It’s no secret that having a well-organized daily routine is super beneficial. After all, life can get overwhelming (hello, reporting week), and it's easy to forget what you need to do without reminders and task lists.

For us, a daily routine means being aware of what’s going on within our team, with our clients’ sites, and in the digital marketing world overall. Sounds simple. Yes. But said it should be dead boring and complicated? Such a routine helps us stay on track and keep our clients’ sites performing at their best.

After all, anyone working in SEO knows things may change quickly, and if you miss an anomaly, it may take weeks or even longer to set things right. We’ve been there and don’t want you to!

To help you stay on top of your programs and create a positive routine, we’ve put together five essential SEO tasks to do each day. Let’s jump in!

1. Analyze Your Analytics

A few years ago, we had a client who used to remove their analytics. Well, it's not like they really wanted to remove analytics, but various team members would make updates to the site and forget to put analytics back on the pages. It wasn’t ideal, but it got us into the habit of checking our clients' analytics more regularly.

This can help for several reasons, but a good example is what happened to one of our clients not so long ago. When working on a monthly report, they noticed a huge decline year-over-year in traffic from Bing. They asked us to dig deeper into it and find a possible reason.

We compared the traffic charts from Bing Webmaster Tools with Google Analytics and found out that Google Analytics data for the same period of the last year was highly overestimated. In fact, there was indeed a decline YoY, but much smaller compared to what the client saw in the GA report.

With this data in place, the client remembered that they had been adjusting the Google Analytics tracking last year, around the same dates, which led to bloated numbers, and took it into account for their monthly report.

Scenarios like this are pretty common. We saw other issues like this, such as removed thank-you pages, deleted pages, error-coding issues, etc. By making an analytics check-in part of your daily routine, you can get out ahead of any issues and ensure you don’t lose days or months of tracking.

2. Monitor Search Console

To be honest, we are not big fans of the modern Google Search Console. People who have been working in SEO for over 10 years would probably agree that the old one was more intuitive, it had better reporting and functionality, and worked faster, especially on slow computers.

HOWEVER – and this is a big however – we do appreciate Google giving us invaluable crawl information. For free. Especially for huge e-commerce sites, which are hard to crawl with our own tools.

One of the reports we look at daily is the Page Indexing report. Are any of my pages throwing errors? Was there a spike in blocked pages? Is my robots.txt file catching the right things?

The great thing about Search Console is that it can provide data faster than Analytics.

For example, a few weeks ago, we were reviewing a report in Search Console and noticed impressions and clicks to core product pages were down. Upon further review, we saw they had lost redirects from old-to-new URLs set earlier during a transition.

It turned out that 301 redirects were removed from the staging site, and it went into production as is. Oops!

In Google Analytics, identifying the issue could take longer, whereas in Search Console, we could identify it immediately and take action.

3. Review Your Rankings

Every time, before a client call, we log into SEMRush to check for improvements or declines in rankings. What for? To see if everything is stable, if any anomalies occur, or if there are algorithmic fluctuations in Google SERPs that affect not only our clients.

We use rankings as a guide, but they can also be good indicators of what Google is doing. For example, if we see a certain piece of content moving up the SERPs or being switched out of a specific SERP, it helps us make decisions on next steps.

Rankings over time can provide amazing insights into the types of content your users search for and what you need to create to meet the audience.

For example, one of our clients’ rankings for a priority term dropped out of the top-30 and didn’t return.

After monitoring the term for a while, we realized what was happening – the intent of the search itself had changed. While Google had initially shown top-of-funnel content, they were shifting to bottom-of-funnel content. Pages built for conversions.

We ended up building a new page, targeting the term, and giving users the ability to request a quote directly on the page. Within a week, the site moved back into the top position and stayed there.

Tracking rankings daily may not be that helpful, but it’s important to see what is happening over time. To do that, you have to know what is happening at any given moment in time.

4. Read the News

Ask anyone who’s been in search for many years about why they love their job, and they’ll probably tell you one reason is that it keeps them up. It’s true! In the world of search, you never know what happens next.

The amazing thing is, there are some fantastic people out there who are constantly monitoring, testing, and reporting back. SEO requires constant learning and understanding, and we are so grateful that there are many people in the industry who help us get better.

As part of our daily routine, we check Twitter in the morning (our list of SEOs can be found here) and quickly check for any updates on one of the following websites.

• Search Engine Roundtable
• Search Engine Land
• SEMRush blog
• Search Engine Journal

5. Check-In with Your Team

Even if you think you are doing everything in your power to optimize site performance, there’s still a chance you missed something. There are a lot of moving parts in SEO projects, and we can’t see everything. That’s why we have a team!

We have bi-weekly calls with our clients to touch base on the high-priority items, to make them aware of any algorithm updates, show current SEO performance, update on the ongoing tasks, and discuss further steps. We like to get a sense for what they are working on, if they need support, and what they are seeing. You never know what helpful piece of info you might get.

For example, recently, a colleague was working on a blog consolidation project, and we found an old blog post that could be refreshed and updated to focus on a new keyword we were targeting. After all, using existing content can be much easier than creating something brand new.

Remote? Tools like Google Meet, Google Chat, and, of course, good old email make keeping up with your team much easier. Don’t hesitate to say hello and see where the conversation goes from there.

Starting Your Routine

While getting into a routine can be beneficial, it isn’t always easy. Start by adding these to your weekly task list and gradually add them to your daily list. A simple trick is to add each item to your calendar so you always have time carved out.

By knocking out these essential SEO tasks each day, you’ll stay on top of your projects, give your sites the best chance to be successful, and improve your knowledge.

If you want to take your SEO routine further, Rankability, can help you identify opportunities, fix hidden issues, and keep your site moving in the right direction. Connect with Rankability on https://x.com/rankability !