Everyday website optimization: 6 tasks for your daily SEO routine

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 team, you can’t always spend a lot of time on your SEO. You probably have tons of other things to do! Here, we discuss a few small yet impactful things you can work on on a daily to weekly basis to keep your SEO on track.

Long-term SEO Strategy

Before we dive into the daily and weekly SEO tasks you can work on, we should stress the importance of having a long-term SEO strategy. While it’s good to have a list of quick wins, make sure to keep an eye on the bigger picture. You should base your strategy on proper keyword research, look at search intent, set goals and take time to analyze how your site is doing. Holistic SEO is a lot of work, but it will 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. That’s why you should regularly add new content and keep existing content up to date. 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 every day. Just try to stick to a schedule of publishing that works for you. For example, when you publish a post every Wednesday, your audience will know to look forward to that! 

Odds are, you also have lots of articles laying around that need a minor 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 is responding to comments. 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, your site visitors can feel ignored. Also, it doesn’t look good to have a lot of unanswered comments on your pages. 

2. Work on your internal linking structure

Working on a good internal linking structure is like rolling out the red carpet for site visitors and Google. As your site keeps growing, you should also continue improving that internal linking structure.  

Something 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 links from your other pages. Those contextual links add a lot of value. Have a hard time finding orphaned content? The Yoast SEO Premium 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 is 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 every day, rather than waiting for the house to become a complete mess. It’s the same principle 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 cannibalization of your content. When you’re regularly (re)publishing content, it’s only a little bit of extra effort to ensure you’re not competing with other content on your site. 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.

If you come across two articles on a similar topic, from a very similar point of view, consider combining them into one. You can easily do this with Yoast Duplicate Post; it allows you to make a clone of a post, so you can easily take your time to merge both posts. When you’re done, you can use the Rewrite & Republish option to update this post to the new version you wrote. After you’ve done this, don’t forget to redirect the other one.

Similarly, don’t keep unnecessary pages around. Regularly factor in some time to check whether you have any 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 a matter of seconds, 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. However, 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 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’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 every day. 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 your pages, but it also makes it super easy to add structured data blocks for How-To and FAQ pages. So if you regularly post how-tos, 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, we offer a free structured data for beginners 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, make sure to look at the following two reports once a week. 

The first is the source/medium report, which you can find in the ‘Acquisition’ section under the 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 is 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.

Microsoft also offers a free analytics tool called Microsoft Clarity. Although it is not yet at the level of Google analytics when it comes to its features, it is still a tool worth trying out. So it can be interesting to keep an eye on its future development!

6. Maintain your presence on social media

When you have a site, you’re probably active on one or more social media platforms. Regularly posting updates for your followers is a good way of showing 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.

Are you not that active on social media yet, or don’t know 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’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!

Read more: What makes a good website? »

The post Everyday website optimization: 6 tasks for your daily SEO routine appeared first on Yoast.