Getting your website to the top of Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) is a huge accomplishment that can bring your business a steady stream of traffic. But getting to this point typically doesn’t happen without a certain amount of effort.
While search engine optimization (SEO) is a critical piece to this puzzle, it’s important that you know how to improve your digital marketing strategies over time to get more value from your efforts. This is where SEO maintenance comes into play.
What is SEO Maintenance?
SEO maintenance is the ongoing monitoring and improvement of optimization strategies used to help improve search engine rankings. This is a continuous process that never really finishes and is designed to be handled in different stages weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually, based on certain website objectives.
Why is SEO Maintenance Important?
While you may have seen some early success when implementing certain SEO practices for your website, it’s important to remember that Google’s algorithms are constantly changing. On top of this, there are countless competitors trying to rank their own pages for similar keywords to your own.
Because of this, it’s essential to make sure that over time, your SEO initiatives are still paying off the same way they used to. By tracking your site’s success and making subtle or even larger tweaks throughout the year, you can achieve much more visibility across search engines, bringing you additional leads and higher conversion rates.
SEO Maintenance Checklist
To help you gauge the performance of your SEO efforts while prioritizing initiatives that can bring you the most benefits to your rankings, we’ve compiled an SEO maintenance checklist you can follow, broken down by daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly tasks:
Daily Tasks
- Stay Updated on SEO Trends: Conduct a daily scan of SEO news sites to stay aware of any newly discovered algorithm changes that could impact your overall digital marketing goals.
- Track Core SEO Metrics: Review important KPI snapshots such as keyword rankings, organic traffic trends, and click-through rates (CTR). While these metrics will likely shift from day to day, it’s important that you can quickly identify any significant drops worth investigating.
- Execute and Necessary Small SEO Tasks: Focus on easy-to-handle tasks such as updating content, improving meta titles and descriptions, answering comments, or checking for brand mentions on social media.
Weekly Tasks
- Conduct a Site Health Check: Run a site health scan that identifies any broken links currently showing up and fix them. You should also review your Google Search Console reporting to verify if new site pages have been crawled and indexed correctly.
- Track Your Keyword Progress and Performance: Look at weekly snapshots of your keyword ranking gains and losses. Determine whether you’re seeing positive impacts from your SEO initiatives or if further improvements are necessary.
- Optimize Site Content: Review any older and poorly ranking web pages and consider where and how you can optimize them. Update any irrelevant articles with new information and include any appropriate internal links to other supporting topics on your site.
- Review Backlink Profile: Review any new backlinks you’ve recently acquired to make sure they’re from high-authority websites. Be sure to disavow any spammy or toxic links coming from unauthorized parties through Google’s Link Disavow tool.
Monthly Tasks
- Use Google Analytics and Search Console to Analyze Your Site: Leverage your Google site developer tools to monitor user site behavior, traffic sources, and the type of search inquiries being used to locate your site.
- Identify and Fix Technical SEO Issues: Look for 404 errors, redirect errors that may have surfaced after a site migration, or any duplicate content that could be impacting your rankings. Fix any of the issues you find.
- Maintain Local SEO Listings: Ensure your business information is accurately represented online by updating any professional profiles, including Google Business, Yelp, and other platforms that reference your company information.
- Conduct Backlink Audits: Continue to monitor any changes you’ve made to improve your backlink portfolio and make sure that Google has properly disavowed any spammy links that you’ve identified previously.
Quarterly Tasks
- Conduct a Deep Technical Audit: Conduct a comprehensive evaluation of your website’s technical health. This includes reviewing your website page loading performance, mobile-friendliness, and how well your pages are being indexed.
- Review On-Page SEO Issues: Review if all your content pages are using proper meta tags, headers (H1-H6), and that you’re leveraging structured data on all relevant web pages. At the same time, ensure all your internal links are properly formatted, valid, and make use of your targeted keywords.
- Evaluate Your Competitors: Take some time to review how your competitors’ own SEO campaigns are performing. See if they’ve recently dropped in rankings or if they are capitalizing on new ranking opportunities worth looking into for your own site.
- Audit Your Local Business Listings: If you have a physical location, use this quarterly review to verify that your business NAP (Name, Address, and Phone number is consistent across all major online directories.
Yearly Tasks
- Measure Annual SEO Performance and ROI: Review your YoY performance of any SEO initiatives you’ve put in place. Look at your website traffic numbers, growth trends in your lead acquisition or revenue, and the amount of time and resources invested. Identify whether or not you're seeing adequate returns in your investments>
- Set New SEO Goals: Set any new goal based on the data you’re seeing between one year’s SEO reports and the next. Plan out any necessary content calendars, refresh your keyword focus, and identify any new competitors you’ll want to track going into the next year.
When to Consider an SEO Agency for Maintenance
Depending on the size of your website and the extent of your SEO goals, you might want to consider hiring an SEO agency to help you ensure you’re getting the best results from your optimization strategies.
If you’re finding that you have too many pages to manage or that you’ve run out of internal resources to manage SEO practices, outsourcing these tasks to agencies can be really helpful. They have the advanced tools and industry experience needed to make sure you’re not wasting your SEO efforts and that you’re getting the best ROI possible.
FAQs
What is SEO maintenance?
SEO maintenance refers to the regular upkeep needed when implementing new initiatives to help improve your website’s ranking performance. This includes regularly auditing your site health, addressing broken links and outdated content, and continuously adjusting your strategies based on how well your keywords are ranking.
How often should I perform SEO maintenance?
SEO maintenance should be handled all throughout the year, with different tasks being handled daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually.
Can I manage SEO maintenance in-house?
Absolutely. However, depending on the size of your website and the complexity of your SEO initiatives, it may also be wise to enlist the help of a trained SEO agency.
What happens if I stop doing SEO maintenance?
While your rankings may not see significant drops overnight, without regular SEO maintenance, you will likely see a negative impact on your web traffic over the long term.