Without a plan, SEO can be time- and resource-intensive with little return on investment. These responsibilities for each day, week, and month will help you stay on course. SEO is a broad field. A lot of time and money can be lost or used inefficiently without structure and preparation.
Many SEO initiatives are started but never finished.
It can be challenging to begin, complete, and maintain focus with targeted strategic and tactical elements that can have a significant impact. Add to that the reality that SEO is never “done.” You may develop the necessary amount of planning to keep SEO on track and effective by breaking it down into daily, weekly, biweekly, and annual milestones and process-driven techniques.
These actions provide a wonderful framework for how to ensure sure SEO is well planned and structured on an annual basis, but they should be linked to goals and a bigger strategy.
Daily
Educate Yourself
A crucial component of SEO that needs to be included in any maintenance or continuing management plan is staying current on industry news. This includes monitoring the important updates and alerts the search engines themselves release, as well as keeping up with SEO best practices and breaking news from websites like Search Engine Journal. Smaller, more subtle changes can become accentuated when you overlook them or best practices become out of date, but larger, more noticeable changes in the industry are difficult to miss.
Don’t lag or use out-of-date strategies!
Know Your Current Metrics
For brands and businesses that depend on e-commerce sales or lead volume to support a sales force, it’s crucial to monitor your critical SEO performance metrics in real-time, or at least once per day.
It’s critical to understand how your website is performing in search through top-level data to spot any warning signs. These might consist of:
- A shift in positioning, either specific or general.
- A decline in organic traffic.
- A decline in the volume of leads or sales.
The key is being able to spot issues as soon as they arise. Before they have an impact on your overall marketing and business goals, you must be able to identify problems and turn around any negative patterns. By monitoring actual performance, you may contrast it with benchmarks and baselines to ensure that your metrics adequately comprehend cause and effect and that an issue doesn’t arise for an excessively long period before you can take action. Less important KPIs (those that don’t require an immediate response) can be monitored every week.
Make Progress on Tactics
Goals, a plan, and particular strategies must all be included in a successful SEO campaign or plan. Without a plan, process, or well-defined approach, you risk wasting a lot of time on low-priority, low-effect SEO tactics.
The daily process should include clear objectives, benchmarks, and doable steps that contribute to the greater goal. The strategies may involve undertaking tasks for the first time in a phased fashion or focusing on repeatable actions.
Regardless, a list of specific technical, on-page, and off-page action items should be established for the year, divided into months, and then further broken down into daily tactics and progress. Both big-picture thinking and the capacity to take on daily tasks and action items are necessary for SEO.
Monthly
Report On Performance
Beyond the daily or weekly KPI monitoring, it’s frequently crucial to employ monthly cycles to report on performance more comprehensively. Since monthly checkpoints are concentrated, time may be set aside to compare a larger sample size of data and identify trends.
Reports on monthly performance should compare the current month’s results year over year as well as any applicable year-to-date statistics. Be consistent and choose meaningful intervals. Finding trends that are challenging to identify in small sample numbers is made easier by looking at longer periods. It is crucial to surface and prioritize any tales of the and why for goal deviations, celebrations for exceeding goals, and indicators that require potential adjustments to the plan through a dashboard or snapshot report of the performance data.
Recap Completed & Continuing Action Items
This is an opportunity to compare the plan with the strategies and execution from the previous month.
- Has everything been finished?
- There were any alterations?
- What challenges or stumbling blocks had to be overcome?
The past can be used to influence the present.
You should be able to gain a general understanding of what influences SEO performance when you mix the action items and approaches with the performance data.
Plan Next Month’s Action Items & Evaluate the Plan
For establishing accountability for work completion, monthly intervals are excellent. Things in SEO change even when the year is planned out, and performance isn’t always what we anticipate after doing something for the first time.
By using a monthly planning approach, changes can be made to the strategy, such as doubling in on a particular tactic or revising the overall strategy to recalibrate. You may avoid overanalyzing situations and reacting hastily while simultaneously making sure that you don’t allow too much time to pass and lose track of trends toward goals by being nimble enough to analyze performance and approaches every month.
The greatest way to stay current and proactive is frequently to strike a balance between the necessity for planned strategies and activities and the requirement for agile techniques to pivot as necessary.
Quarterly
Technical Issues Auditing
It’s crucial to take a broader look through an audit each quarter, assuming you have already addressed technical concerns at the beginning of your SEO emphasis and are keeping an eye out for those that raise red flags in daily and weekly monitoring. Examining concerns that have been reported in Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console should be part of this audit.
Additionally, comparisons to benchmarks and standards for site speed, mobile usability, structured data validation, and the less frequently examined factors will be made.
On-Page Issues Auditing
Things happen on websites even when they are regularly monitored and without an audit process. Duplicate tags, duplicate content, or even missing on-page elements may result from a code change, database update, plugin/extension update, or publishing material.
It’s crucial to undertake a quarterly audit of on-page problems utilizing a variety of both free and paid third-party solutions. Some programs even give notifications and take into account daily operations if something changes, such as the deletion of a Meta description.
In any case, it’s critical to have a strong set of tools and a process for quarterly evaluation and comparison to the previous audit to guarantee that the findings of the audit and any necessary corrections are recognized and included in the tactical plan.
Link Profile Auditing
The whole SEO strategy probably includes some kind of link development. It is likely a component of the ongoing tactics (or should be taken into consideration, if it isn’t), whether that be through drawing links with interesting material or by developing a more targeted plan of study and outreach.
It’s crucial to have visibility into the overall link profile and development because the approaches need time and effort commitment. This performance parameter may be monitored during the monthly reporting phase, but a more thorough audit should take place periodically.
To make sure the strategy is working as planned in the area of backlinks, it’s crucial to evaluate the quantity and quality of links as well as the diversity of sources, the relevance of the linked content, comparisons to rivals and benchmarks, and period-to-period comparisons. Additionally, any spam my links or bad SEO attempts that are not identified through daily or monthly efforts can be caught here and rectified through the disavow process.
