If you’re taking the DIY SEO route or want to monitor how your SEO company is doing, some tasks should be completed each month to ensure your website stays optimized and traffic continues to increase. As a follow-up to our do-it-yourself SEO article, we have put together six-monthly tasks that you should do monthly as a small business to help manage SEO performance and duties.
Task #1: Crawl your site
With any client website, we always start with the crawl. A website crawl will provide an immediately up-to-date picture of what’s on your site and any SEO concerns that may be there. We use Screaming Frog SEO Spider and SEMrush for crawling websites.
Once you have crawled the website, your report will provide you with a list of items that are not optimized for Google or not SEO compliant. From this data, you’ll want to create a prioritized list of things – not all will have the same impact – and build a plan to address them.
The website crawl will also give you a list by URL that includes your metadata, such as title tags, meta descriptions, headings, canonical tags, robot tags, and more. Once you have a list of your current tags, you’ll want to analyze and refine your SEO tags where necessary.
Task #2: Monitor Your Competition
Monitoring your competition can be a great place to find inspiration for new content or website functionality.
Analyzing competitive website data such as inbound links, publishing schedule, content types and topics, and which content is getting the most engagement can help you better understand what you need to do to compete for priority keywords.
Task #3: Plan Your Next Content
Planning next month’s content is an important exercise that will help you organize and build your editorial and publishing calendar. Your content should include visual, short-form, long-form, evergreen,d timely content.
SEO Tip: Every day, your customer service team – or any team member who engages with clients – has a wealth of data about what customers and prospects value or questions they have. Use that data and conversations to create new content on your website and optimize existing content.
Task #4: Check Your Backlink Report
Google has said many times that other people can’t hurt your rankings by link spamming your website – we don’t think this is the case for all businesses. We find that small companies don’t usually have a large number of valuable links – which can offset most link spam – therefore, they are at a higher risk of being the victims of this type of negative SEO.
Monitoring your inbound links can help you quickly identify and address any concerns before they become an issue. Get a report of the sites linking to your site (commonly known as your link profile) from Google Search Console, SEMrush, or Moz, and look through it to identify low-quality sites.
It’s natural to have a couple, but a mass of them could mean a past SEO effort has gone wrong or a negative SEO campaign from another source.
Once you identify low-quality links, a disavowed file should be created and submitted to Google through their search console.
Task #5: Measure Performance
Based on your goals and key performance indicators, measure the performance of the natural search channel. At least once a month, look at the pages with the most significant positive and negative traffic changes. A few success metrics to monitor each month include:
- Total Keywords Your Website Ranks For – Organic reach represents almost all keywords ranking in Google’s top 100 search results.
- Organic Traffic – Traffic that comes from the organic search results due to keyword rankings.
- Referral Traffic – Referral traffic represents traffic from other websites outside the primary domain or even subdomains on the primary domain.
- Social Traffic – Social traffic represents traffic coming from social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
- Direct Traffic – Direct traffic is usually a result of a marketing campaign or brand awareness and value.
- Traffic By Website Section – this can be gathered from Google Analytics.
- Traffic Year-over-Year – this can be gathered from Google Analytics.
- Rankings for Priority Keywords – We like to use SEMRush for this
- Conversion Rate by Source – this can be gathered from Google Analytics.
Task #6: Plan The Next Steps
Once you’ve completed steps 1-5, your next step is to plan and prioritize the SEO strategies for the next few months. This includes:
- They determine which pages can potentially increase traffic and sales from natural search traffic.
- They are planning who will optimize these new pages and when they will launch.
- You are planning and prioritizing fixing any issues you’ve found with your SEO audit.
- You are building your editorial and content calendar for new content sets.
- You are determining the metrics you’ll use to measure these changes.
Final Thought
By now, you’ve probably realized that SEO is not a quick fix or a one-and-done strategy. Contact our CEO directly if you need help with your monthly SEO management.