How this works
SEO is never finished. Each month we choose the work that will make the biggest difference to your results, drawing from the lists on this page.
You will not see every task every month. Finishing one job does not empty the list: once a technical fault is fixed, there is still content to improve, links to earn and competitors to watch. Google changes, your competitors change and your business changes, so the priorities change too.
The actions below are not exhaustive. There are other "secret sauce" elements to our management that we choose not to disclose at this time.
The work falls into six areas.
| Area | In plain terms |
|---|---|
| How your site is built (technical) | Making sure search engines can find, read and quickly load every page that matters. |
| What your pages say (content) | Making each page the best available answer to what your customers are searching for. |
| Who vouches for you (links and mentions) | Earning links and mentions from other trusted websites. Search engines treat these as votes of confidence. |
| Local presence | Showing up on Google Maps and in "near me" searches. Only relevant if you serve a local area. |
| Your competitors | Knowing who you are up against in search results, what they do well and where they are weak. |
| Measurement | Tracking where you appear, how many people visit and what they do, so decisions rest on evidence. |
Month 1: getting started
The first month is about understanding your business, measuring where you stand today and fixing anything urgent. Almost everything here happens for every client.
Getting to know your business+
- Hold a kick-off meeting covering your goals, most profitable products or services, ideal customers and the areas you serve
- Agree what success looks like (enquiries, sales, bookings) and how we will measure it
- Learn your busy and quiet seasons so work lands at the right time
- Review past SEO work, previous agencies and any earlier website moves or problems
- Agree who approves new content and who makes changes to the website
- Collect your brand guidelines and tone of voice
Access and setup+
- Get access to your website, Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Google Business Profile
- Check your visitor tracking is recording properly
- Check enquiries, sales and phone calls are being counted (conversion tracking), and fix the tracking if not
- Set up Bing's equivalent tools (Bing Webmaster Tools), so you are covered beyond Google
- Set up daily tracking of where you appear for the search terms we agree (keyword rank tracking), plus weekly tracking of your position in map results (the map pack) if you serve a local area
- Set up automatic daily checks of your site's technical health and of page speed for your real visitors (Core Web Vitals), plus alerts for outages, new and lost links, and mentions of your brand
- Build your reporting dashboard
- Record a starting point for rankings, visitors, enquiries and links, so progress can be measured fairly
Full technical health check+
- Scan every page of your site the way a search engine does (a site crawl)
- Check Google can find and list the pages that matter (indexing), and is not wasting effort on pages that do not
- Test how fast pages load on mobile and desktop (page speed and Core Web Vitals)
- Test how well the site works on a phone (mobile usability)
- Find broken pages, broken links and redirects that go round the houses (404 errors and redirect chains)
- Find duplicate pages and different versions of the same page competing with each other (duplicate content and canonical tags)
- Review how pages link to each other, and find important pages that are buried or cut off (internal linking and orphan pages)
- Check the behind-the-scenes files that tell search engines where to go and where not to (robots.txt and XML sitemap)
- Check the site is secure (HTTPS)
- Check the hidden labels (structured data, also called schema) that help search engines understand products, reviews, opening hours and FAQs
- Check language and country settings (hreflang), if you trade in more than one
- For online shops: review category pages, filters (faceted navigation), product pages and how out-of-stock items are handled
- Produce a fix list, ordered by impact and effort
Search term research (keyword research)+
- Find the words and phrases your customers really type in, which are often not the ones you use internally
- Sort them by intent (search intent): ready to buy, comparing options or still researching
- Estimate how many people search for each one and how hard it will be to win (search volume and keyword difficulty)
- Match each group of terms to a page on your site (keyword mapping)
- Spot gaps where you have no suitable page (content gaps)
- Spot pages that are competing with each other for the same search (keyword cannibalisation)
- Agree the priority terms we will track
Content review+
- Review every important page: the title and description shown in search results (meta title and meta description), the headings and the copy
- Find pages that are thin, out of date or duplicated
- Decide for each page whether to keep, improve, merge or remove it
- Check your pages show real expertise and trust (known as E-E-A-T): reviews, credentials, case studies, named authors
- Check images load quickly and are described properly for search engines (alt text)
- Write a content plan for the first three months
Link and reputation review+
- Review every website that currently links to yours (your backlink profile)
- Judge the quality of each one using our own scoring, which is harder to game than the public scores
- Find harmful or spammy links (toxic links) and decide whether action is needed
- Find good links you have lost that are worth winning back
- Find places that mention your brand without linking to you (unlinked brand mentions)
- Compare your links with your competitors' to see where they are ahead (link gap analysis)
- Write a link building plan
Competitor review+
- Identify who you actually compete with in search results, which is often different from who you think of as competitors
- Review where they appear, their strongest pages, their content and their links
- Work out where they beat you and why
- Find their weak spots, where you can overtake fastest
Local presence (where relevant)+
- Claim, verify and complete your Google Business Profile: categories, services, opening hours, photos
- Check your name, address and phone number match across online directories (citations and NAP consistency)
- Review your online reviews and how you ask customers for them
- Review your location pages, or plan them if you have none
Plan and quick wins+
- Fix anything urgent straight away
- Make the easy, high-value improvements to your most important pages
- Produce a 90-day plan, ordered by impact
- Talk you through the findings in plain English
Every month
Each month we pick the items from this list that will move your results most. Nobody gets all of them in one month, and the mix changes as your site improves.
The measurement tasks at the end happen every month without fail. Everything else is chosen on impact.
Technical upkeep+
- Review the results of our automatic daily site checks and deal with new faults before they cost you visitors
- Check Google Search Console for errors, warnings and security problems
- Fix broken pages, broken links and faulty redirects, or brief your developer to
- Check new pages are being found and listed by Google (indexing)
- Review our daily monitoring of page speed for your real visitors (Core Web Vitals, from Google's CrUX data) and deal with anything that slows the site down
- Work through the technical fix list in priority order
- Check that website updates, new plug-ins or developer changes have not broken anything
- Add and test the hidden labels (structured data) that help search engines understand your pages
- Add links between your own pages (internal linking) so new and important pages get noticed
- Tidy up old or unwanted pages that should not appear in search results
Content+
- Improve existing pages: titles, headings and copy (on-page optimisation)
- Refresh pages that are slipping down the results or have gone out of date
- Write new pages or articles to fill gaps where customers are searching and you have nothing to show
- Push pages sitting just off the first page of results onto it (striking-distance keywords)
- Add answers to the real questions your customers ask
- Rewrite the titles and descriptions shown in search results (meta titles and meta descriptions) so more people click
- Merge or remove weak pages that hold the rest of the site back (content pruning)
- Improve pages that get plenty of visitors but few enquiries (conversion rate optimisation)
- Improve product and category pages, for online shops
- Optimise images so they load fast and can be found in image search (image optimisation and alt text)
- Brief your team or our writers, then edit and publish the result
- Add proof of expertise (E-E-A-T): case studies, reviews, credentials, author details
Links and mentions+
- Secure links from relevant, good-quality websites (link building), drawn from our own list built up over 15 years
- Check the quality of every site before a link is placed
- Pitch stories, data and expert comment to journalists and publications (digital PR)
- Contact sites that mention you without linking and ask for the link (unlinked mention outreach)
- Win back good links that have been lost or broken (link reclamation)
- Pursue links from suppliers, partners, trade bodies and local organisations
- Check every new link pointing to your site and flag any that look harmful (backlink monitoring)
- Watch for new mentions of your brand, good and bad (brand mention monitoring)
Local presence (where relevant)+
- Keep your Google Business Profile current: posts, photos, services, opening hours
- Answer questions left on your profile
- Help you gather new reviews and respond to the ones you receive
- Correct wrong or inconsistent listings in online directories (citations)
- Track your position in Google's map results (the map pack) every week, across the areas you serve
- Improve or add location pages
Competitors+
- Watch competitors' positions for your priority search terms
- Spot their new pages, new content and new links
- Flag when a competitor overtakes you on an important term, and plan the response
Measurement and reporting+
- Track where you appear for every agreed search term (keyword rank tracking)
- Review visitors, enquiries and sales that came from search
- Review which searches bring people to your site, and which pages they land on
- Send a plain-English report: what we did, what changed and what comes next
- Update the plan for the following month
Every quarter
Every three months we step back from the day-to-day, re-check the foundations and reset priorities for the next 90 days. The daily checks catch faults; the quarterly review catches slow drift.
Technical+
- Run a deeper technical review than the automatic daily checks can
- Review the quarter's trend in page speed for your real visitors (Core Web Vitals), which we monitor daily
- Review the site's structure and navigation as it has grown (site architecture)
- Review the full set of hidden labels (structured data) that describe your pages to search engines
- Review which pages search engines are actually visiting, and which they ignore (log file analysis)
- Re-test the site on phones and tablets
- Review the fix list and re-order what remains
Content+
- Review how every important page has performed over the quarter
- Find pages that are slowly losing visitors (content decay) and schedule them for a refresh
- Find pages that have started competing with each other (keyword cannibalisation)
- Refresh the search term research (keyword research): new terms, changed habits, seasonal shifts
- Compare your content with competitors' and list what they cover that you do not (content gap analysis)
- Write the content plan for the next quarter
Links and mentions+
- Review your full set of links (backlink profile): growth, quality and any that have turned harmful
- Check the wording other sites use when they link to you (anchor text) looks natural
- Compare your link growth with your competitors'
- Review which link sources worked best and adjust the plan
- Refresh the list of publications and sites we approach
Local presence (where relevant)+
- Audit all your directory listings (citations) for accuracy
- Compare your reviews and profile with local competitors'
- Review your Google Business Profile categories and services against any changes Google has made
Competitors+
- Repeat the full competitor review from month one
- Identify new competitors that have appeared in your search results
- Review any large moves: redesigns, new sections, link campaigns
Strategy and reporting+
- Hold a quarterly review meeting
- Report progress against your goals, including return on your spend
- Check whether your business priorities have changed: new services, new locations, new targets
- Plan ahead for seasonal peaks, so pages are ready before demand arrives
- Set the plan for the next 90 days
Every year
Once a year we repeat the full month-one review and reset the strategy against your business goals. A year is long enough for the site, the market and Google itself to have changed materially.
Full re-audit+
- Repeat the full technical health check from scratch
- Review every page of content again: keep, improve, merge or remove
- Redo the search term research from a blank sheet
- Review every link pointing to your site
- Redraw the competitor picture
- Repeat the full local presence review, where relevant
Results and strategy+
- Compare the year with the one before: rankings, visitors, enquiries and revenue from search
- Review what worked, what did not and what we would do differently
- Review the year's changes to Google, and what they mean for you
- Agree goals and targets for the coming year
- Check the level of work still matches the size of the opportunity
- Plan the year's content around seasonal peaks, launches and events
Website and housekeeping+
- Review whether your website platform still suits you, or whether a redesign or rebuild is due
- Review your tracking setup, including the effect of cookie consent on your numbers
- Update pages that quote years, prices, statistics or regulations
- Check domain name and security certificate renewal dates
- Review who has access to your website and accounts, and remove anyone who should not
- Review the terms we track and retire those that no longer matter
As and when needed
Some work is triggered by events, not the calendar. When one of these happens it usually jumps to the top of the list.
You redesign, rebuild or move your website (a site migration)+
Plan the move so rankings carry across, check everything before launch, watch closely afterwards. A badly handled move is the most common cause of a sudden loss of visitors.
Google makes a major change to how it ranks sites (an algorithm or core update)+
Measure the effect on you, work out why and adjust the plan.
Rankings or visitors drop suddenly+
Investigate the cause straight away and tell you what we found.
You launch a new product, service or location+
Research how people search for it, then build or improve the pages to match.
Your developer plans changes to the site+
Review them before they go live so nothing harms your visibility.
Google issues a warning (a manual action), or the site is hacked+
Find the cause, fix it and ask Google to review the site.
A wave of spammy links appears+
Assess the risk and, where needed, ask Google to disregard them (a disavow).
A competitor makes a big move+
Assess the threat and decide whether and how to respond.
A bad review or negative press appears+
Advise on the response and work to keep your own pages prominent for your name.
A news story or PR opportunity comes up+
Move quickly to get you quoted, mentioned and linked.
A new search feature takes off+
Test how you appear in it and decide whether it deserves attention.
Running in the background at all times: daily technical checks of your site, daily page speed checks for real visitors, daily ranking checks, weekly map position checks for local businesses, and alerts for outages, sudden ranking drops, new and lost links, and mentions of your brand.