Planning is not an exciting topic, I admit. Yet, I wrote a book recently on the topic of planning, introducing a framework for doing it for digital marketing.
Over the two decades of my career, I have found that the best and quickest positive outcomes nearly always came from a strong plan and a planned approach to SEO work.
With AI dominating the headlines, I know how hard it can be to commit to a structure, cadence, or specific approach for doing anything in digital marketing, including SEO. However, I continue to advocate for having an agile, yet planned approach that includes the things you should do daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually.
No, you don’t get to check your brain at the door every day and mindlessly do mundane SEO tasks. But, you also don’t need to panic every day over every little change, ebb and flow of visibility, or rip up your plan and start over.
I have outlined the cadence and frequency of things I believe go into a strong SEO process and approach to help you on the journey.
Daily
Educate Yourself
Staying up to date on industry news is a critical aspect of SEO that must be built into any maintenance or ongoing management plan.
This ranges from the mission-critical alerts and updates the search engines announce to keeping tabs on SEO best practices and breaking news from sources like Search Engine Journal.
AI news seems to be constantly disruptive, and we have to be mindful of how SEO is not just all about Google or concepts that we have applied in the past (if you’ve been in the game for a while).
Big shifts in the industry are hard to miss (whether they are about AI or not).
But smaller, more subtle changes can become magnified when you miss them or best practices become outdated.
There’s a careful balance you have to find in how you react to the daily news about AI and how search engines are changing. Some things justify a quick reaction or testing. Other news is speculative, and while good to know and note today, probably not applicable until more testing happens or more definitive proof emerges on the impact of any tactics.
Regardless, the key if you do search or seek visibility in AI is to not fall behind or deploy outdated tactics!
Don’t Lose Sight Of Metrics
Monitoring your key SEO performance metrics in real-time, or at least once per day, is especially necessary for brands and organizations that rely on ecommerce transactions or lead volume to feed a sales team. You don’t necessarily need to go look at KPIs manually or spend minutes or hours in reporting, though, if you can automate any critical daily alerts and categorize what is important to know within an hour, minute, or 24-hour period that needs immediate attention versus longer-term performance metrics that can wait.
Knowing how your website performs in search through top-level metrics is important for recognizing any red flags. These could include:
- A specific or aggregate positioning drop.
- An organic traffic drop.
- A decrease in sales or lead volume.
Being able to recognize problems as soon as they happen is key.
You need to be able to diagnose issues and reverse any negative trends before they impact your overall marketing and business goals.
By keeping tabs on actual performance, you can compare to benchmarks and baselines to make sure that you fully understand the cause and effect with your metrics and not have an issue happen for too long before you can intervene.
You can monitor less critical KPIs (any that don’t necessitate an immediate reaction) on a weekly basis. As long as you have some type of anomaly detection alerts in Google Analytics 4 that help streamline the process, you can save time from checking every property every day.
In any case, you want to have the pulse of what is happening with your visibility in search and AI, know what metrics are tied to return on investment versus vanity metrics, and that you’re influencing the right KPIs as things continue to change and shift with AI.
Make Progress On Tactics
A solid digital marketing plan – especially an SEO plan – or campaign must start with strategy (including goals), tactics, assets needed, how it will be measured, and documented steps to be accountable and actionable.
Without a plan, process, or defined approach, you can waste a lot of time chasing specific SEO aspects that might be low impact and low priority – or tactics absent of a strategy that are part of a “best practices” checklist, but not one that is specific to your business. If this article interested you as you like lists and routines (like I do), I hope it doesn’t turn you off when I say that you can’t look at SEO as a production checklist, and especially not now that things are going up and down so much and news and noise are everywhere.
The daily process should include specific tasks, milestones, and achievable actions that work toward the bigger picture.
The tactics can include things done for the first time in a phased approach or action items more in a rinse-and-repeat methodology.
Regardless, the list of specific technical, on-page, and off-page action items should be defined for the year, broken out into months, and further into tactics and progress that can be made on a daily basis to stay on track.
SEO requires both big-picture thinking and the ability to tackle daily tasks and action items.
Monthly
Report On Performance
Beyond the daily or weekly KPI monitoring, it’s often important to use monthly cycles to more broadly report on performance.
The focus of monthly checkpoints allows for dedicated time to compare a larger sample size of data and see trends.
Monthly performance reporting should include year-over-year comparisons of the completed month plus any available year-to-date stats.
Find meaningful intervals to measure and be consistent. Looking at bigger ranges of time helps to see trends that are hard to decipher in small sample sizes. It also helps us not get lost in some of the hourly (and even in cases minute-to-minute) changes my team has seen in the SERPs with swings in what is showing up and what isn’t.
Any stories of the what and why for deviations in goal, celebrations for exceeding goals, and metrics that warrant possible changes to the plan are critical to the surface and prioritized through a dashboard or snapshot report of the performance data.
Recap Completed & Continuing Action Items
This is a chance to evaluate the tactics and execution in the previous month against the plan.
- Was everything completed?
- Were there deviations?
- What obstacles or roadblocks were in the way or overcome?
Looking at the past helps shape the future.
When you combine the action items and tactics with the performance data, you should get an overall picture of the reality of what is driving SEO performance.
Plan Next Month’s Action Items & Evaluate The Plan
Monthly intervals are great for ensuring accountability for the completion of tasks. Whether you like to use the actual calendar to define periods of activity and ongoing strategic check-ins, or build it into sprints of a similar timeframe, 30 days often works well.
Even when the year is planned out, things change in SEO, and performance isn’t always what we expect after doing something the first time.
Taking a monthly planning approach, adjustments can be made to the plan, such as doubling down on a specific tactic or adjusting the overall strategy to recalibrate.
By being agile enough to evaluate performance and tactics monthly, you can avoid overthinking things and reacting too swiftly, but also not let too much time pass and lose footing with trends toward goals.
Having a good balance of planned tactics and actions versus the need for agile methods to pivot when needed is often the best approach to staying current and proactive.
Quarterly
Technical Issues Auditing
Assuming you have covered technical issues at the beginning of your SEO focus and are also watching for any that trigger red flags in daily and weekly monitoring, it is important to take a broader look through an audit each quarter.
This audit should include a review of reported issues in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
Plus, comparison to benchmarks and standards for site speed, mobile usability, validation of structured data, and the aspects that aren’t often looked at on a more frequent basis.
On-Page Issues Auditing
Without an audit process and even with frequent monitoring, things happen on websites.
A code update, database update, plugin/extension update, or publishing content can cause duplicate tags, duplicate content, or even missing on-page elements.
A quarterly audit of on-page issues that can be conducted using a wide range of free and subscription third-party tools is important.
There are tools that will even send alerts and factor into the daily process if something changes, like a meta description being wiped out.
Regardless, having a solid tool stack and process for quarterly evaluation and comparison to the previous audit is important to ensure that the results of the audit and any fixes needed are noted and made into the tactical plan.
Link Profile Auditing
Overall, the SEO plan likely includes some form of link building.
Whether that is through attracting links with engaging content or a more focused plan of research and outreach, or even an AI-minded digital PR effort, it is likely a part of the ongoing tactics (or should be considered if it isn’t).
Investing time and effort into the tactics makes it important to have visibility of the overall link profile and progress.
This might be a performance metric tracked in the monthly reporting phase, but quarterly should be audited in a deeper sense.
Evaluating the quality of links, the number of links, the diversity of sources, the relevancy of linked content, comparisons to competitors, comparisons to benchmarks, and period-over-period comparisons are all important aspects to ensure that the plan is performing as intended in the area of backlinks.
Plus, if not caught through daily or monthly efforts, any spammy links or negative SEO attempts can be caught here and addressed through the disavow process, if applicable or if it makes sense for your situation.
Local Listings Audit
Once local listings management is in maintenance mode, there won’t be a frequent need for major changes with NAP (name, address, phone) data or inconsistencies in listing data.
However, that doesn’t mean it won’t happen, and it can be “set it and forget it.”
An audit using third-party tools to ensure accuracy and consistency of data is strongly advised at least quarterly.
This audit can identify issues that can be addressed on a one-off basis as well as provide guidance on performance and any needed changes to the content, reviews, and other aspects of the listings themselves beyond the basic NAP data.
If any third-party data sources or listings were missed, Google Business Profile data could be overwritten with inaccurate listing info.
Even if nothing changes with your management of listings, data can change and needs to be monitored at a minimum.
Yearly
Measure Performance
When running annual plans for SEO – and even when not on annual agreements or evaluation cycles – taking an entire year of data and evaluating it is helpful to advise strategy and find measurable ROI calculations.
SEO is a long-term process that aims to achieve the most competitive positioning and visibility possible in search engines. It is a valuable investment of time to look at performance data over 12-month spans, compare it to previous periods, look at benchmarks, and celebrate successes.
Even if you don’t have annual budgets or agreements with outside partners/providers, taking an annual step back and looking at performance and the effort like an investment rather than an expense is important. This can include factors like how much time or dollars to invest in people, resources, and tech.
Planning Strategy & Tactics
In addition to reviewing yearly performance data, you should also plan your goals, strategy, and tactics for the next year.
Even though the plan could change a week into maintenance or the ongoing implementation phase, having a plan and setting a target are key to measuring progress.
Without a plan and using past learnings and a realistic view of the resources being invested in the coming year, there can be a gap between expectations and reality.
It is best to sort this out before getting months down the road.
Why SEO Performs Better Under A Disciplined Framework
SEO isn’t a set it and forget it discipline. It is one that requires a lot of strategy and planning up front, as well as incremental or ongoing strategic planning throughout. While I can empathize with fatigue of constantly revisiting strategies and over-thinking things, we can’t take our focus off of strategy and where we might need to pivot when we get into ongoing implementation during the year.
By breaking up an SEO plan into meaningful periods and ensuring that certain audits, activities, and focuses aren’t over- or under-prioritized, we can find a balance of incorporating the right level of strategy and agility with the need to get things done and implement without missing key details or tactics during a given year.
With things moving fast, a lot of real research coming out mixed in with a lot of speculation as SEO and AI shift, we have to make sure we keep the discipline needed to see a plan through while also making sure it can adjust when justified.
More Resources:
- 11 Lessons Learned From Auditing Over 500 Websites
- How To Create An SEO Roadmap That Actually Drives Results
- Agentic AI In SEO: AI Agents & Workflows For Audit (Part 1)
Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock
