Keeping up with SEO best practices can be an exhausting process. Between content creation, backlink growth and site performance monitoring, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by a long to-do list.
Learning to pace your monthly SEO tasks is a key skill that can help you achieve greater results faster. Here are 7 strategies to keep in mind when setting your SEO to-do list.
Prioritize Your Tasks
If you’re looking for ways to improve your SEO, it is vital to have a plan. Without one, you will find yourself wasting time and money. A good plan will include a list of recurring tasks that will help you achieve your goals.
The search landscape is constantly evolving. This is because algorithms change, new websites are created, and competitors are always rigorously pursuing better search rankings. To survive in the SEO jungle, you need to be a cunning prioritizer.
This involves evaluating the potential impact of a task and its cost to complete. For example, if your website has a technical issue that reduces user experience, you should prioritize fixing it to ensure that your business can continue to grow. Other important factors include determining the impact of a problem on site speed, crawling, indexing, and conversions.
It is also helpful to consider how long a specific project will take to complete. This will help you determine if it is worth the effort and will provide a positive ROI. For instance, creating an XML sitemap is relatively quick and inexpensive, while fixing errors that affect site speed may be more difficult but will have a longer-term effect on the business.
Prioritize Your Clients
SEO is a complex and ever-changing field. It requires meticulous attention to detail and constant reevaluation to ensure that best practices are consistently in place. While some tasks are universal (such as assessing content quality, analyzing link profiles and monitoring rankings) others are specific to individual clients or businesses.
Prioritizing these nuances can make or break your SEO strategy. A well-executed SEO strategy will secure a prime spot in search engine results pages, which will attract visitors and foster meaningful engagement. However, in the vast expanse of online content, securing this position can be challenging.
The good news is that there are numerous strategies for streamlining and executing on an SEO task list. For example, you can prioritize new content creation based on keyword research and purchase intent to drive the most ROI. Alternatively, you can optimize existing content instead of creating it from scratch. This usually takes less time and can be more cost-effective.
Other time-saving tactics include eliminating old content that has lost relevance or is beyond a reasonable period for reevaluation. Regularly examining your website for obsolete or unnecessary pages can save you a great deal of time and effort in the long run — especially with a handy tool like Yoast SEO Premium that makes it easy to delete and redirect.
Schedule Your Work
SEO is a complex and time-consuming process that requires regular analysis, audits and ongoing optimization. It’s important to plan and prioritize your tasks to ensure that you’re working on what matters most. This will help you to achieve the best results and improve your ranking.
Create a schedule for your daily, weekly and monthly tasks. This will help you stay organized and prevent you from spending too much time on low-impact activities. Having a clear list of SEO tasks will also make it easier to track progress and provide updates to clients.
Some of the key SEO tasks that need to be regularly performed include:
Keyword Research and Strategy Formation: Set aside time each week for conducting keyword research using tools like SEMrush or Moz. This will enable you to identify keywords that are most relevant to your business and target audience. Then, map these keywords to the pages on your website to optimize for search engine visibility.
Create a Calendar
Managing SEO tasks without a monthly to-do list can be overwhelming and lead to random or ad hoc efforts, wasting time and resources. With a detailed, recurring checklist of essential SEO tasks, your team can focus on high-impact activities that can move the needle and drive results.
Create a new Google Calendar and set it up for landscape orientation. This will make the calendar more legible and give you more room for adding task details.
Weekly content creation and publishing: Develop a schedule for creating and publishing new content to ensure a consistent flow of fresh, relevant content that aligns with your topic strategy and SEO goals.
Technical SEO audits: Checking for technical issues on a regular basis will help you keep pace with algorithm changes and ensure your site is functioning optimally. Use tools like Search Console, Google Page Speed Insights, and Rank Revival to keep on top of technical SEO updates.
Research and analysis: Weekly analytics reports can be critical to identifying trends in website traffic and ensuring that your SEO strategy is focused on the most effective channels. This may include analyzing email campaign performance, conducting competitor research, and researching keyword data.
Schedule Your Time
Whether you’re a solopreneur or a member of an agency, scheduling your time is essential to managing and executing SEO tasks effectively. Without a clear schedule, it’s easy to spend time on ineffective or low-impact efforts, draining your resources. A recurring monthly task list is one way to keep your SEO strategy on track. However, the SEO sphere is constantly changing, so it’s important to make time each month to update your task list accordingly.
For example, if you’re targeting a specific keyword, it’s crucial to review your competition’s content and performance metrics on a regular basis. This allows you to identify opportunities for improvement and avoid falling behind the curve. Additionally, scheduling time each day to perform quick and effective SEO tasks like checking for technical issues or planning new content will help you make progress toward your goals faster. This will prevent you from wasting time on ineffective or repetitive activities and move your business toward true SEO success. This will also simplify tracking and reporting, allowing you to spot trends faster.
Schedule Your Meetings
If you’re working with an SEO consultant, it’s a good idea to schedule your meetings in advance. This way, you can make sure that you’re both available at the same time and that you have the information you need before your meeting. Also, if you have any questions, be sure to send them to the consultant ahead of time. This will save you time and will ensure that your questions are answered in the most thorough manner possible.
Regularly scheduled meetings are vital to keeping everyone up-to-date on progress and ensuring that team members remain on the same page with regard to project planning efforts. Using a tool like CoSchedule will help you manage these tasks efficiently and effectively. This tool helps you set agendas, create and manage task templates, and track project progress in real-time.
Schedule Your Time
SEO is a long-term marketing strategy that requires consistent efforts to see results. For this reason, it’s important to schedule regular tasks into your monthly plan. This will help to keep you on track and ensure that your goals are met.
Some recurring SEO tasks include analyzing competitors, implementing technical SEO updates, monitoring search engine results and more. It’s also helpful to regularly brainstorm and plan content to build a strong content pipeline.
In addition to these recurring tasks, it’s also important to make time for more advanced SEO projects. For example, conducting competitor analysis requires a lot of research and can take up a significant amount of time. However, if you do it properly, you can get a lot of value from this activity.
A good way to manage these SEO tasks is to use a task management tool like Multicollab, which has an in-built mission feature that makes it easy for users to stay updated with added tasks, how long they’ve been working on them and more. In addition, completed missions are automatically moved to the XP feature, which can be fun and motivating for your team members. This is a great way to improve your productivity and optimize the workflow of your entire SEO team.
