February 1, 2024
The digital market is filled with many businesses wanting to secure the top spot in search results. According to FirstPage stats, being at the top of search results in your field gets you a 39.8% click-through rate (CTR) in 2023. However, only 33% of all search traffic is able to secure the top spot in the search results.
You think making a website, writing relevant content, and optimizing it is enough to keep your business up and running, right? Well, not exactly. The internet keeps expanding, and when you add content to your site, many other things get added elsewhere, pushing you down in search results. So, just doing SEO once won’t help; you need to keep up with SEO monthly tasks.
In this blog, we’ll explore key aspects of SEO maintenance per month with best practices to drive better results.
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What is SEO Maintenance?
Since it is a broad and evolving domain, it is important to carefully plan your optimization strategy so you won’t end up losing time or money. Being a continuous process, you can not fully complete your website’s SEO journey, and that’s where many businesses lack. They start search engine optimization for their site but don’t end up maintaining it.
SEO maintenance means regularly working to improve and keep up your website’s position in search engine results. This ongoing SEO checklist involves a few steps that take a few hours each month:
- Check how well your content is ranking.
- Make changes based on what you find.
- Adjust and improve your content to get better search results.
- Periodically check if your content is meeting your goals.
- Spot and use new opportunities in the market.
- Keep an eye out for any signs of decreasing traffic.
For SEO to work well, you need to keep updating old content. Since this can take a lot of time and effort, many companies get help from SEO experts to handle these regular monthly tasks.
Does Your Business Need SEO Maintenance?
Even if your website is doing well in search rankings now, you might not secure the top position for long without regular SEO maintenance.
Maintaining an ongoing SEO checklist can help as search engine optimization impacts many essential factors.
Some of the major reasons why your business need monthly SEO maintenance are as follows:
Rankings Change Over Time
Reaching your website to a high rank on the search engine results is great, but it’s majorly temporary. Just like when your business gets popular and reaches your targeted audience, your competitors try pushing it down. In response, you make extra efforts
not permanent. Just like your business can climb to the top, others can do the same and push you down. That’s why you need ongoing effort, and that’s where SEO maintenance comes in. Regular maintenance guarantees your website ranks well and stays ahead of the competition.
Content Needs Updates
Making SEO maintenance a core part of your strategy helps you compete effectively. This includes refreshing your content, updating keywords, fixing broken links, and other steps to keep your website pages competitive and valuable for users. Ignoring this can lead to “content decay,” causing a drop in rankings and potentially pushing your pages to the second page or beyond in search results.
Regular SEO maintenance is vital to keep your website performing well and visible to your target audience in search engine rankings.
Search Engine Algorithms Keep Changing
Search engines like Google regularly make updates to their algorithms, and this affects your SEO strategy. Knowing all about these changes can help, just like Google shifted to a mobile-first index, leading businesses to prioritize building responsive and mobile-friendly websites. Adapting your SEO approach based on these updates is key to maintaining optimal website performance in search engine rankings.
Competitors Are Investing in SEO
In the past, businesses could skip SEO without a major impact on their rankings. However, things have changed. Nowadays, more companies understand the importance of SEO and invest in ongoing maintenance to stay competitive. This puts pressure on competitors to adopt SEO maintenance practices or risk losing out on traffic, sales, and revenue.
SEO Maintenance Tasks to Add to Your To-Do List
Daily SEO Tasks
Learn About SEO: Keeping up with industry news is important for SEO and should be part of any ongoing plan. This means staying alert to important updates from search engines and staying informed about SEO best practices from sources like Search Engine Journal. While big industry changes are hard to miss, smaller, subtle changes or outdated practices can cause problems. Stay updated to avoid falling behind or using outdated tactics!
Know Your KPIs and Metrics: Monitoring your key SEO performance metrics, especially for e-commerce or lead-focused businesses, is essential. Keep an eye on metrics like positioning, organic traffic, sales, or lead volume. Recognizing issues early can help diagnose and fix problems before they affect your overall marketing goals. Regularly check your performance against benchmarks to understand cause and effect, intervening before issues persist for too long. Less critical metrics can be monitored on a weekly basis.
Make Updates in Your SEO Strategy: A strong SEO plan needs clear goals, a strategy, and specific tactics. Without a plan, you might waste time on low-impact SEO aspects. Your daily process should include tasks, milestones, and achievable actions working towards the bigger picture. These tasks can be new actions phased in or repetitive tasks in a rinse-and-repeat approach.
Weekly SEO Tasks
Traffic Analytics and Rank Tracking: To maintain adequate website health and know about all the ups and downs, digital marketers regularly monitor performance. Daily check-ins on traffic and keyword rankings help identify and address issues before they become major problems. Understand the typical behaviors of your visitors and see if they’re doing what you want them to do on your site.
Content Creation and Publishing: For most businesses, a big part of your week involves creating or reviewing content to maintain online visibility. To stay on schedule, know what’s ready, in progress, and coming next. Keep a calendar with page publication dates, target keywords, and search intent. Track the status of all content pieces and properly label them as finished, in progress, or needs review. Have a process to optimize content, including meta descriptions, title tags, alt text, and other on-page SEO factors. Always be aware of upcoming topics in the pipeline.
Backlink Building: Building backlinks is important for off-site SEO. Getting links from other sites builds your site’s authority. It’s an active process; you must actively seek and request links, especially if your site is new and trying to climb rankings. Part of your week should involve finding and asking for links from high-authority domains.
Local List Management: Customers use online local listings to find basic info about your company. Regularly managing these listings promises customers always get the right information, including Google Business Profiles and other directory listings. Minor issues can instantly penalize your profile, and fixing it might take days or even weeks. Catch and fix errors immediately to avoid disruptions in your online presence.
SEO Monthly Tasks
Technical SEO Health Review: Just like all departments within your business need constant maintenance and fixing to stay at 100% health, SEO also needs a monthly health review. It looks for problems affecting how search engines go through your site and how users experience it. These issues often pop up as your site grows, especially if you’re adding new pages or using extra tools.
Google Search Console has reports and tools to help, and you can work with your web development team to fix any problems. Your ongoing SEO checklist for every month should include fixing broken or missing links, handling 404 errors, managing redirects, checking site speed, updating plugins, and dealing with security issues.
Content Ideation and Keyword Research: Creating and publishing content every day is important, but don’t forget to come up with new ideas for future content. Each month, focus on finding new topics and creating groups of keywords for writers to work on. To write and publish good quality content, you should spend ample time on ideation as it keeps your content fresh and interesting for your audience.
Also Read: How To Promote Your Business Through Content Marketing
Quarterly SEO Tasks
Harmful Link Cleanup: Protect your website from losing its ranking due to harmful links by staying on top of disavowal requests. While links from good sites boost your page’s credibility, links from low-quality or spam sites can harm its authority and rankings. If they don’t respond or ask for payment, use a disavowal request to tell Google to ignore these harmful links when calculating your rank. It is important to check for disavowal links every quarter but do it more often if spam is a significant issue. Keep a record of bad links and your removal attempts to stay organized and support your disavowal requests.
Sitemap and Index Check: Make your website more accessible to Googlebot by having an XML sitemap, especially for larger sites with over 500 pages. Use automated tools like Yoast to create dynamic sitemaps efficiently. Periodically check your sitemap and index coverage to fix any problems that may arise as you add more pages. Sitemap maintenance, done quarterly, is a small task but can significantly impact indexing pages and managing your crawl budget.
Yearly SEO Tasks
Boosting Internal Links: Internal links guide both people and search engine bots around your website by directing them to related pages. A solid internal linking system makes it easier for bots to understand your site and index it. For human visitors, interesting internal links keep them engaged with your content and explore more pages. Doing a yearly internal link analysis using tools like Google Search Console can reveal which pages need more links. Adding links to these pages in existing content ensures they get noticed by Google and receive the link power to help them rank better.
Avoiding Keyword Cannibalization: Keyword cannibalization is the SEO issue that occurs when multiple pages on a site target the same or very similar keywords. This forces these pages to compete, splitting their authority and link power. Instead of having one strong page, you end up with two weaker ones. This issue can arise over time if content topics are reused or if existing pages start covering similar ground. An annual check of live URLs and page rankings helps find and fix pages that are too alike.
Comprehensive SEO Checkup: Conducting a thorough SEO audit every year can help you look at every aspect of your site. You can also use it to strategize how everything works together to achieve your goals. These yearly reports create a new data baseline, helping you set goals and plan your digital strategy for the next year. It’s a good idea to schedule these audits at the beginning of your fiscal year, aligning with your company’s annual business goals.
Summing Up
Prioritizing SEO maintenance is necessary for sustained online success. Remember, SEO isn’t a one-and-done task but an ongoing SEO checklist and consistent efforts to keep your website visible and competitive.
If the thought of managing SEO monthly tasks feels overwhelming, you’re not alone. Many business professionals face the challenge of finding time for ongoing SEO support.
Let Vitruvian SEO Agency take care of the technicalities, making sure your online presence stays strong. Focus on running your business while our experts navigate the changing dynamics of search engine protocols, providing you confidence in your digital strategy.
