SEO Maintenance Checklist: Essential Year-Round Tasks

Maintaining your SEO strategy is crucial for staying ahead in search engine rankings and ensuring your website’s performance. While a strategy is necessary for SEO success, daily, monthly, quarterly, and annual duties must be carried out to achieve it. Here is a comprehensive checklist of essential year-round SEO tasks to keep your strategy in top shape.

Daily Tasks

1: 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. Regularly read SEO blogs, news sites, and forums to stay informed about the latest trends, algorithm updates, and best practices.

2: Know Your Current Metrics
Track key performance indicators (KPIs) daily to monitor your website’s performance. This includes metrics like organic traffic, bounce rate, and conversion rates.

3: Make Progress On Tactics
Allocate time each day to implement specific SEO tactics. This could involve optimizing content, building backlinks, or improving site speed.

Monthly Tasks

1: Report On Performance

• Use monthly cycles to report on performance more generally. Compare a larger sample size of data to 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 goals, celebrations for exceeding goals, and metrics that warrant possible changes to the plan are critical to surface and prioritize through a dashboard or snapshot report of the performance data.

2: Recap Completed & Continuing Action Items
Summarize the tasks you’ve completed over the past month and evaluate their impact. This helps in planning future actions.

3: Plan Next Month’s Action Items & Evaluate The Plan
Plan the SEO tasks for the upcoming month based on the performance data and ongoing strategy.

Quarterly Tasks

1: Technical Issues Auditing
Conduct a broader audit each quarter to identify any technical issues. This includes a review of reported issues in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, comparison to benchmarks and standards for site speed, mobile usability, validation of structured data, and aspects that aren’t often looked at on a more frequent basis.

2: On-Page Issues Auditing
Review on-page SEO elements such as title tags, meta descriptions, headers, and content to ensure they are optimized for target keywords.

3: Link Profile Auditing
Analyze your backlink profile to identify and disavow harmful links and look for opportunities to acquire high-quality backlinks.

4: Local Listings Audit
If you have a local business, regularly audit your local listings to ensure they are accurate and up-to-date.

Yearly Tasks

1: Measure Performance
When running annual plans for SEO, and even when not on annual agreements or evaluation cycles, taking an entire year of data and evaluating it is helpful to advise strategy and find measurable ROI calculations. SEO is a long-term process that aims to achieve the most competitive positioning and visibility possible in search engines. It is a valuable investment of time to look at performance data over 12-month spans, compare it to previous periods, look at benchmarks, and celebrate successes. 

2: Planning Strategy & Tactics
Take a step back annually to review your overall strategy and adjust it based on the performance data. This ensures that your SEO efforts are aligned with your business goals and market changes.

Summary

With this structured approach, you can systematically maintain and improve your SEO strategy throughout the year. By staying informed, monitoring performance, and regularly auditing your site, you’ll ensure your website remains optimized and competitive in search engine rankings.

Image: @freepik
Source: Search Engine Journal