# SEO in thirty minutes a week: the routine

Thirty minutes a week is enough to keep a small site healthy, if you spend it on the same three things every time: read what changed, fix one page, ask for one link. Here is the routine as steps, with the monthly hour and the quarterly afternoon that sit around it, and an explicit list of what to ignore.

Updated 2026-09-15 · Source: https://porteur.ai/guides/seo-in-30-minutes-a-week

## The shape of 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.

| Cadence | Time | The job |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Weekly | 30 minutes | Read what changed. Fix one page. Ask for one link. |
| Monthly | 1 hour | Pick the next two pages. Refresh the falling one. Read the indexing report. |
| Quarterly | An afternoon | Audit the library. Decide what to merge or remove. Rewrite the plan. |
| Never | 0 | Daily rank checks, weekly redesigns, chasing a competitor's every move. |

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.

## The weekly half hour, in steps

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. **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. **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. **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. **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.

> Do it on the same day each week. The routine survives because it is a slot, not because it is important; important things get postponed and slots do not.

## The monthly hour

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.

## The quarterly afternoon

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. **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. **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. **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. **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.

## What to ignore in between

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

| Ignore | Why |
| --- | --- |
| Daily rank checks | Positions move constantly with personalisation, tests and rivals. A day's movement is not information. |
| A tool's site health score | It measures that tool's rules, not ranking. Google has no such score. |
| Domain authority and its equivalents | They are the tools' models on the tools' indexes, useful to compare two sites inside one tool and nothing else. |
| Every algorithm update discussion | Check the Search Status Dashboard if your traffic moved. Otherwise it is somebody else's site. |
| Competitor page counts | They are publishing for a different business with a different team. |
| Keyword density and word count targets | Google has said neither is a thing. The top results are the brief. |
| Disavowing links | Google says its systems ignore most bad links, and the file is for a manual action or a known paid history. |

> The exception: if clicks fall sharply and stay down for more than a week, stop the routine and diagnose by date. That means checking your own deploys, the Search Status Dashboard, and the Manual actions report.

## The three numbers to keep

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.

## Questions

### Is thirty minutes a week really enough for SEO?

For a small site, yes, if it goes on the same three things: reading what changed, fixing one page, asking for one link. What it cannot do is write pages at volume or run a link campaign, which are separate blocks of time.

### What should I look at first in Search Console each week?

The Performance report comparing the last 28 days to the 28 before. Then Pages sorted by the change in clicks, then Queries filtered to positions five to fifteen. That sequence answers what changed and what to do next.

### How often should I check my rankings?

Weekly at most, through Search Console's average position rather than by searching yourself. Your own searches are personalised by location and history. Daily checks measure noise.

### What is the quickest weekly win?

A title on a page that has impressions and a weak click-through rate at a decent position. The ranking is already there; the click is not. It is ten minutes and it shows up within a month.

### When should I break the routine?

When clicks fall sharply and stay down for over a week, when you migrate or rebrand, or when you launch something. Those need a diagnosis or a checklist, not a half hour.

## Read next

- [How to use Google Search Console in ten minutes a week](https://porteur.ai/guides/how-to-use-google-search-console): A quick weekly routine: set four filters, compare 28 days, check pages then queries, and fix three findings, without getting lost in noise.
- [The Search Console performance report, column by column](https://porteur.ai/guides/search-console-performance-report): Every column in the Google Search Console performance report explained with the traps that trip small sites, and how to act on each.
- [SEO KPIs: the three numbers a founder reads weekly](https://porteur.ai/guides/seo-kpis): Track three SEO KPIs each week: non-brand clicks, signups from search, and revenue from search. See where each comes from and what to do when one moves.
- [Striking distance keywords: the searches one page from the light](https://porteur.ai/guides/striking-distance-keywords): Find queries you already rank for at positions 11 to 20, fix the one page that’s close, and add links. Faster wins than writing a new page.
- [How to find declining pages in Search Console before the traffic is gone](https://porteur.ai/guides/find-declining-pages-in-search-console): Use Search Console to compare periods, sort by click loss, read queries, and act before a page’s traffic is gone. Works for SaaS and small shops.
- [How to refresh a page that lost its traffic](https://porteur.ai/guides/content-refresh): Find why a page lost clicks, refresh what searchers want now, and measure the result. Keep the same URL, update facts, sections, links and date.
- [Your organic traffic dropped: how to find the cause by date](https://porteur.ai/guides/organic-traffic-dropped): Use this by-date method to find why your Google search traffic fell: compare pages and queries in Search Console, match the dates, and pick the fix.

Short on time? Paste your URL and the free check reads your site and the searches around it in about thirty seconds, then names the three findings worth your next half hour. Free check: https://porteur.ai/