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
Tanisha Mitchell, our SEO Strategist says, “Embracing a monthly set of SEO tasks is more than just an addition to your routine—it’s a strategic move towards consistent visibility and connection with your target audience. Each task ensures your website remains optimized, relevant, and competitive. Remember, in the realm of SEO, it’s consistency and attention to detail that separate the leaders from the followers.”
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).
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.
And like many things, change is the only constant in the SEO landscape. Search engines tweak their algorithms regularly to provide users with the most relevant search results.
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.
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.
Action Item: Have content experts sift through old content and determine if it’s still suitable for publication, or if it could benefit from some tweaks.
Once you decide that you want to refresh a piece of content, take a look at things like:
- Titles
- Subheadings
- Meta descriptions
- Focus keywords
- Media (such as video, animations, or images)
- Facts and statistics
- The content itself
Your old content may have titles, subheadings, and meta descriptions that don’t align well with today’s SEO best practices. Here are some common examples:
- The media you embedded in the content could be outdated or no longer live
- Blogs could focus on a certain year that has since passed
- Links to external sources could have changed
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 contains multiple forms of media (e.g. text, video, and infographics). It provides tons of information that your audience can act on, much like service journalism but from a content marketing perspective.
You can optimize for EEAT by producing content from or featuring qualified and knowledgeable industry experts. Content that demonstrates firsthand experience with the topic at hand and reliable sources of information will help you with your monthly SEO efforts. In the process, be sure to include clear author bios expressing authority, with accurate and clearly visible citations. Additionally, include any relevant certifications to further demonstrate expertise.
Action Item: Get familiar with EEAT – Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Aiming to produce content that hits these four quality pillars will not only be beneficial to your reader but it is also a huge part of Google’s algorithm, as stated in its Quality Rater Guidelines.
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. This pillar page would then link to other blog posts about subtopics like “workout routines for losing fat” or “workout routines to gain muscle.” These pages would then link back to that pillar page in a supportive internal linking structure.
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.
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 these 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
To check your ranking for certain keywords, use tools like Google Search Console.
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.
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.
Big news most likely means it’s time for you to switch up your marketing plan or monthly SEO tasks.
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 (like you) change things up all the time. That can mean 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.
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.
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.
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
What people are looking for is constantly changing and because of these trends, so are popular keywords.
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.
As part of your on-page SEO activities list, don’t limit yourself to traditional keyword research. Instead, go beyond simple keyword optimization by prioritizing user intent and semantic search, which you can accomplish in your monthly SEO plan using various tools like Clearscope and Surfer SEO.
These solutions can assist with the optimization of content clusters, entities, and various related elements to help you keep up with search algorithms as they change over time.
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.
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?
15. Review Featured Snippets
Google’s Featured Snippets are another place you can use to grab your audience’s attention.
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.
16. Examine Entity Salience
Entity Salience is a move beyond traditional strategies that focus excessively on keywords. Instead, it encourages you to offer a thorough and contextually rich exploration of a topic. It’s an advanced approach that emphasizes understanding the relationship between different subjects or “entities” within your website’s content.
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?
In a landing page audit in an SEO checklist, focus on both your content and relevant user experience metrics such as Core Web Vitals. These elements will include page load time, visual stability, and interactivity, among other components to gauge user-friendliness.
Based on your analysis, you can personalize the user experience using A/B testing and data-driven web design, which will go a long way in boosting engagement and conversions.
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). 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.
To cater to AI and ML technologies, your SEO strategy checklist should incorporate content that takes into account semantic relevance and context while targeting keywords. Ensure your content is in-depth, highly structured based on relevant topics, and aligned with user intent to appeal to 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
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.
Want to Get More Out of Your SEO Strategy?
If you’re new to SEO and not sure where to start, you might have questions like, “How often should I update SEO keywords and meta descriptions?” and “How do I check for and fix technical SEO issues monthly?” This is where monthly SEO services can help.
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.
Hundreds of businesses have used Ignite to increase their website’s rankings. Whether you’re a plumber, HVAC contractor, plastic surgeon’s office, or auto dealer, we’re here to support your business goals.
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!
