SEO is hard work. It takes a consistent effort to pay off. Some SEO tasks are better suited for your monthly-to-do list because consistent application is the best way to reap the benefits.
So, what are the essential monthly SEO tasks for content optimization? In this blog, our Senior SEO Strategist, Tanisha Mitchell, will go into the 20 most effective monthly SEO tasks to complete your SEO plan checklist and stay on top of search results.
What You’ll Learn:
- Optimize Existing Content
- Evaluate the Quality of Your Content
- Remove Low-Quality Content
- Use Content Clusters
- Keep Tabs on Your Rankings
- Analyze the Competition
- Stay Up to Date With the Industry News
- Check the Technical Aspects of SEO
- Make Important Link Updates
- Optimize for Voice Search
- Engage With Users
- Review Schema Opportunities
- Conduct New Keyword Research
- Analyze for Mobile Friendliness
- Review Featured Snippets
- Examine Entity Salience
- Optimize Landing Pages
- Utilize AI and Machine Learning
- Analyze Core Web Vitals and USer Experience (UX)
- Video SEO and Multimedia Content Optimization
Our Expert’s Insight on Monthly SEO Tasks
Consider your website as a vehicle, and SEO as its maintenance schedule.
Just as your car’s maintenance checks and tune-ups improve its lifespan and performance, regular SEO health checks and optimization tasks for your website ensure it remains functional and visible. You’re essentially changing the “website oil” (updating content), rotating the “SEO tires” (refreshing keywords and meta tags), and checking the “digital breaks” (ensuring links are working and pages load quickly).
At the same time, it’s important to know the difference between daily, monthly, and long-term SEO. SEO daily tasks tend to involve those little wins and work toward your larger strategy, such as rank tracking, minor content updates, and technical SEO fixes, while monthly SEO tasks help make incremental progress through keyword research, on-page optimization, content development, and reporting.
Both daily and monthly SEO contributes to your long-term SEO strategy, which takes a holistic approach to SEO through content strategies, annual targets, and more.
If you put off monthly SEO maintenance tasks, you risk losing your search engine ranking to competitors, damaging your site’s health, and diminishing the user experience, which could be significantly more challenging and costly to resolve down the line.
Integrating a routine set of monthly SEO tasks into your marketing strategy ensures you stay consistent, efficient, adaptable, and able to track your SEO performance effectively.
Why You Need Monthly SEO
Suppose you publish a page today. You check back in a couple of days and it’s ranking well in the SERPs. Fantastic! However, SEO is not a one-time activity, but rather a persistent process.
Your competitors aren’t stationary, and neither are the algorithms that decide your website’s rank. This is where having consistent, monthly SEO plans keeps your site proactive.
Besides consistency, efficiency will help you solidify your monthly SEO plans.
Random or ad hoc tasks often lead to ineffective attempts, low-impact results, or redundant efforts, burning both time and resources. With a well-defined task list, you can focus on high-impact items, such as optimizing meta descriptions or growing your backlink profile.
Having a monthly SEO plan in place will also help you achieve your long-term goals as you work toward that larger strategy with smaller yet equally meaningful SEO tasks.
Adaptability is the key to success here. Staying in the loop with frequent changes will help you adapt your monthly SEO tasks to evolve with industry standards.
Finally, having a monthly SEO task checklist will simplify tracking and reporting, helping you identify trends that are working and adjust what’s not quicker.
To get the best results from your plan, it’s best to break down your monthly SEO tasks into manageable chunks that won’t overwhelm you or your team. Making your SEO optimization checklist realistic and attainable will go a long way in helping you secure long-term success.
The Ultimate Monthly SEO Checklist
To succeed with your monthly SEO tasks, it’s important to know what to include and how to go about each aspect of your strategy. Having a clear checklist can help you maintain consistent organization and keep your strategy on schedule.
To guide you, here are some of the main items to include in your monthly SEO checklist.
1. Optimize Existing Content
If you’ve been working in content marketing for a while, your library of content may not 100% meet your latest (or highest) standards. After all, both SEO and your marketing quality are evolving with time.
Critical SEO tasks to update your content entail refreshing titles, keywords, and outdated or broken links.
- Titles: Both your main header tags (H1s and H2s) and any other subheadings could benefit from refreshes, ideally with new keywords worth targeting or popular phrases that people are searching.
- Keywords: Research new keywords that are worth targeting and incorporate them into your content throughout. However, make sure your keyword inclusions appear naturally and avoid stuffing, as this can do more harm than good.
- Links: Internal and external links within your content should be both relevant and functional. Be sure to replace or redirect any broken links and use anchor text that can support those linked pages, especially with your internal linking efforts.
2. Evaluate The Quality of Your Content
Who told you content quantity is top dog? It’s the quality of your content that reigns supreme.
Evaluating content quality is not as abstract as it sounds. What you’re looking for is rich content.
Rich content is robust. It involves engaging audiences with fresh and varied content that can include videos, infographics, and actionable tips that shake things up from regular text content.
You should also try to optimize for Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines, which favor content that demonstrates Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. In short, your content should show expertise and come across as trustworthy to establish your brand as an authority in your industry.
3. Remove Low-Quality Content
While optimizing old content should be part of your content plan, not all old content or pages are worth the time and effort it takes to refresh or optimize. You should have a system in place to determine which pages are so low quality that they should simply be removed from the archives altogether.
So how do you know which pages have a low enough quality that they should be removed? Focus on thin content. This just means it adds minimal value (if any) to the end-user. Much like you want to prioritize rich content, you want to eliminate thin content.
There are a couple of ways to remove pages without messing up your SEO:
- Do a 301 redirect from the page to another URL
- Add a noindex tag to the page
- Canonicalize the page to another URL
4. Use Content Clustering and Topic Authority
One of the most effective SEO tasks to implement today is clustering your content and establishing your website as a topic authority. By creating plenty of content around various industry topics, you’ll be able to develop a website that functions as a central hub for information among your audiences.
So, how does content clustering fit into your SEO in a monthly plan? Specifically, content clustering will involve creating a pillar page that covers a broad topic in depth.
For example, a fitness website might have a pillar page about workout routines, with subtopics covering specific types of workouts to achieve different results.
By implementing this kind of content structure, not only does your website become a topical authority, but it also gives search engines more context for what your site is about, helping with SEO. You’ll also be able to target all relevant keywords, from broader short-tail terms to long-tail phrases that competitors might not cover as extensively.
Engaging more readers who find value in your content can further indicate to Google that your content is worth ranking above competitors.
5. Keep Tabs on Your Rankings
Google SERPs can change in an instant. Unfortunately, new competition comes just as quickly. Because of this, add “check rankings” to your list of monthly SEO tasks. This will help keep your digital marketing plan dynamic so you can respond to the most recent needs.
As part of your monthly SEO efforts, you’ll want to effectively monitor keyword rankings using various tools, including Google Search Console and keyword checking tools like Ahrefs and Semrush. Incorporating Semrush tasks optimization and other tools into your list of SEO activities can help with multiple SEO tasks, such as:
- Analyzing SERP features like rankings and competition
- Tracking competitive keywords
- Monitoring fluctuations in rankings as they occur
As one of the most important monthly SEO activities, monitoring rankings can significantly help you monitor where you fall compared to other brands and competitors.
If you decide to use Google Search Console, head to “Performance” and scroll through the results to see which queries and keywords you show up for in search results.
6. Analyze the Competition
Analyzing your competition gives you a starting point to practice benchmark marketing, where you will use your competition as a benchmark for your own unique SEO performance.
The most important part is to define 3–5 key performance indicators that you’ll determine results from. In the case of SEO tasks, you may want to include things like the number of keywords that a website is ranking for, how many number-one positions they have, and clicks.
In the process, compare competitors’ keywords with your own, along with top-ranking pages. If you notice fluctuations in rankings, such as a competitor outranking you for a certain term, see what page ranks for that term and find out what that competitor might have done to boost their ranking.
For instance, you might see that a competitor updated a particular blog post recently and that this update led to a boost in rankings. You may then take cues from this update, adding them to your content SEO checklist to maintain a competitive edge.
Check out this video to learn how to use competitive analysis through benchmarking in your marketing plan:
7. Stay Up to Date With Industry News
The best way to know what is happening in the industry is to stay alert and make a conscious effort to consume the news.
The best way to do this is to find a voice of authority that you trust to deliver up-to-date and correct information.
Pay attention to digital marketing news and news within your specific industry. Stay up-to-date on noteworthy changes like Google algorithm updates and industry-specific regulations.
There are many reliable news sources you can turn to and check as one of your monthly SEO tasks. Two of the leading examples include Search Engine Land and Search Engine Journal, with another top source being the Moz Blog. Each of these consists of regular updates from industry leaders.
Big news most likely means it’s time for you to switch up your marketing plan or monthly SEO tasks. As you stay informed, you can more quickly pivot to keep your SEO strategy flexible and maximize performance.
8. Check the Technical Aspects of SEO
Checking the technical aspects of SEO can be tedious, but adding it to your monthly SEO tasks actually makes the job way easier.
By breaking up the technical checks in your digital marketing plan with a monthly to-do method, you’ll be more thorough in your search. Plus, you’ll find technical issues sooner rather than finding them weeks after the issue took place.
When you’re performing these technical checks, watch things like:
- Crawl reports
- Errors
- Duplicate content
- First input delay (FID), largest contentful paint (LCP) and cumulative layout shift (CLS), aka Google Core Web Vitals
- Broken internal and external links
- URL structures
- HTTPS site protocol
- XML sitemap and robots.txt file optimization
- Accuracy of schema markup or structured data
You can use tools directly from Google to help you with the technicalities (e.g. Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, Analytics, and Mobile Friendly Testing Tool).
Third-party tools you may want to consider include Screaming Frog and SEMrush.
9. Make Important Link Updates
The use of high-quality links throughout your content has the potential to give you a serious SEO boost.
Keeping tabs on these links is an important part of your monthly SEO tasks. That’s because content creators change things up all the time, removing pages, changing URLs, or directing pages to other destinations.
One thing you don’t want to do is send your readers to a broken, outdated link. Broken links can signal to users that you’re not on top of the industry and that your content is outdated and even irrelevant.
Conversely, current functioning links can keep readers moving along the customer journey and establish you as a trustworthy authority.
As you update your content, make sure that any linked material is relevant, current, and helpful to your reader.
10. Optimize for Voice Search
In today’s digital economy, users want shortcuts for finding the content they need. Voice search makes it easier and faster to ask a question and get an answer in seconds.
As you optimize for voice search, you’ll want to answer questions using a more conversational tone, including natural keyword phrases that people are likely to say out loud to their voice assistants.
According to recent stats, nearly 40% of adults in the U.S. use voice assistants daily. Voice search continues to rise in popularity today as it becomes increasingly convenient through tools like Google Home and Amazon Echo, which is why it’s integral to SEO task management efforts.
Many people use voice search to connect with local businesses, asking questions like “What Chinese restaurants are open near me?” or “What hardware stores are in [city]?” If you have a brick-and-mortar business or offer locally-targeted offerings, targeting these kinds of terms will be a critical part of your content SEO checklist.
Optimize your content for voice searches by creating content that answers real user questions quickly and clearly.
To better understand what users want to do, conduct keyword research. This is especially important if local SEO is your priority. A lot of people will search for things near them and, if you’re a brick-and-mortar depending on walk-in traffic, you need to focus on voice search optimization tactics.
11. Engage with Users
In your SEO strategy checklist, include steps to hook local users. Be sure to claim your Google Business Profile and optimize your profile and reviews.
Formerly known as Google My Business, Google Business Profile is essential for local businesses to connect with local traffic. When managing your Google Business Profile as part of your monthly SEO efforts, be sure to integrate and update elements like:
- Business hours
- High-quality images of your business and offerings
- Reviews from customers
- Responses to reviews that show your engagement with customers
Updating each of these components when going down your SEO plan checklist can help you with your local SEO strategy, especially when targeting voice search terms.
You can also look into paid options, such as Google Guaranteed, to see if it might be worth it to your business’s bottom line.
Another approach is staying active on your brand’s social media profiles. Whether you rely on the free opportunities these channels create or lean into the paid ads side, social media opens a lot of doors for brands.
The engagement you’ll get through social media gives you a chance to link to your content, get to know your audience and build a legit brand that reflects what they want to see.
12. Review Schema Opportunities
Another SEO tactic to try is optimizing your schema opportunities. Schema is essentially a roadmap to your website that you hand over to the search engines’ crawlers without making it obvious to your readers.
Schema, specifically Question & Answer Schema or FAQs, are incredibly helpful when it comes to crawlers determining what your site is about. If you take advantage of schema opportunities, you’re essentially helping the algorithm do its job. And if you can help influence it, why wouldn’t you?
13. Conduct New Keyword Research
While users consistently update their preferences and search queries, your competition is optimizing their content to outrank yours. This is why you might be number 1 on the SERP one day for a particular keyword but drop down to spot 3 or 4 a few days later.
To stay on top of this, make sure you refresh your keywords often.
Don’t limit yourself to traditional keyword research; instead, prioritize user intent and semantic search using various tools like Clearscope and Surfer SEO.
14. Analyze for Mobile Friendliness
People are accessing your site on their mobile devices and if your page isn’t ready for it, they’re going to click right off.
Not only does this affect your user experience, but it also affects Google’s crawlers’ experience. If the algorithm can tell that your site does not translate well to a mobile device, your ranking is going to take a totally avoidable hit.
The user experience is essential here, as you should focus on giving mobile users a convenient layout that’s highly readable and navigable, with equally easy navigation and clickable buttons.
When analyzing for mobile friendliness ask yourself the following questions:
- Is the layout okay?
- Does your message come across the same?
- Do the buttons work?
The easier it is for people on mobile devices to explore your site, the more they’ll be likely to re-engage with your site and move down the sales funnel.
15. Review Featured Snippets
Google’s Featured Snippets are another place you can use to grab your audience’s attention.
Snippets are basically quick answers that Google highlights to give people vital information right from the SERP.
While people can get the details they need without leaving search engines, a good snippet could encourage users to explore the cited source for more information.
The downside of Featured Snippets is that you can’t opt into them. Google chooses which site would make a good featured snippet.
The upside of this, though, is that you can get a little peek into what Google is looking for when looking at the Featured Snippets that come up for your preferred keywords. If your page wasn’t selected, look at the pages that were, take some notes on things they did, and then recreate it on your page, putting your spin on it.
One of the best ways to increase your chances of appearing for a Featured Snippet is to create concise and clear content, often when answering specific questions. So, make creating bite-sized content specifically for snippets, such as FAQs, part of your monthly SEO optimization checklist.
16. Examine Entity Salience
Put simply, Entity Salience is all about making content “deeper” and ensuring it connects with other related topics, labeling those topics as “entities.” The more cohesive and in-depth your content is, the better its Entity Salience will be.
Google can now recognize entities and understand the links between them within a text. This marked evolution enables Google to better comprehend the purpose of the content, enhancing its ability to serve more accurate search results, like the example below.
Entity optimization will involve structuring your content around different types of entities based on Google Knowledge Graph definitions, such as people, products, and organizations.
Through the optimization of content to target these entities, you can get a better chance of ranking for entity-related search terms and showing up in Rich Results. One of the best ways to incorporate entity optimization into your on-page SEO activities list is to incorporate Schema.org markup, i.e., structured data, which will help search engine crawlers better understand your content and what it’s about.
17. Optimize Landing Pages
Every page on your website, especially landing pages, should have a clear goal that aligns with the user’s position in the buyer’s journey. Do they need information? Are they ready to purchase?
For instance, a blog post or service page functioning as a landing page could have the goal of educating and informing audiences, while a product page could have the goal of selling and a contact page one of generating leads.
You can then analyze and measure each page’s metrics based on the goals you have in place.
A/B testing is particularly helpful with landing page optimization, as you can see how two pages perform when changing out a single element between them, whether it’s text, images, videos, or calls to action.
Remember, your page or post can’t cater to everyone. A targeted approach results in a more efficient and effective SEO strategy.
18. Utilize AI and Machine Learning in SEO
Another critical component of monthly SEO tasks will involve factoring in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).
AI makes it easier for search engines to understand the content they rank, helping them detect context and readability, among other ranking factors.
Technologies like Multitask Unified Model (MUM) and Google RankBrain are changing how search engines rank content as they work to understand user intent and relevance.
Remember, the better your content is for readers, the better it will perform in the “eyes” of AI.
19. Analyze Core Web Vitals and User Experience (UX)
You might wonder, how do I check for and fix technical issues monthly? One of the best ways to do so is to analyze Core Web Vitals and your website’s overall user experience.
Google’s Core Web Vitals tracks certain critical metrics such as:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This metric measures the amount of time it takes for the largest components of web pages to appear, with the ideal time falling around 2.5 seconds.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): Core Web Vitals tracks this metric to measure the time it takes for a webpage to respond to user actions such as clicks or key presses to understand the page’s overall responsiveness.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Use this to determine how different elements on your pages move as the page loads or when users engage with them.
These and other metrics assess your site’s UX based on interactivity, page load speeds, and visual stability. By optimizing for these components in a monthly SEO report, you can keep more users engaged with a smooth experience while supplementing other monthly and daily SEO tasks for better rankings.
Tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse can help you track these metrics as you go down your list of SEO tasks.
20. Complete Video SEO and Multimedia Content Optimization
One final monthly SEO task to implement is to optimize your videos and other multimedia content. These visual components should be a part of your content audit in an SEO checklist, as they can supplement other SEO efforts to further boost rankings.
As video content becomes increasingly prevalent in search results, you cannot overlook this vital element. When optimizing videos, optimize for SEO by including various features, such as:
- Descriptive titles and descriptions
- Transcripts to improve accessibility
- Compelling thumbnails that get viewers’ attention
Clear video titles and transcripts are particularly effective, easy wins as part of your list of SEO tasks. You can optimize titles with the most relevant keywords or trending phrases, while transcripts can go within YouTube descriptions or on a corresponding blog post.
You should also embed your videos on relevant pages to complement surrounding text content and images. Doing so can lead people to spend more time on your pages, which is a critical ranking signal for Google and can lead to improved results.
Performance Analysis and Reporting
To succeed with SEO task management and get the best results from your SEO optimization checklist, take the following steps for proper reporting and analytics:
1. Review Relevant Analytical Data
Start by reviewing various types of data against the goals you have for your SEO activities, including metrics like:
- Website traffic
- Keyword rankings
- Conversions
Google Analytics and Semrush task optimization tools, among others, can help with analytics and provide you with accurate data in real-time.
2. Analyze Competitors and Look for New Opportunities
You should also regularly look at competitors and see how they’re performing.
In doing so, compare your top competitors’ rankings and general SEO performance to your site’s while also looking for new opportunities.
While you might want to continually optimize existing content to stay ahead of competitors, you might also identify content gaps that could contribute to your content SEO checklist. These opportunities could involve keywords your competitors are targeting while you aren’t, or they may include terms or topics they aren’t pursuing that you can cover.
3. Measure the Success of Past Optimizations
To continually perfect your strategy and inform SEO daily tasks to long-term efforts, be sure to gauge the success of previous optimizations.
Compare each month’s efforts to determine how they got you to where you are, and take steps to improve if you find that any elements are underperforming.
Using Tools to Simplify SEO Task Management
If you want to keep optimization simple and effective, it’s important to have the right tools to facilitate automation and reliable tracking.
Semrush remains one of the top solutions available. Here are some ways you can benefit from Semrush task optimization:
- Keyword tracking and competitor analysis: Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool makes it easy to find thousands of search terms for campaigns with in-depth metrics, along with competitor analysis, to see how you perform compared to other companies.
- Backlink monitoring: Check on the health of your backlink profile with Semrush’s Backlink Analysis tool. You can also use other Semrush link-building tools to conduct backlink audits, build more backlinks, and analyze backlinks in bulk.
- Content gap analysis: See what keywords your competitors are ranking for and find some of the best opportunities for your strategy.
- Project management tools for streamlined workflows: Semrush also includes various tools that can help you with project management and automation, including a Projects Dashboard, Semrush Copilot, and much more.
Turn to Ignite Visibility for Help Completing Your Monthly SEO Tasks
Whether you’re looking to boost your keyword rankings, increase your online visibility, or improve your site health, Ignite can help guide your SEO strategy with tailored monthly SEO packages.
Through our monthly SEO packages, Ignite can help with:
- Keyword strategy, including identifying high-volume keywords with targeted search intent
- Creating high-quality optimized content with natural keyword instances written for humans by humans
- On-page SEO, including title tags, meta descriptions, headers, and mobile-optimized content
- Off-page SEO by way of backlinks, social media posts, brand mentions, and public business listings
- Technical SEO, including SEO-friendly website structure and improving loading times
- And so much more!
Ready to get started with monthly SEO services based on your needs? Contact us today!
