SEO is a multifaceted discipline. It requires a solid strategy, connection to broader digital marketing (and business goals), and accountability.
While there are differing processes, approaches, and even opinions on how you should implement it, it is something that you can’t ignore or push off specific short-term tactics if you want to get to specific long-term results.
I’m against just blindly “doing” best practices or following a prescribed checklist in the absence of a strategy or documented plan.
Rather than giving you a specific checklist of things to do during the year, I’m unpacking activities categorized by daily, monthly, quarterly, and yearly.
I feel strongly that if you have a well-balanced approach to SEO that starts with a strategy and solid goals, then you can move into the ongoing campaign management or tactical implementation phase of moving through your year.
My goal is to unpack this cadence so that you will be able to factor it into your plan and see it through to ultimate return on investment (ROI) and success.
Daily
Educate Yourself
Staying up to date on industry news is a critical aspect of SEO that must be built into any maintenance or ongoing management plan.
This ranges from the mission-critical alerts and updates the search engines announce to keeping tabs on SEO best practices and breaking news from sources like Search Engine Journal.
AI news seems to be constantly disruptive, and we have to be mindful of how SEO is not just all about Google or concepts that we have applied in the past (if you’ve been in the game for a while).
Big shifts in the industry are hard to miss (whether they are about AI or not).
But smaller, more subtle changes can become magnified when you miss them or best practices become outdated.
Don’t fall behind or deploy outdated tactics!
Know Your Current Metrics
Monitoring your key SEO performance metrics in real-time, or at least once per day, is especially necessary for brands and organizations that rely on ecommerce transactions or lead volume to feed a sales team.
Knowing how your website performs in search through top-level metrics is important for recognizing any red flags. These could include:
A specific or aggregate positioning drop.
An organic traffic drop.
A decrease in sales or lead volume.
Being able to recognize problems as soon as they happen is key.
You need to be able to diagnose issues and reverse any negative trends before they impact your overall marketing and business goals.
By keeping tabs on actual performance, you can compare to benchmarks and baselines to make sure that you fully understand the cause and effect with your metrics and not have an issue happen for too long before you can intervene.
You can monitor less critical KPIs (any that don’t necessitate an immediate reaction) on a weekly basis.
Make Progress On Tactics
A solid digital marketing plan – especially an SEO plan – or campaign must start with strategy (including goals), tactics, assets needed, how it will be measured, and documented steps to be accountable and actionable.
Without a plan, process, or defined approach, you can waste a lot of time chasing specific SEO aspects that might be low impact and low priority – or tactics absent of a strategy that are part of a “best practices” checklist, but not one that is specific to your business.
The daily process should include specific tasks, milestones, and achievable actions that work toward the bigger picture.
The tactics can include things done for the first time in a phased approach or action items more in a rinse-and-repeat methodology.
Regardless, the list of specific technical, on-page, and off-page action items should be defined for the year, broken out into months, and further into tactics and progress that can be made on a daily basis to stay on track.
SEO requires both big-picture thinking and the ability to tackle daily tasks and action items.
Monthly
Report On Performance
Beyond the daily or weekly KPI monitoring, it’s often important to use monthly cycles to more broadly report on performance.
The focus of monthly checkpoints allows for dedicated time to compare a larger sample size of data and see trends.
Monthly performance reporting should include year-over-year comparisons of the completed month plus any available year-to-date stats.
Find meaningful intervals to measure and be consistent. Looking at bigger ranges of time helps to see trends that are hard to decipher in small sample sizes.
Any stories of the what and why for deviations in goal, celebrations for exceeding goals, and metrics that warrant possible changes to the plan are critical to the surface and prioritized through a dashboard or snapshot report of the performance data.
Recap Completed & Continuing Action Items
This is a chance to evaluate the tactics and execution in the previous month against the plan.
Was everything completed?
Were there deviations?
What obstacles or roadblocks were in the way or overcome?
Looking at the past helps shape the future.
When you combine the action items and tactics with the performance data, you should get an overall picture of the reality of what is driving SEO performance.
Plan Next Month’s Action Items & Evaluate The Plan
Monthly intervals are great for ensuring accountability for the completion of tasks.
Even when the year is planned out, things change in SEO, and performance isn’t always what we expect after doing something the first time.
Taking a monthly planning approach, adjustments can be made to the plan, such as doubling down on a specific tactic or adjusting the overall strategy to recalibrate.
By being agile enough to evaluate performance and tactics monthly, you can avoid overthinking things and reacting too swiftly, but also not let too much time pass and lose footing with trends toward goals.