Your Monthly SEO Maintenance Plan (With Tools and Trello and Asana Tasks)

Wouldn’t it be lovely if SEO was something you sorted out and then left to whir away in the background while it dutifully pushed your content onto Page One of Google while you sat back and watched the clients roll in? 

Well, I’m sorry to have to be the harbinger of bad news, but once you’ve put all that blood, sweat, and, yes, I’ve seen tears shed over setting up your SEO, it’s something you need to go back to every month to make sure everything is still working and make any fixes and adjustments as required.  

I like to think of SEO as a garden. You invest a lot of time and effort in creating fertile soil that will support all your lovely plants; that’s the SEO setup stage. And once you’ve planted everything, you don’t just leave it to do its thing. No, you weed it, water it, feed it, and tidy it up every single month.  

Creating a lush garden is like creating a thriving website; you need to tend it every month and to do that, you need a monthly SEO Maintenance Plan.

Oh, and talking of plans, to make sure you don’t just read this blog, nod your head and add it to your "I must do that someday" list, I’m sharing my monthly Trello and Asana board SEO Maintenance tasks with you so you can copy and paste them into yours and make sure you get this stuff done!

Just click here for the PDF with all the SEO Maintenance tasks and the tools you’ll need set out for you.

Why Bother With Monthly SEO Maintenance?

Just like having a garden maintenance plan telling what to do every month based on the seasons, you can create an SEO maintenance plan that takes account of what is going on in your business and, of course, what’s happening with the Google Algorithm.

On top of your specific marketing initiatives and the algorithm updates you’ll look at on a month-by-month basis, you’ll also build in a number of core maintenance tasks you’ll undertake on a regular basis to make sure your site continues to engage your visitors, retain your rankings and identifies new opportunities for you to rank even better.

Your Monthly SEO Maintenance Tasks

Task One: Analyse Your Website’s Performance

Start each month by looking at your website analytics. Tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console offer really good insights into how users are interacting with your site and how it’s performing in the search results. 

Look for changes in traffic patterns, conversion rates, and bounce rates. These tools also help you track the performance of specific keywords and pages and will inform any tweaks you need to make to your content and optimisation strategies.

I recommend you look at Google Analytics if you’re feeling brave, Monsterinsights if you're working with WordPress, and Ubersuggest if you’re looking for an easy way to understand your SEO performance.

Task Two: Update Your Website’s Content

Content is critically important for getting your SEO to work.  Each month, you need to look at the content on your site and make sure it’s relevant and engaging your readers.  

What can you do to keep things fresh? Add new information, pop in a new infographic to one of your blogs. Embed a video you’ve recorded on the same subject on YouTube. Add new links to helpful resources or new blogs you’ve written.

Updating your older content not only benefits your readers by adding new value to the posts, but it also gives your SEO a boost.

So, once a month, pick a blog or two and give them a spring clean. Choose ones that are already driving traffic to your site.

Task Three Three: Check for Technical SEO Issues

Technical SEO is so important to your website's health and your chances of getting your pages ranked. 

Run an SEO audit once a month and check for crawl errors, broken links, and slow-loading pages. 

Tools like Screaming Frog SEO Spider or Ubersuggest can help you audit your site for the most common technical issues, which are often pretty easy to fix.

Ensure that your website is mobile-friendly and loads quickly, as these factors are increasingly important for ranking well in Google. You can check these things out using PageSpeed Insights.

Task Four: Review and Refine Your Keywords

You need to keep up with your keyword research, too. Each month, look at the performance of the keywords you’ve decided you want to rank well for and change up your your strategy if things aren’t working. 

Use tools like Ubersuggest or Google Keyword Planner to find new keywords that could attract more targeted traffic. 

Task Five: Enhance Your User Experience (UX)

User experience, or the ease with which your visitors can use and move around your site, is really important for SEO. You can analyse your users' or visitors' behaviour on your site using tools like Google Analytics. 

Look for patterns that might show they’re not happy with their experience, such as high exit rates on specific pages. 

You also need to look for changes you can make to improve navigation, page speed, and overall site design to ensure it’s easy to navigate and engage with. 

You’re looking for a site that delights!

Task Six 6. Build and Review Your Backlinks

Backlinks are at the core of a successful SEO strategy, and you should be trying to attract as many high-quality and relevant backlinks as possible. 

Just as a reminder, backlinks are links to your website from someone else. It might be that they are recommending you as a resource for their clients to check out, and they’ve linked to your site from theirs, or they’ve shared a link to one of your blogs on their site, or you're listed in a directory… there are lots of backlink sources, but the long and short of it is that you want as many high-quality ones as possible.

So, once a month, take a look at your site’s backlink profile using Ubersuggest. or Majestic and plan out some ways you can gain some new backlinks from reputable sources. Can you do a guest blog post for someone or be a guest on their podcast and get them to link back to your site? Maybe you could be a source for a journalist and get a mention in their article.  See what you can come up with.

My Top Tip For Actually Sticking To Your SEO Maintenance Plan 

This all sounds good, doesn’t it? You’re definitely up for taking most of these steps each month to ensure that all that hard work you put into improving your SEO in the first place doesn’t go to waste. 

But how do you make sure you actually do it?

Simple answer, set yourself up a Trello or Asana board and put the tasks I’ve outlined here in on a recurring basis. Give yourself an allocated SEO day per month, and there you go, you’ve got your SEO Maintenance Plan in place!

Click here to download the task list I’ve created for you so you can just copy and paste your monthly SEO maintenance tasks into Asana or Trello.

So There You Have It, Your SEO Maintenance Plan Tasks!

Please don’t let all that hard work you did when you set up your SEO go to waste by letting the metaphorical grass grow so long that Google can’t find your website for looking!

Instead, keep your website humming away, in 100% health, and fully optimised so you keep those hard-won rankings and, indeed, continue improving the rankings of your up-and-coming keywords.

SEO is most definitely not a sprint, it’s a marathon, or maybe it would be better to say it’s an oak tree of an undertaking.

Keep nurturing your hard work, and you will see results!

Remember to download those monthly SEO maintenance tasks, add them to Trello or Asana, and watch your garden grow!

WANT TO DOWNLOAD THE PDF? CLICK HERE