Neglecting search engine optimization tactics and maintenance tasks can tank your website rankings and result in a loss of sales but keeping up with these things through a schedule can be easier than it sounds. There are things you can do daily, monthly and quarterly to maintain your SEO rankings as well as a couple of yearly tasks to include in your list. Some tactics you should be using and comparing against goals and benchmarks include link maintenance, keyword searches and accessibility. You can also optimize content like blogs, videos and pictures or use techniques like establishing relevant and authoritative backlinks as part of your maintenance.
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Daily Checks and Updates
You should check your business metrics daily; this shows you where the company is gaining traffic and any significant drops since your last check. Making the habit of pulling up your tracking and metrics portal first thing in the morning can give you all day to determine how to fix anything that has gone wrong and even implement some changes. Checking recent changes should also be a daily task as a video added yesterday might need to be optimized for the site to load correctly or a change to the site architecture may have caused a spacing error on one of the pages.
Check and update progress towards tactics goals like content building, schema markup and enhancing site security every day. This ensures you are making consistent headway in your plans as well as giving you the time to get everything done on or ahead of schedule. If you are managing a team, make sure you are reminding each member of where their work should be by the end of the day and then work towards that goal yourself. Building habits like daily checks and updates can turn using and maintaining SEO tactics into sustained progress over the month, quarter or year.
Update your education on the current search engine optimization tips and tricks, the latest algorithm changes and even what your competitors are doing to keep up. Learning something new about SEO everyday can make the task seem less intimidating and help you innovate solutions and techniques to use to improve your digital footprint. You can include topics like which keywords are most relevant to your company, how to build quality content and which journalists are looking for an authoritative source in your industry to your education and make progress towards your tactics goals at the same time.
Monthly Reports and Plans
Make and go over progress reports on goals and tactics each month with your team to see where improvements have been made, what still needs to be done and what did not quite go as planned. This includes comparing the plan you made for the month with what the actual metrics and progress was so you can better plan for the next month. You can even determine where your knowledge on SEO seems to have been lacking over the month to give yourself new focus moving forward in areas of social media optimization, content creation and video or keyword placement.
Your progress reports should consider any issues with loading or site maps as well as other accessibility or structure issues so they can be addressed and monitored in future months. This is especially true for any critical errors which arose in one area when updating another, slow loading speeds and complaints or reports you received from customers about your site. Checking in with each technique, tool and innovation used for search engine optimization with a monthly report can be the best way to find issues, brainstorm ways to fix them and plan a way to further increase your rankings the next month.
Quarterly Auditing and Review
Every quarter, audit and review on-page and technical issues such as accessibility and structure. Include any reported issues to the tools and portals offered by various search engines and review what fixes have been implemented, which have worked, and which issues still need to be addressed. If the structure of your website interferes with accessibility or seems overly complex or crowded for the average customer, then your traffic will drop. Reviewing which things were changed before and after a drop can show you where issues are.
It is also important to audit and review your link profile and local listings. Link building is a way to establish your brand as a trustworthy authority in your industry, but broken or irrelevant links in your profile can have the opposite effect. Your local listings information should include accurate information for your company such as phone number, URL and physical address as well as the name and the types of products or services you offer. Once these listings are built, some errors or inconsistencies may pop up from time to time, so a quick audit and review of them can keep you on top of it.
Yearly Measurements and Strategy
Your yearly maintenance tasks include taking measurements of your progress, reviewing numbers and evaluating your strategy and tactics. When you check metrics every day, make monthly reports and conduct a quarterly audit, you are doing much of the work for this already and will just need to compile everything for gauging how well you did. You can then take this information and use it to build a new strategy for the next year, break that up by quarter and month, to stay on the first page of search engine results lists.
Neglecting SEO tactics can mean missing out on the boost those things can give your numbers, but with daily education on the subject, monthly progress reports and quarterly auditing of the tactics you have used, you can measure a strategy over the course of a year and determine how well it is working for your company. Daily education means that you can update and fix any issues as they arise, keep up with changes made by search engines and the demands of the market, or even innovate new techniques for search engine optimization.