SEO in thirty minutes a week: the routine

Three cadences, each with a different job. The weekly half hour catches changes, the monthly hour picks the work, the quarterly afternoon decides what the site should become.

The value is in the repetition, not the depth. A half hour every week for a year beats a full day twice a year, because you catch problems while they are small and you keep the pages accurate.

1. 1

   Open the Performance report, last 28 days against the 28 before (5 minutes)

   Read four numbers: clicks, impressions, click-through rate, average position. You are looking for a change big enough to explain, not for a target.

2. 2

   Switch to Pages and sort by the difference in clicks (5 minutes)

   The page at the top gained, the page at the bottom lost. Open the loser's queries and decide: did the search shrink (impressions fell too) or did the page fall (impressions held, position worse)?

3. 3

   Switch to Queries, filter to positions five to fifteen (5 minutes)

   These are the searches one improvement from the first page. Pick the one with the most impressions and the most relevance to what you sell. That is next week's fix.

4. 4

   Fix one page (10 minutes)

   Last week's pick. Usually a title that does not match what people search, an answer buried under an introduction, or a missing section the results page shows people want.

5. 5

   Ask for one link or one mention (5 minutes)

   One email: an unlinked mention, a resource page that lists tools like yours, a partner whose integrations page could name you. One a week is fifty a year.

Once a month, the wider view. This is where the next pages get chosen, which is the decision that matters most and the one people skip.

1. Compare the last three months to the three before, by page. The pages losing clicks are your refresh list.
2. Read the Page indexing report: did the Not indexed count move, and which reason grew? A reason growing across a template is a judgement about that template.
3. Pick the next two pages to write, from the queries you already get impressions on and from what your users asked this month.
4. Refresh the top page on the falling list: facts, screenshots, dead links, the questions the results page now shows, the modified date.
5. Check the pages you shipped two months ago are indexed and picking up impressions. If they are flat, the choice of page was wrong, not the writing.

One hour, and it produces the only two decisions that compound: what to write next, and what to fix first.

1. 1

   Export twelve months of Performance data by page

   Clicks and impressions per URL, plus the last update date and the internal links from a crawl. One table.

2. 2

   Decide per page

   Keep, refresh, merge, redirect or remove. Most rows are keep. The rows with no clicks, no impressions, no links and no purpose are the ones to act on.

3. 3

   Run a crawl of the site

   Broken links, redirect chains, missing titles, orphan pages, pages three clicks deep. Fix the ones that touch pages with traffic first.

4. 4

   Check speed on one page of each template

   The home page, a guide, a product page. Field data if you have traffic, a lab run otherwise.

5. 5

   Rewrite the plan for the quarter

   Six to eight pages, three refreshes, one technical debt, one link idea. On one page, with dates.

Four afternoons a year. This is where a library stays a library instead of becoming a pile.

Most of what feels like SEO work is noise. Ignoring it is what makes thirty minutes enough.

Keep a small table you update monthly. Three outcome figures, and the diagnostics only when one of them moves.

• Clicks from non-brand searches: the traffic the work earns, separate from people who already knew your name.
• Signups attributable to a search landing page: the reason any of this is worth doing.
• Referring domains: whether anything you published is being linked.

Impressions, average position, indexed pages and Core Web Vitals are diagnostics. You open them when a KPI moves, to find out why, and not otherwise.