Camille Cunningham
Camille is Content Manager at Yoast. She writes and optimizes blog posts and enjoys creating content that will help people master SEO.
Many of you log into your website every day or at least once a week. However, when you run a small business or team, you can’t always spend a lot of time on search engine optimization. You probably have a ton of other things to do! Here we are discussing some small but powerful things you can work on daily to weekly to keep your SEO up to date.
Long-term SEO strategy
Before we dive into the daily and weekly SEO tasks that you can work on, we should emphasize the importance of a long-term SEO strategy. While it’s good to have a list of quick wins, be sure to keep an eye on the bigger picture. You should base your strategy on proper keyword research, checking search intent, setting goals, and taking the time to analyze how your website is performing. Holistic SEO is a lot of work, but it will pay off in the end!
On days when you only have an hour or so on your website, consider doing one of the following.
1. Make sure your content stays up to date
Content is important to rank. Therefore, you should regularly add new content and keep existing content up to date. Writing and posting new content or updating existing content should be part of daily website optimization. You don’t have to post a new post every day. Just try to stick to a release schedule that works for you. For example, if you post a post every Wednesday, your audience will be excited!
There are also probably a lot of articles lying around that need a little update before they can be published again. If you don’t have time to write a new article, it is helpful to have a list of such posts and edit one of those posts as your daily SEO chore.
One task that also relates to keeping your content fresh and lively is responding to comments. If you’re getting a lot of comments on your blog posts, try interacting with commenters regularly. If you don’t reply to their comments, your website visitors may feel ignored. It also doesn’t look good to have a lot of unanswered comments on your pages.
2. Work on your internal link structure
Working on a good internal linking structure is like rolling out the red carpet for website visitors and Google. As your website continues to grow, you should continue to improve this internal link structure as well.
something Every time you look at your post overview, you will see orphaned content. It is such a waste to have content that doesn’t get links from your other pages. These contextual links offer great value. Are you struggling to find orphaned content? The Yoast SEO Premium Plugin is here to help! Once installed, you don’t have to open every post to see which internal links you’ve already added. Just use the filter in the post overview to find orphaned content and add relevant links.
Something else To include in your daily SEO efforts means linking to your cornerstone content. Ideally, when you update or publish articles, you should add links to relevant cornerstones. However, to make sure you haven’t forgotten any cornerstones, check your latest posts and make sure they have links to relevant cornerstones.
Haven’t thought about a cornerstone content strategy yet? Now is the time to work on it! Yoast SEO can help you develop a cornerstone kickass strategy.
3. Keep your website maintenance on track
Most of you will agree that it is better to do a little cleaning every day than waiting for the house to turn into a mess. It’s the same principle for your website. Don’t wait until the number of pages is no longer manageable, just keep an overview!
One way to do this as part of your daily search engine optimization is to watch out for cannibalization of your content. If you (re) publish content on a regular basis, it’s just a little extra hassle to make sure you’re not competing with other content on your website. Unfortunately, too much good, such as quality content, can still cause problems. So take some time to make sure your content doesn’t repeat itself.
If you come across two articles on a similar topic from a very similar angle, consider combining them into one. You can easily do this with Yoast Duplicate Post. You can use it to create a clone of a post so that you can easily take the time to merge the two posts together. When you’re done, you can use the “Rewrite and Republish” option to update this post to the new version you wrote. Do not forget to redirect the other afterwards.
Also, don’t keep unnecessary pages. Periodically allow some time to check if there are any pages that have lost relevance and that cannot be updated. Delete these pages (properly) from your website and you will thank them later. With Yoast SEO Premium, pages can be deleted and redirected in seconds. Give it a try if you want to save even more time.
4. Work on your technical search engine optimization
Many technical SEO tasks require time and expertise or do not have to be part of your daily routine. However, there are things that you should look out for on a regular basis.
One of them is to keep the size of your pictures as small as possible. Having high quality images on your website is a must, but you don’t want your handpicked image to slow down your website. A quick task to add to your SEO routine is using tools like ImageOptim or websites like Squoosh, JPEGmini, jpeg.io or Kraken.io to optimize the size of your images.
Another thing to be aware of is duplicate content. You are already on the right track if you regularly check for cannibalized content. However, duplicate content can also be accidentally created. Now you no longer have to do a double content check every day. However, you should be aware of the possibility, such as when creating a tag that applies to the exact same group of posts as another tag. Or if you add a printer friendly version of your DIY post.
One last thing that is easy to implement into your content publishing routine: add structured data. Not every type of post is good for rich results, but for many types of content this can make a difference. Yoast SEO not only automatically adds the most important structured data to your pages, it also makes it very easy to add structured data blocks for How-To and FAQ pages. So if you publish guides regularly, use Yoast SEO’s structured chunks of data to increase your chances of a bountiful result. If your website is focused on recipes, products, reviews, or events, you may want to learn how to add structured data. Fortunately, we offer free structured data for beginners!
5. Keep an eye on your analytics
Google Analytics has a ton of interesting data that you can use to optimize your website. However, mastering every single aspect of Google Analytics takes a long time. If you don’t have enough time to dive in and have just a little understanding of the analytics tool, check out the following two reports once a week.
The first is the source / media report, which you can find in the “Capture” section under “All traffic”. This shows you where your website visitors are coming from. Check if you are getting organic traffic from search engines like Google. And try to understand the data that you see. Which sources have a high bounce rate, which sources are driving the most traffic to your site? If you look at this data every week, you’ll know if your website is doing better than the week before.
The second report of interest is the landing page report, which you can find in the Behaviors section under All Pages. These pages are the very first pages people visit on your website. That way, you’ll get a glimpse of the things your visitors are interested in. You basically learn whether the description of a page on Facebook or in a search result was interesting enough to make people click. Try again to understand the data. What is the bounce rate of landing pages that shouldn’t have a high bounce rate, such as B. Your homepage? If you dare, add a secondary dimension like “Source” to this report so you can instantly see which pages are being visited by Google.
Microsoft also offers a free analytics tool called Microsoft Clarity. While it’s not yet on the level of Google Analytics in terms of its features, it’s still a tool worth trying out. So it can be interesting to keep an eye on future developments!
If you have a website, you are likely active on one or more social media platforms. Posting updates to your followers on a regular basis is a great way to show that your account is alive and well. You can share your blog posts, but also pictures, events from your daily life, other articles that you find interesting, and so on. You know your audience best, you know what they will like. And while you’re at it, also try to interact regularly with people who post comments on your social media pages to keep them busy.
New to social media or unsure where to start? A social media strategy can help you determine what needs to be done to easily make social media part of your daily routine.
Conclusion on everyday SEO
That’s it! Work on one or more of these six things once a day and you will be well on your way to keeping your website’s SEO in good shape. And don’t forget to invest more time in your long-term SEO strategy whenever you can for a truly sustainable approach to SEO!
Read more: What Makes a Good Website? »
