Quarterly Review Checklist: Systematic Site Maintenance
SEO requires ongoing maintenance. Algorithm changes, competitor movements, and content decay erode rankings over time. Quarterly reviews catch problems before they compound and identify improvement opportunities.
Top Page Optimization
Identify your top 10-20 traffic-generating pages. These money pages deserve the most attention. Small improvements to high-traffic pages produce larger absolute gains than major improvements to low-traffic pages.
Check Search Console for pages ranking 11-20. These striking distance opportunities can often reach page one with targeted optimization. The effort-to-reward ratio is exceptional.
Review conversion data for top pages. High traffic without conversions indicates CTA or page design problems worth fixing.
Broken Link Maintenance
External links decay as referenced sites change or disappear. Dead links create poor user experience and signal neglected maintenance to search engines.
Run broken link scans quarterly. Fix or remove links to 404 pages. Replace outdated references with current alternatives.
Check for broken inbound links pointing to pages you’ve deleted. Redirect these to relevant current pages to preserve link equity.
Content Freshness Updates
Google favors fresh content. Pages with outdated information gradually lose rankings to newer competitors.
Compare year-over-year traffic in Search Console. Declining pages likely need content updates. Add current statistics, refresh examples, and remove obsolete references.
Update title tags with current years where appropriate. Small changes signal ongoing maintenance.
Consider merging similar pages that cannibalize each other’s rankings into single comprehensive resources.
New Keyword Discovery
Check Search Console for queries generating impressions on unoptimized content. Google’s NLP often matches your pages to keywords you didn’t target. Explicitly optimizing for these discovered keywords accelerates ranking improvement.
Monitor trending topics in your niche. Google Trends and topic monitoring tools reveal emerging search demand before competition intensifies.
Look for misspelling opportunities. Common typos represent low-competition keywords worth capturing.