A useful approach to managing the workload is to use a core group of technical SEO factors to monitor the site and search presence health weekly.<\/p>\n
This list is remarkably applicable for almost any individual or team across a variety of industries.<\/p>\n
Of course, there may be additional factors that can be added that are specific to your situation, but these points can form the backbone of a useful weekly checkup.<\/p>\n
Is 20 Minutes A Week Enough?<\/h2>\n
I can already hear the counterarguments from full-time technical SEO pros: \u201cYou can\u2019t even scratch the surface in 20 minutes a week.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n I agree.<\/p>\n But the point of this guide is to demonstrate how to monitor your most critical issues from a high level and diagnose where to spend more energy digging in.<\/p>\n Some weeks, a 20-minute checkup may be all you need.<\/p>\n Other weeks, you may find a disastrous canonicalization<\/a> error and call in the troops for an all-hands-on-deck assault.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re lagging on monitoring your technical SEO, you\u2019re about to get a big efficiency boost by following this weekly workflow.<\/p>\n There\u2019s no better place to start than popping over to Search Console<\/a> for a high-level scan of everything.<\/p>\n The data is straight from Google; the dashboard is already built for you, and you already have it set up for your account.<\/p>\n What we\u2019re looking for are glaring errors.<\/em><\/p>\n We\u2019re not digging into pages to analyze small keyword movements.<\/p>\n We\u2019re looking for the big kahunas of problems.<\/p>\n Review these data points:<\/strong><\/p>\n The Index Coverage section is key to understanding how Google\u2019s indexing and crawling of your site are going.<\/p>\n This is where Google communicates errors related to indexing or crawling.<\/p>\n The biggest thing to look for is the default Error view, and you\u2019ll want to read through the Details section.<\/p>\n Scan line by line and look at the trend column. If anything looks out of the ordinary, you\u2019ll want to dig in more and diagnose.<\/p>\n This provides a wealth of information on your sitemaps and their corresponding pages.<\/p>\n It\u2019s especially helpful when you have multiple sitemaps that represent different sections of pages on your site.<\/p>\n You want to look at the Last Read column to ensure it\u2019s been crawled somewhat recently, which varies depending on your site.<\/p>\n Then, you\u2019ll want to check the Status column to see the highlighted errors. Make a note to take action if this has increased since last week in an elevated way.<\/p>\n This is a big one. If you\u2019re doing everything right, this will rarely, if ever, have any manual actions listed.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s worth checking weekly to give you peace of mind. You want to find it before your CEO does.<\/p>\n Search Console has a wealth of information, and you could spend days digging into each report.<\/p>\n These high-level checks represent the most important summary dashboards to check weekly.<\/p>\n Briefly reviewing each of these sections and making notes can be done in as little as 10 minutes a week. But digging into the issues you find will take a lot more research.<\/p>\n The Robots.txt file is among the most important way to communicate to search engines where you want them to crawl and what pages you don\u2019t want to be crawled.<\/p>\n Super important: The robots.txt<\/a> file only controls the crawling<\/em> of but not the indexing of pages.<\/p>\n Some small sites have one or two lines in the file, while massive sites have incredibly complex setups.<\/p>\n Your average site will have just a few lines, and it rarely changes week to week.<\/p>\n Despite the file rarely changing, it\u2019s important to double-check that it\u2019s still there and that nothing unintentional was added to it.<\/p>\n In the worst-case scenario, such as on a website relaunch or a new site update from your development team, the robots.txt file might get changed to \u201cDisallow: \/\u201d to block search engines from crawling while the pages are under development on a staging server and then brought over to the live site with the disallow directive intact.<\/p>\n Make sure this is not on the live website:<\/p>\n But if it\u2019s a normal week, there won\u2019t be any changes, and it should only take a minute.<\/p>\n Every site has a different configuration every week; you\u2019ll want to compare it against your best-practice setup<\/a><\/u> to ensure nothing has changed in error.<\/p>\n For a high-level look at page speed across your site, we\u2019ll hop over to Google Analytics<\/a><\/u>.<\/p>\n Go to Behavior > Site Speed > Overview<\/em><\/p>\n I recommend comparing the past seven days to the previous seven days to get a sense of any big changes.<\/p>\n To dig in further, you\u2019ll want to go to Speed Suggestions to get page-by-page timings and suggestions:<\/p>\n The goal is to get a high-level sense of whether anything has gone wrong in the last week.<\/p>\n To take action, you\u2019ll want to test individual pages with a few other tools that get into the nuts and bolts.<\/p>\n Many other tools<\/a><\/u> exist to dig in further and diagnose specific page speed issues.<\/p>\n A useful tool from Google for measuring and diagnosing page speed issues is the Chrome Lighthouse<\/a><\/u> tool which can be accessed through the DevTools<\/a> built into every Chrome-based browser.<\/p>\n There\u2019s nothing better than getting down and dirty in the actual Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).<\/p>\n Gianluca Fiorelli said it best:<\/p>\n It surprises a lot how many SEOs rarely directly look at the SERPs, but do that only through \u201cthe 👀 \u201c of a tool. Shame! Look at them & youl\u2019ll: \u2014 Gianluca Fiorelli (@gfiorelli1) October 23, 2018<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Though tools are useful and time-saving, one shouldn\u2019t neglect to review the actual search results (SERPs) and not only when tools report significant changes.<\/p>\n Just type your keywords into the search engine and check if the tools reported match what you see in the SERPs.<\/p>\n It\u2019s 100% normal that there are slight variations in rankings because search results are dynamic and can change depending on factors such as geography, search history, device, and other personalization-related reasons.<\/p>\n Spot check the SERPs weekly, and you\u2019ll sleep better at night.<\/p>\n Continuing on from the previous phenomenon of not checking the SERPs, it\u2019s all too common for SEO professionals to default to analysis tools rather than hand-checking the website.<\/p>\n Yes, it\u2019s not as \u201cscalable\u201d to check the website by hand, but it\u2019s necessary to pick up some obvious issues that can get lost or undetected in a tool\u2019s report.<\/p>\n You\u2019ll want to rapidly test a few of your top pages to keep this to two minutes.<\/p>\n Remember, this is spot-checking for big issues that stand out, not a granular review of sentences, grammar, and paragraphs.<\/p>\n Start at the home page and scroll through, looking for anything clearly broken. Click all throughout the site, checking different page types and looking for anything off.<\/p>\n And while you\u2019re at it, take a quick look at the code.<\/p>\n Using Chrome, navigate to:<\/p>\n Again, this is a great practice to do weekly as a high-level checkup.<\/p>\n You\u2019ll feel much better knowing you\u2019re getting your own eyeballs directly on the thing that\u2019s making you money and not depending on some abstraction via a third-party tool.<\/p>\n The 20-minute technical SEO checkup provides a high-level overview of the overall SEO health of a website and provides an early warning when something is out of place before the problem escalates into a catastrophic failure.<\/p>\n The point is to quickly determine that all of the website vitals signs (such as crawling and indexing) are healthy and that site performance is optimal.<\/p>\n I also recommend doing a periodic full technical SEO audit<\/a><\/u> of your site to get a full diagnosis and uncover the deeper issues.<\/p>\n More Resources:<\/strong><\/p>\n Featured Image: Kite_rin\/Shutterstock<\/em><\/p>\n1. Search Console Overview (Minutes 0-10)<\/h2>\n
Start With The Overview Section:<\/h3>\n
![\"Screenshot](\"https:\/\/marketingnewsbox.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/technical-seo-the-20-minute-workweek-checklist-via-sejournal-josephrobison.png\")
Screenshot from Google Search Console, July 2022<\/span><\/div>\n\n
Next, Move On To The Coverage Section:<\/h3>\n
![\"Screenshot](\"https:\/\/marketingnewsbox.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/technical-seo-the-20-minute-workweek-checklist-via-sejournal-josephrobison-1.png\")
Screenshot from Google Search Console, July 2022<\/span><\/div>\nView The Sitemaps Section:<\/h3>\n
![\"Screenshot](\"https:\/\/marketingnewsbox.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/technical-seo-the-20-minute-workweek-checklist-via-sejournal-josephrobison-2.png\")
Screenshot from Google Search Console, July 2022<\/span><\/div>\nCheck For Manual Actions:<\/h3>\n
![\"Screenshot](\"https:\/\/marketingnewsbox.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/technical-seo-the-20-minute-workweek-checklist-via-sejournal-josephrobison-3.png\")
Screenshot from Google Search Console, July 2022<\/span><\/div>\n2. Check Robots.txt (Minutes 11-12)<\/h2>\n
User-agent: *\nDisallow: \/<\/pre>\n
3. Review Page Speed In Google Analytics (Minutes 13-15)<\/h2>\n
![\"Technical](\"https:\/\/marketingnewsbox.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/technical-seo-the-20-minute-workweek-checklist-via-sejournal-josephrobison-4.png\")
Screenshot from Google Analytics, July 2022<\/span><\/div>\n![\"Technical](\"https:\/\/marketingnewsbox.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/technical-seo-the-20-minute-workweek-checklist-via-sejournal-josephrobison-5.png\")
Screenshot from Google Analytics, July 2022<\/span><\/div>\n4. Review The Search Results (Minutes 15-18) <\/strong><\/h2>\n
\n
1) see clearly the search intent detected by Google
2) see how to format your content
3) find On SERPS SEO opportunities pic.twitter.com\/Wr4OYAcmiG<\/a><\/p>\n5. Visually Check Your Site (Minutes 19-20)<\/h2>\n
Developer Tools > View Page Source<\/pre>\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n
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