10 Monthly SEO Tasks to Add to Your Digital Marketing Strategy

If you have learned anything from our previous SEO blogs, you’ll know that search engine optimisation is not a set-it-and-forget-it thing. It’s a continuous process and requires consistent effort from your side.

Monthly SEO tasks will help you track your SEO performance and improvements to make to keep your site competitive. They further help assess how your website performs in natural search and pinpoint areas to better your rankings.

The shrewd implementation of these SEO tasks will bring fruitful and positive results. You can either take a DIY approach or hire an SEO agency to carry out the same for your digital brand.

If you are planning to take a DIY approach, then this article is for you. Before we get into the SEO monthly task list, let’s understand why creating one is important:

Why Create a Monthly SEO Task List?

The first thing you need to understand is that SEO is a little different from other digital marketing strategies like paid ads or email marketing. Unlike those, you can’t simply implement the SEO strategy and expect results to pour in.

While the primary objective of SEO is to improve rankings on Search Engine Result Pages (SERP), the governing algorithms keep getting updated or changed. Further, new websites and competitors spring to life daily, which might stir up your existing SEO performance and rankings.

Thus, to abide by these constantly evolving search algorithms and stay on top of your competitors, you need a list of SEO tasks. Not having one will, otherwise, make your site lose SERP real estate with a stagnant SEO strategy.

Regularly updated and refreshed SEO monthly tasks ensure that you find additional opportunities to acquire more SERP space without spending much. That said, here’s a list of SEO tasks you need to carry out monthly:

10 Essential SEO Monthly Tasks to Add to Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Now that you know the importance of creating an SEO task list, let’s get to the list of tasks you should include in your digital marketing strategy:

1. Plan Monthly Content Strategy

Planning the next month’s content marketing strategy is a vital step to help organise your editorial content calendar. Your content strategy should include a variety of content types such as visual content, video content, short & long-form content, and others.

Brainstorm different content notions that align and fulfil your target audience’s needs and research the best resources you come across on the internet. The next step is to start keyword research to find terms that searchers use to find the content you are planning to create.

Now put all these together and come up with optimised titles and timeframe to complete your content strategy calendar. If you don’t have a content strategy in motion, start one today and use web platforms like WordPress, or Wix.

Tip: Use the data from the customer service team that interacts with customers and prospects. They have a wealth of data, which you can leverage to formulate the next month’s content strategy to engage customers.

2. Keep Tabs on Underperforming Keywords

Month after month, Google keeps bringing new updates and algorithm changes that affect the rankings of your and many other websites. These updates are quick and sometimes unexpected, which is why it’s important to keep tabs on how it impacts your keyword ranking.

Also, since users’ behaviour changes drastically, the keywords they’ve used before for making a search may not be relevant today. This can lead your old blogs and content assets to see a drop in traffic, engagement, ranking, and other metrics.

However, you don’t have to get into panic mode just yet. Identify the underperforming keywords and optimise or replace them with high-volume ones. Doing so helps turn your underperforming keywords and content to generate high rankings, traffic, and engagements.

3. Assess and Update the Existing Content

As mentioned, the SEO realm is constantly evolving and changing its focus to offer only quality content. In an effort to do so, Google has come up with Helpful Content Update to help users see updated, original, and helpful content.

Content gap analysis is one of the most critical monthly SEO tasks to keep your existing content ranking intact or improve it to claim the top spot. Content updates can include making small tweaks in titles, subheadings, and keywords, or refreshing the whole to stay relevant to current market trends and demands.

In addition to creating new content, updating your existing content provides you with more opportunities to boost your rankings and bring new traffic. You want to assess what issues are dragging the performance of your old content and what can you do to improve the same.

Eliminate anything that doesn’t align with today’s content creation standards and SEO best practices. Also, remove the outdated content if it is beyond update and optimisation, and doesn’t bring much value to the table.

4. Analyse & Track Page Speed Often

While we are on the subject of algorithm changes and ranking factors, page speed has long been a search signal for Google. Therefore, it’s essential that you add tracking page speed of your web pages to your SEO monthly task list.

Several website page speed tracking and test tools are available at your disposal today to aid in improving your website loading speed. These page speed tracking tools offer vital insights and suggestions into how your website performs.

For example, Google’s PageSpeed Insights is a renowned and free-to-use tool for speed test analysis and monitoring. It allows you to conduct unlimited speed analysis for mobile and desktops and provide performance scores from 1 to 100.

Additionally, the tool offers suggestions and opportunities for improvement based on the diagnostics. Apart from that, other best website page speed tracking and analysis tools include:

• GTmetrix
• Pingdom
• Uptrends
• SpeedCurve
• And others

5. Audit Your Backlink Profile

Backlink profile analysis is another recurring SEO task you need to carry out on a monthly basis. Every month, you’ll gain a few backlinks and lose a few too, which is why you should keep an eye out for your backlink profile.

Backlinks from quality and relevant sites are one of the top ranking factors Google considers while positioning a web page on the search engine result pages (SERP). Therefore, it becomes pivotal you keep track of how many backlinks you have gained or lost and where they are coming from.

In addition to yours, you should also track the backlink profile of your competitors. Doing so gives you a sense of what your competitors are doing and how you can outrank them.

You can analyse the backlink profile of any website using Ahrefs, Moz, and other SEO tools. These small business tools provide essential insights into your backlinks and provide you with information such as

• Total number of backlinks
• New/lost backlinks
• No. of dofollow/nofollow links
• Unique referring domains
• Domain Authority/Ranking
• Page Authority/Ranking
• And others

6. Create Plans to Acquire New Backlinks

Apart from auditing your existing backlinks, plan to build new links that point to the important pages of your website. For instance, your backlinks should point to diverse essential pages such as a long-form guide, service page, or home page.

Backlinks help establish the expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (E-A-T) of your website. Here are a few ways to build quality backlinks for your website:

• Guest Posting: Do more guest outreach to relevant publications and media houses to build as many natural links as possible.
• Broken Link Building: Broken link building is an effective technique where you find broken links from sites you need backlinks from. Pitch those publishers to remove broken links and replace them with similar ones of yours.
• Create Link-Worthy Assets: Linkable content asset creation that brings natural links is an underutilised yet effective way of link building. Create content assets such as in-depth guides, tools, surveys, studies, statistics, and others to get natural backlinks.
• Custom Image Link Building: Custom images are another linkable asset that others can use in their content creation. You can reach out to the publishers who may have used your images without linking back and ask them for proper attribution.

7. Spy On Your Competitors’ Strategy

In the digital space, chances are you’d be competing against several businesses and websites just like yours. All those competitors are trying nothing but one thing and that is to rank higher at the SERP, so that potential prospects can avail of their services only.

Competitor analysis enables you to spy on other businesses and what strategies they have implemented to rank higher. It helps you assess their SEO strategy, backlink profile, keyword research, traffic growth, and many other things that you can replicate for your own site.

Additionally, analyse the inbound links, content types, keyword gap, technical SEO, and what’s bringing more engagement for them. Getting your hands on such data will help you better comprehend the competitors' strategy and use the information to your advantage.

8. Measure the Previous Month’s SEO Performance

There’s no meaning to building an SEO strategy and an SEO monthly task list if you aren’t measuring how your website has performed in the past months. Tracking and measuring key indicators of your SEO strategy will help you identify areas of improvement.

For instance, neglecting the analytics data would mean you won’t know if some pages see a major drop in their traffic. Also, you won’t know if one or more pages have technical issues if you haven’t set up your Google Search Console.

Therefore, measuring organic traffic, conversion rate, click-through rate, and others can help you improve your SEO and user experience. Further, you can identify any potential red flags with your important KPIs and eliminate them as soon as possible.

You can also set up visual monitoring of key landing pages to get alerts if something goes south. Recognising the problems as soon as they happen is the key reason for measuring and tracking your SEO and website performance.

9. Plan for Next Month's SEO Strategy

Now that you are adorned with important data and information, prepare next month’s SEO strategy. Here, you want to set goals and objectives that you want to achieve with your next month’s plan.

Based on the performance indicators, prioritise your SEO tasks and strategies, and issues that you want to resolve. Use SEO audit tools to find technical issues with your website and find resolutions for the same.

Alternatively, you can use the SEO agency near you to help with resolving issues and bottlenecks that are bugging you. Besides, include conversions to bring, content to create, optimising outdated content, acquiring new backlinks, and other monthly SEO tasks to your list.

Doing so would ensure that your SEO strategy stays on course, getting you desired outcomes throughout the coming year.

10. Monitor Your Site Health

Apart from the SEO issues, your website may have design and UX-related bottlenecks that need your attention. User experience and design features are crucial elements not only for aesthetically pleasing websites but also for providing the experience your users expect.

Websites with improper designs and less attractive features would see higher bounce rates and low conversions. And as you can guess, bounce rate, conversion ratio, etc. impact your SEO health.

Additionally, monitor the technical aspects such as sitemaps, structured data, robots.txt, and others to keep your website’s SEO health intact. Monthly technical SEO inspection helps you resolve crawl errors, duplicate content, broken links, improper URL structures, and page speed.

Thus, add monitoring your site health to your SEO monthly task list for keeping your site’s SEO and technical health intact.

Bottom Line

Just like your yearly or daily SEO task list, monthly tasks are a crucial part of your digital marketing strategy. These monthly tasks support achieving your overall marketing agenda and the ultimate goal of generating revenue for your business.

Given that the SEO sphere goes through rapid evolutions month-over-month, your SEO task list should occasionally be updated to fit in with the current SEO changes. You may have to put yourself through rigorous learning to keep up with the SEO current affairs.

While this sounds a little overwhelming, an expert SEO agency like Supple can help you with staying at the top of your SEO game. With a proven track record of serving diverse clients, we have gained expertise in the SEO landscape.

Get in touch with us to consult our SEO professionals with all your recurring SEO tasks to complete them aptly.