SEO Daily Tasks Checklist: 10 Things to Monitor
How often should I audit my site for SEO? What SEO daily tasks should I perform?
Search engine optimization is a long game, but if you want your content to rank you really need to improve your SEO efforts which is an ongoing process.
In this guide, you’ll discover:
- SEO daily tasks checklist to help guide you through the fundamental activities that need performing. This daily checklist will give you some ideas on how to improve your SEO strategy, including the key performance indicators you should have to improve your overall SEO
- Some weekly and monthly tasks to give you a complete round-up of what should be part of your SEO/content strategy
- Essential SEO tools that make performing these tasks a breeze
- Bonus SEO tips to boost your website
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Essential SEO Tasks
Here are some essential tasks you can perform to ensure your SEO efforts are at an optimal level.
Doing this daily, weekly, and monthly SEO routine will help to fuel website growth by keeping search engines happy. You’ll also be in a better position to acquire traffic from search engines.
Daily/Weekly Task List
Conduct these SEO tasks on either a daily or weekly basis to ensure your website has the potential to rank highly in search engines.
Monthly Task List
These effective SEO strategies should be part of your monthly content checklist.
For an SEO tools checklist, discover the best paid and free tools here.
SEO Daily Tasks Checklist
Check Google Analytics
An analytics tool like Google Analytics is where you’ll monitor the organic traffic that comes to your website. The data that Google Analytics shows you can help you to determine your content strategies and how effective these are.
If you haven’t already done so, then make sure you install Google Analytics correctly. If you’re not seeing any views, it may be that you haven’t set it up correctly. This guide will show you how to do it.
Your daily SEO tasks can include checking the following stats:
- Number of users
- Number of sessions
- Bounce rate
- Sources of traffic
- Popular pages
- Conversion rates/engagement rates
Check Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a goldmine of free information. You can get a full report of your website’s performance for aspects including:
- Total number of impressions
- Website clicks
- Average position in search results
- Average click through rate
These elements can give you an idea of how pieces of content are performing and which blog posts are generating the highest number of clicks and impressions
Another great thing about Google Search Console is that you can find out if you have any indexing issues. If you’re writing helpful content but you’re not getting any traffic, it may be that Google hasn’t indexed your posts.
You can see which pages haven’t been indexed – and the reasons why. You can also determine which pages have been indexed but aren’t ranking. In this case, you’ll need to ensure that you perform a content audit to check that you’re using your target keywords correctly.
Pay Attention To Any Website Errors
Google Search Console is great for finding technical issues that may be affecting your website, such as duplicate content issues.
By checking Google Search Console on a daily basis, you’ll be able to spot:
- Broken links
- Penalties given by Google for duplicate content
- 404 errors when pages can’t be found
- 500 internal server errors
In console, you can also check your core web vitals – these are factors that Google deems important for user experience.
A poor user experience can affect how your content pieces rank in search, so it’s well worth making the extra effort to add this task into your daily routine.
You can take a deep dive into which URLs need improvement and how your website performs on mobile devices.
Review Website Speed
Poor load times have a significant impact on search rankings so it’s important to check for any issues on a daily basis.
To increase your speed, you should aim to:
- Compress and optimize the size of your images
- Reduce any redirects
- Use a plugin like WP Rocket to minify files
- Use a content delivery network
- Optimize your website for mobile devices
The best (and free) tool for determining the speed of your website is Google PageSpeed Insights. This will reveal the load times of your website, including on mobile.
Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool is also awesome for revealing any problems affecting the responsiveness of your website.
Keyword Analysis
Finding relevant keywords for your website is part of your content marketing strategy, and without them, you’re going to struggle to acquire relevant quality traffic.
Weekly: on your daily or weekly checklist, you can search for other relevant keywords alongside your primary keyword.
Your keyword research should include long-tail keywords that you can rank for (including a primary keyword – the main focus of your article) and secondary keywords relating to it so that your content ideas can rank for hundreds of keywords.
While long-tail keywords tend to have less search volume than head terms (for example, SEO agency is a head term, while SEO agency in Ohio is a long-tail keyword).
Keysearch is a great tool for finding competitive terms to rank for.
Monthly: batch find competitive keywords with SEO tools as part of your monthly task list.
Your keyword research should include finding low-competition long-tail keywords that you can potentially rank for, as well as determining user intent and the types of content you need to create.
When finding focus keywords to rank for, you should also check SERPs to determine content formats (for example, will you need to add video to your articles), competitive analysis, and content gap analysis.
Content gap analysis will help you to create high-quality, rich content that meets user intent and provides a solution to what they’re searching for.
Monitor Broken Links
Monitoring broken internal links or external links should be a part of your SEO daily tasks. These help to boost the overall power of your website.
You can easily find any broken links in Semrush.
Once you find these, make sure you update them. For example, if you’ve linked to an internal lead magnet that you no longer offer, you’ll need to either delete these internal links or point them to a live resource.
For external links, make sure you update your links with those from high-authority websites within your niche to ensure you’re sending readers to a high-quality source of information.
Content Creation
Creating content is an ongoing part of your daily routine. When you form your content marketing strategy, you should consider how many pieces of content you’re going to create, a content gap analysis, social media strategy, and content pillars.
Daily/Weekly: Write articles that meet user intent – this usually comprises buying guides, informational guides, review posts, opinion articles, listicles. If you’re selling products or services, these will also be aligned with your buyer journey.
You may also want to repurpose your content for social media platforms.
Monthly: Check Google Trends and add ideas to your content editorial calendar – you can easily do this in a Google Sheets Template or in Google Docs.
You should also review your content strategy on a monthly basis. I generally perform a content plan every three months. This involves planning topic pillars and sub-topics.
Let’s look at an example – if you have a gardening website, a pillar topic may be vegatable gardens, while sub-topics could include ‘how to plant tomatoes’, and ‘how to grow onions’ etc.
Content Optimization
Your content calendar should include updating old blog posts to help increase keyword rankings. Google likes you to keep content fresh, which means content creators should revise low quality content and articles that are not optimized for SEO.
Here are some ways to optimize old posts:
- Use a SEO-friendly URL/title tags
- Check internal link opportunities within your content
- Use outbound links to good authority sites only
- Add a meta description including your target keyword
- Use the target keyword in blog post introductions and conclusions
- Use your focus keyword in the SEO title tag and one other heading
- Update images and compress them
- Update content for relevance
- Add content to keep your posts up-to-date
You can use a tool like Frase to update old posts for SEO.
Plus, you can use a plugin like RankMath if your website runs on WordPress to help you optimize your content.
Optimizing your content is a valuable investment of time, especially since it can enhance your search performance.
A few activities within your daily process may include:
- Updating images
- Adding infographics, graphics, videos
- Updating headings
- Adding high authority outbound links
- Internal linking to relevant posts
You may also want to do an extra check for any fresh information, especially on posts that aren’t evergreen.
Review Google SEO Rankings
Semrush’s site audit can give you an in-depth look at keyword rankings, backlink analytics, including your full backlink profiles.
It’s important to see where how your keywords are ranking as this determines if you need to tweak your approach to how you create content.
On a brand-new website, it can take months for your content to rank so don’t be dismayed if you don’t notice any keywords ranking or any improvements. Google needs to see that you’re a trustworthy source of information so it’s unlikely that you’re going to rank highly to start with, unless you find a keyword with very little to no competition.
Monitoring the movement of your articles in the SERPs is also beneficial. If you notice your rankings dropping, then this is often a sign that you need to update your content. However, this can also happen when Google updates occur. I always recommend updating old posts around 6-12 months later depending on how they’re ranking.
Build Backlinks
Building links is going to be on your monthly task list and part of your daily SEO routine. This off-page SEO task is something that every SEO specialist monitors since it can move the needle when it comes to how your content performs in the SERPs.
It’s important to build high-quality backlinks – you don’t want to build backlinks from spam sites or low-quality websites. I also don’t suggest using Fiverr to get backlinks either.
To build organic backlinks, there are a few things you can do:
- Find authority sites in your niche to guest post on
- Find sites with broken links to deleted posts and reach out to ask to link to your content instead
- Use HARO for link building
- See who is linking to your competitors and reach out to them
- Publish skyscraper/ultimate content resources that people will naturally want to link to
- Publish infographics to acquire natural links
- Find resource pages in your niche and reach out to site owners to be included
Extra Tips:
- Make sure you’ve set up Bing Webmaster Tools
- You can also set up a Google Business Profile to improve your online authority
- Use Google Tag Manager if you’re having trouble with your Google Analytic reports
- Content calendar templates can help you to devise a thorough editorial process for content creation
To Recap
This comprehensive SEO routine can help your website to grow in the right direction.
Remember, SEO is a long-term process so use this SEO daily tasks checklist to improve your rankings, website speed, and content creation.
Download your complete SEO checklist here
