Many of you log into your site every day, or, at the very least, once a week. But, if you’re managing a small business or one-man blog, you can’t (always) spend a lot of time on your SEO, you have other things to do! Here, we discuss several small yet impactful things you should try to work on on a daily to weekly basis to keep your SEO on track.
Does this all sound a bit daunting to tackle on your own? Check out our All-around SEO training! It doesn’t just tell you about every aspect of SEO: it makes sure you know how to put these skills into actual practice!!
Long-term SEO Strategy
Before we dive into daily and weekly SEO tasks to work on, we should stress the importance of having a long-term SEO strategy. While it’s good to have a list of quick SEO tasks, make sure you keep an eye on the bigger picture. You should base your strategy on extensive keyword research, look at search intent, set goals and analyze how your site is doing. Holistic SEO is a lot of work, but it’ll pay off in the end!
On days you only have about an hour to spend on your site, consider tackling one of the following tasks.
- 1. Make sure your content stays fresh
- 2. Work on your internal linking structure
- 3. Keep your site maintenance on track
- 4. Work on your technical SEO
- 5. Keep track of your analytics
- 6. Maintain your presence on social media
1. Make sure your content stays fresh
Content is important to rank, which is why you should aim to regularly add new content and keep existing content up to date. Either writing and publishing new content or updating existing content is something that should be part of everyday website optimization. You don’t have to publish a new post everyday, just try to stick to a schedule of publishing that’s realistic for you. If you publish a (new) post every wednesday, for example, your audience will, in time, know to look forward to that!
Odds are, you also have lots of valuable articles laying around that only need a small update before they can be published again. If you don’t have time to write a new article, it’s useful to have a list of posts like this and work on one of those as your daily SEO task.
A task that’s also related to keeping your content fresh and alive: if you get a lot of comments on your blog posts, try to regularly interact with commenters. If you don’t reply to their comments, people can feel ignored, and it doesn’t look good to have a load of unanswered comments on your content pages either.
2. Work on your internal linking structure
Working on a good internal linking structure is like rolling out the red carpet for Google. But as your site keeps growing, you should also continue improving that internal linking structure.
One of the things to keep an eye out for every time you look at your post overview, is orphaned content. It’s such a waste having content that doesn’t get any text links from your other posts or pages, as those contextual links add much value. Have a hard time finding orphaned content? The Yoast plugin is here to help! After installing it, there’s no need to open every post to see which internal links you’ve added already: simply use the filter in the post overview to locate orphaned content and add relevant links!
Another thing to incorporate into your daily SEO efforts: linking to your cornerstone content. Ideally, you should add links to relevant cornerstone content when you’re updating or publishing articles. But, just to make sure you haven’t forgotten any cornerstones, check your most recent posts and make sure they include links to relevant cornerstones.
Haven’t thought about a cornerstone content strategy yet? Now is the time to start working on that! Yoast SEO can help you set up a kickass cornerstone strategy.
3. Keep your site maintenance on track
Most of you will agree that it’s better to do a bit of cleaning everyday, rather than waiting for the house to become a huge, dirty mess. It’s the same for your website: don’t wait until the number of pages has become unmanageable, stay on top of things!
One way to do that as part of your everyday SEO is to look out for cannibalized content. Since you’re already making sure you regularly publish or republish content, it’s only a little bit of extra effort to ensure you’re not competing with (other) existing content on your site. If you come across two articles that are on a similar topic, from a similar point of view, consider combining them into one new article. Unfortunately, too much of a good thing, such as quality content, can still cause problems. So take some time to ensure your content isn’t repeating itself!
Similarly, don’t keep unnecessary pages around. Regularly factor in some time to check for pages that have lost their relevance and can’t be updated. Delete these pages (properly) from your site and you’ll thank yourself later! Yoast SEO Premium makes deleting and redirecting pages super easy, so check it out if you want to save even more time!
4. Work on your technical SEO
Many technical SEO tasks require time and expertise, or don’t need to be part of your daily routine. Nevertheless, there are things you should pay attention to on a regular basis.
One of them is keeping the size of your images as small as possible. Having high-quality images on your site is a must, but you don’t want your handpicked picture to slow down your site! A quick task to add to your SEO routine: use tools like ImageOptim or websites like JPEGmini, jpeg.io or Kraken.io to optimize the size of your images.
Another thing to be aware of: duplicate content. You’re already on track if you regularly look for cannibalized content, but duplicate content can also be created accidentally. Now, you don’t have to do a duplicate content check everyday. But you should be aware of the possibility, for instance when you’re creating a tag that applies to the exact same group of posts as another tag, or when you add a printer-friendly version of your DIY post.
One final thing that could be easy to implement in your routine of publishing content: adding structured data. Not every type of post is suited for rich results, but for many types of content it can make a difference. Yoast SEO not only automatically adds the most important structured data to (almost) every page on your site, it also makes it super easy to add structured data blocks for howtos and FAQ pages. So if you regularly post howtos, use Yoast SEO’s structured data blocks to increase your chances of a rich result. If your site focuses on recipes, products, reviews or events, you may want to learn how to add structured data. Luckily, Yoast Academy offers a structured data training course!
5. Keep track of your analytics
Google Analytics has a ton of interesting data you can use to optimize your website. But mastering every single aspect of Google Analytics takes a lot of time. If you don’t have enough time to dive in, and only have a little understanding of the analytics tool, then you can spend some time once a week looking at two reports.
The first is the source/medium report, which you can find in the ‘Acquisition’ section under item ‘all traffic’. This will show you where your site’s visitors are coming from. Check if you get organic traffic from search engines, like Google. And try to understand the data you’re seeing. Which sources have a high bounce rate, which sources drive the most traffic to your site? If you look at this data every week, you’ll know if your site’s doing better than the week before.
The second report that’s interesting is the Landing pages report you can find in the ‘Behavior’ section under ‘All pages’. These pages are the very first pages people visit on your site, which gives you insight into the things your visitors are interested in. It’ll (basically) tell you if the description of a page on Facebook or in a search result was interesting enough to make people click. Again, try to understand the data. How’s the bounce rate of landing pages that shouldn’t have a high bounce rate, like your homepage, for instance? And if you dare, add a secondary dimension like ‘source’ to this report so you can immediately see which pages are visited from Google.
6. Maintain your presence on social media
You’re probably active on one or more social media platforms. Regularly posting updates for your followers is a good idea, to make clear that your account is alive and kicking. You can share your blog posts, but also pictures you take, events from your daily life, other articles you find interesting, and so on… You know your audience best, you know what they’ll like. And, while you’re at it, also try to regularly interact with people leaving comments on your social media pages, so you keep them engaged.
Read more: How to use social media »
Conclusion on everyday SEO
That’s it! Work on one (or more) of these six things once a day, and you’re well on your way to keeping your site’s SEO in good shape. And don’t forget to invest some more time into your long term seo strategy whenever you can, for a truly sustainable approach to SEO!
Keep reading: What makes a good website? »
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