition which is
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not something that you want. And tthere you go! A 9-10 step
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SEO checklist for SEO beginners and also for more navigated SEO
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specialists to check that your website is always on
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point so that you can increase your organic traffic and ranking on google
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And let me know in the comments below if you have already followed any of the
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steps, which you probably have, of this checklist or if you have some
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steps that we have missed out so I’ll be waiting for you in the comments
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because I’m always curious to get to know more
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your work and if you liked the video don’t forget to subscribe to the channel
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and activate the notification bell so that
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you don’t miss any of the great content that will be posted
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and as usual please check the description below I don’t know how many
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times i’ve said it in this video i’m sorry if I’m boring you with this
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but there are a ton of super useful resources in the
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description that you should definitely not miss out!
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(guides, videos, tools) everything is right below
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I’ve put all the links. Thank you so much for listening
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have a nice day and I’ll see you in the next video. Ciao!
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