SEO can be difficult without structure and take up a lot of resources. These tasks will help you stay on track.
SEO is a complex discipline. Structure and planning are essential. Otherwise, time & money can be wasted and used inefficiently.
Many SEO activities are never finished.
This is in addition to the fact that SEO can never be “done,” and it can be challenging to keep track of strategic and tactical elements that are most likely to impact.
You can plan SEO in a way that is easy to understand and implement.
These activities should be linked to goals and a bigger strategy. However, they provide a framework for how to ensure that SEO is well-planned and structured on an annually basis.
Daily Learn
SEO is all about staying current with industry news. This must be a part of any ongoing maintenance plan.
This includes the mission-critical updates and alerts search engines send to their users and breaking news sourced from the Search Engine Journal.
It is difficult to miss significant shifts in the industry.
Even subtler changes, however, can be magnified if you don’t notice them or if best practices are outdated.
Do not fall behind or use obsolete tactics
Get Current Metrics
Companies and brands that rely on eCommerce sales transactions or lead volume for their business operations must monitor their key SEO performance metrics at least once daily.
Knowing how your website performs in search using top-level metrics is crucial. This will help you recognize any red flags. These could be:
- Drop in specific or aggregate position
- Organic traffic drops
- A drop in sales volume or leads.
It is prominent to be able to recognize problems immediately.
Before you can improve your marketing and business goals, you must be able to diagnose and reverse negative trends.
You can keep track of actual performance and compare it to baselines and benchmarks to ensure that you understand the cause and effect of your metrics. This will allow you to intervene quickly if an issue occurs.
On a weekly basis, you can monitor KPIs that are less important (but don’t require immediate action)
Making Progress on Tactics
A solid SEO campaign or plan must include goals and specific tactics.
You can waste time finding low-impact and low-priority SEO elements without a process or plan.
Daily tasks should be outlined with milestones and actions that can be achieved to reach the larger picture.
These tactics could include items being completed for the first time using a phased approach or more complex actions that can be done with a repeat and rinse method.
To stay on track, the year’s list of technical, on-page, and off-page actions should be broken down into months and further into tactics, progress, and other details.
SEO requires both great-picture thinking and the ability of daily tasks and actions.
Monthly Report on Performance
It’s important to report performance more frequently than just the weekly or daily KPI monitoring.
Monthly checkpoints allow for dedicated time to analyze larger data samples and identify trends.
Monthly performance reporting should include comparison of the completed month and year-to-date stats.
Be consistent and find meaningful intervals to measure. Trends that are difficult to discern in small samples can be seen at more considerable periods.
It is crucial to share any stories about the why and what deviations from the goal, celebrations for surpassing goals, or metrics that may warrant changes to the plan. This can be done through a dashboard, snapshot report, or other means.
Summary Completed and Continuing Action Items
This allows you to compare the execution and tactics of the previous month with the plan.
- Did everything go as planned?
- Did there exist deviations?
- Which roadblocks or obstacles were there that prevented you from achieving your goals?
The past can help shape the future.
You can get a full visual of the natural driving forces behind SEO performance when you combine the performance data with the actions and tactics.
Next Month's Action Items and Evaluation of The Plan
It is essential to set up monthly intervals so that you can be held accountable for the completion of tasks.
Even if the year is well planned, SEO can change, and results may not be what we expected after the first attempt.
You can adjust the plan by using a monthly approach to planning. This includes doubling down on one tactic or changing the overall strategy to recalibrate.
You can be agile enough to evaluate monthly performance and tactics. This will allow you to avoid overthinking and not react too quickly but also prevent you from wasting too much time and losing sight of the trends towards your goals.
It is essential to balance planned actions and activities and the ability to pivot as needed. This will help you stay current and proactive.
Quarterly Technical Issues Assessment
It is assumed that you have addressed technical issues at the beginning of your SEO focus. You are also monitoring for red flags in daily or weekly monitoring. Each quarter, it is essential to look at an audit more broadly.
This audit should also include a review of Google Search Console, Bing Search Tools, and other issues.
Comparison to standards and benchmarks for site speed, mobile useability, validation of structured data, and other aspects that are not often considered regularly.
On-Page Issues Auditing
Websites can be hacked without an audit and with no monitoring.
An update to the code, database, plugin/extension, or publishing content could cause duplicate tags, contents, or pages missing elements.
It is essential to conduct a quarterly audit of all on-page issues. This can be done using various third-party tools that are both free and paid.
You can even get alerts from tools to notify you if there are any changes, such as a meta description being deleted.
However, it is essential to have a solid tool stack and a process for quarterly evaluation. This will allow you to compare the previous audit to determine if any changes are needed.
Link Profile Auditing
Most likely, the SEO plan includes some link-building.
It can be done by acquiring links with engaging content or by a more targeted plan of outreach and research.
It is essential to monitor the progress and visibility of all links after you have invested time and effort in the tactics.
This could be a performance indicator tracked in the monthly reporting phase. However, quarterly audits should be done in a more broad sense.
kEvaluating the quality and quantity of links are essential to ensure that your plan is effective in backlinks.
Additionally, even if you cannot catch spammy links or other SEO efforts on a daily or monthly basis, they can be detected here and dealt with through the disavow process.
Local Listings Audit
When local listings management is in maintenance mode, there will not be any need to make significant changes to NAP data (name, address, and phone number) or inconsistencies in listing information.
It doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t happen, and it is possible to “set it and forget.”
It is strongly recommended to audit your data using third-party tools at least once a quarter.
The audit can help identify problems that can be fixed on a one-off basis and provide guidance on performance, changes, and revisions to listings.
When local listings management is in maintenance mode, there will not be any need to make significant changes to NAP data (name, address, and phone number) or inconsistencies in listing information.
It doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t happen, and it is possible to “set it and forget.”
It is strongly recommended to audit your data using third-party tools at least once a quarter.
The audit can help identify problems that can be fixed on a one-off basis and provide guidance on performance, changes, and revisions to listings.
Google Business Profile data can be overwritten if third-party data sources are unavailable. In this case, inaccurate listing information may be added.
Data can change even if you don’t make any changes to your listing management. You must keep track of all the changes.
Yearly Measure Performance
To help you determine strategy and calculate ROI, it’s helpful to take a full year of data when running SEO annual plans.
SEO is a long-term effort to get the best position in search engines. It’s a worthwhile investment of time to examine performance data over 12 months, compare it with previous periods, review benchmarks, and celebrate your successes.
Even if there aren’t any agreements or budgets with outside providers/partners, it is worth taking an annual look at your performance and considering the expense as an investment.
Planning Strategy & Tactics
You should review your annual performance data and plan for next year’s goals, strategy, and tactics.
Even though your plan may change during maintenance, it is essential to have a plan and a target to measure progress.
There can be a detach between reality and expectations if there is no plan and without using past lessons and realistic views of the resources that will be invested in the next year.
It is better to get this resolved before you are months later.
Conclusion
Each of us has goals and specific outcomes we want to achieve through our SEO investments.
Instead of reacting to the noises and being pulled in by them, having a plan and structure for how work is done will help keep your investment and time focused.
You can balance planned and unplanned activities while still responding quickly, regardless of technical factors, backlinks, content, and on-page technical factors.
Also, ensure that you progress and that your priorities for SEO work are balanced.
