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Weekly Search Engine Optimization Tactics

Staying Ahead of the Competition

Search Engine Optimization is a never-ending process as the algorithms are constantly changing and your competitors are continuously updating their websites and content strategy. With so many moving pieces, it is critical to have a proactive SEO strategy to keep your business from falling behind. Here weekly search engine optimization tactics to stay competitive.

Check SEO Website Signals and Vitals

It is important to always start by making data driven decisions. There is a wealth of free data available if you have the right measurement strategy in place such as:

Some of the core vitals we make sure to monitor on a weekly basis included first looking at website traffic within Google Analytics viewing week over week and year over year for trends or shifts in where traffic is coming from. We also look at how that traffic is engaging and converting because as great as traffic is, we want to make sure it is the right traffic by seeing users engage with metrics like time on site, pages visited, conversions, etc.

Once we see how that traffic may be dipping or growing we use other tools such as Google Search Console (see example screenshot below) and Bing Webmaster tools to view keyword specific trends as well as page visibility trends. This gives us a better idea of “why” some of the traffic is changing allowing us to make data driven decisions on our content strategy and where we may need to tune or further optimize to improve metrics.

Google Search Console Keyword Data

Weekly SEO Site Scans

Bing Webmaster Tools or other paid tools like SEMRush or Screamingfrog can be used to scan your website regularly in order to identify technical SEO health and opportunities. Depending on the scan they can help you identify items such as:

  • Images that are too large
  • Missing Alt Text
  • Non-optimized site code
  • Canonical issues
  • NoIndex Markup
  • Duplicate or Non Optimized Meta Data
  • Duplicate content
  • Redirect loops
  • Broken Links
  • 404 Errors
  • and more!

 

You can then use this information to roadmap out those opportunities or enhancements since they may range in level of difficulty and amount of time needed to be fixed. 

Below is an image of the SEMRush site scan overview giving you a quick glance of the health of your website from an Search Engine Optimization standpoint.

SEMRush Site Scan Image Showing Weekly Site Crawl

Updates to Your Local Business Listings

If you are a local business, your local business listings such as Google Business Profile Manager and Bing Places should be updated and maintained regularly. If left abandoned for a certain amount of time they wont perform as optimally and in the case of Bing they get flagged as “low confidence” and are no longer shown in the search engine. Content that should be updated weekly include:

  • New photos of your business or product
  • Marketing posts with announcements or promotions
  • Responding to Customer Submitted Reviews

Update at Least One Existing Content Page

Fresh content is important to search engines and is also important to your audience. Make sure to either be creating new content as you can, but in addition to new pages make it a goal to at least update an existing page each week. We mentioned at the beginning of this blog to be monitoring your keywords so the page updates could be as simple as reinforcing the keyword strategy for that page with related terms, adding supporting imagery with image alt tags or adding fresh information such as recent studies, products or services. Don’t forget to review your internal linking strategy, as you add new pages make sure existing pages link to them as well.

Monitor Competitor SEO Trends and Content Strategy

It is important to keep an eye on your competitors and their content strategy. Are they running new ads within the search engines that may be stealing some of your traffic? Are they posting new content such as blogs to target terms you want to rank for? Have they made larger website changes to improve the user experience since website engagement is a ranking factor with search engines? Keeping an eye on your competitors should help you adapt and grow your own strategy to not fall behind. One way to monitor is to follow your competitors on social media as they will likely be promoting any new content there, but also make sure you are testing keywords in the search engine regularly that are important to you to check for their use of paid ads or movement in search listings. Remember though, your search history does affect the results you are seeing.

If you can’t monitor and take action on your SEO strategy weekly, don’t just avoid these tips. Give yourself realistic goals of what you and your team can achieve and start there. Any optimization is better than none! Need help with these weekly search engine optimization tactics or your SEO strategy? Contact us for a free consultation.