SEO Maintenance Checklist: 12 Things You Should Be Doing Every Month

SEO isn’t a one-and-done job because search engine algorithms are always evolving. As are your competition. So even the best-optimized websites can slowly lose rankings and traffic without regular upkeep.

We’ve put together a practical monthly SEO maintenance checklist that keeps your site in top shape, from monitoring technical health to fine-tuning content and tracking performance.

We’ll also cover extra tips for local SEO and what tools you should use to make your workflow smoother.

Why Monthly SEO Maintenance Is Non-Negotiable?

Google had some core algorithm updates within just a few months in 2024. And each of these changed the way rankings work. This means you’ve got to review your site every month so you’re able to adapt to any algorithm changes and address anything that might cause a rankings dip.

Also, consider SEO as part of your wider business strategy because you wouldn’t neglect other marketing channels for months like your social media presence or email marketing campaigns.

The same goes for SEO. Just as you’d run an email marketing audit periodically to keep those campaigns effective, your website needs regular SEO check-ups.

And regular SEO maintenance also protects your site’s long-term ROI. Unlike paid search ads, which stop generating leads the moment you pause them, organic traffic can compound over time. But that’s only if you nurture it.

SEO Maintenance vs. SEO Strategy: What’s the Difference?

SEO strategy is where you map out what you want to achieve and how you’ll get there over the long term.

SEO maintenance, on the other hand, is the regular routine that keeps your site in shape and executes that strategy. Strategy might tell you which content to publish or which site improvements to prioritize. Maintenance is more to do with implementation and upkeep:

• Checking for technical issues
• Updating content
• Monitoring performance
• Constantly fine-tuning

Maintenance is ensuring all those posts you’ve published stay updated and don’t have any errors. But strategy is a lot more proactive and often project-based (e.g. a website redesign or an SEO migration to a new platform).

Tools You’ll Need for Monthly SEO Maintenance

You can’t do effective SEO maintenance without some help from tools:

Technical Auditing Tools (GSC, Screaming Frog, Sitebulb)

For technical SEO maintenance, your first stop is Google Search Console (GSC). It’s a free tool that alerts you to:

• Coverage errors
• Indexing issues
• Mobile usability problems

GSC provides direct insight into how Google is crawling and indexing your site. Each month, use it to spot errors like pages not being indexed or sudden spikes in crawl errors.

And using another crawling tool such as Screaming Frog SEO Spider or Sitebulb also helps. These programs crawl your website like search engine bots do. Then you get reports on technical issues:

• Broken links
• Missing meta tags
• Duplicate content
• 404 errors
• Redirect chains

For example, Screaming Frog will list any broken URLs or server errors so you can fix them promptly. Sitebulb goes a step further with a visual audit and prioritization of issues.

Both these tools give you an “under the hood” view of your site’s health, so use them when you’re diagnosing technical SEO problems that aren’t always obvious on the surface.

Keyword Tracking and Ranking Tools (Ahrefs, Semrush, etc.)

You’ll also want tools to track keyword rankings and organic traffic trends to see if any of this is actually paying off. You can automatically track your target keywords in Google’s results with platforms like:

• Ahrefs
• Semrush
• Moz
• SE Ranking

These tools often provide an overall visibility index, which is how visible your site is across all tracked keywords. Monitoring this index month to month is a quick way to gauge if things are improving or if you need to investigate a dip.

Additionally, use Google Analytics (or another analytics suite) to review your organic traffic and user behavior. Look at the past month’s organic sessions, and compare to previous periods. Are there any sharp declines on specific days or pages? If there is, maybe an algorithm update or a technical issue affected you.

Semrush and Ahrefs also have features like organic traffic analysis and competitor tracking. These can show you if competitors gained on certain keywords or if new content is overtaking yours.

Content and On-Page Tools (Surfer, Clearscope, PageSpeed Insights)

Tools like Surfer SEO or Clear scope let you know if your content’s relevant and will suggest any improvements. So if you’re updating an old blog post you’d use these tools to analyze top-ranking content and see which keywords or subtopics you should include to cover the topic better.

Site speed and user experience are always a big part of SEO, so use something like Google’s Page Speed Insights to monitor your site’s performance.

Slow load times can hurt rankings and drive visitors away. In fact, if your page load goes from 1 second to 3 seconds, the probability of a bounce increases by 32%. That’s a big deal for user experience and SEO.

So use Page Speed Insights to see issues like unoptimized images or slow server response. You’ll also see reports on your Core Web Vitals metrics, which include:

• Largest Contentful Paint
• Cumulative Layout Shift
• First Input Delay

When you get any “needs improvement” or “poor” scores you should work with your development team to fix them because they’ll directly boost your SEO.

The Monthly SEO Maintenance Checklist: 12 Essentials

You can adjust the order of these to what makes sense for you, but generally it’s good to start with technical health (so nothing is fundamentally broken) and then move into content and links:

1. Check Google Search Console for Errors and Coverage Issues

Your first task each month is to log in to Google Search Console and review the health of your site. GSC will alert you to any new Coverage issues (for example, pages that Google tried to crawl but couldn’t index).

Look at the Index Coverage report and see if there are any Errors or Valid-with-Warning statuses. Common things to scan for include:

• Excluded Pages: GSC might list pages it chose not to index (due to noindex tags, duplicate content, alternate page with canonical, etc.). So review these to make sure you actually expected them.

  For instance, it’s normal to see admin or filtered pages excluded if you’ve noindexed them. But if an important page is showing as Excluded (Duplicate without user-selected canonical) unexpectedly, you may need to set a canonical tag or address duplicate content.

• URL Inspection: Use the URL Inspection tool on any critical pages that saw traffic drops. This will tell you if a page is indexed and if Google encountered any crawl issues on it.

2. Review Organic Traffic and Rankings for Key Pages

Your next step is to see how your organic traffic and keyword rankings are trending. You can do this through your web analytics (e.g., Google Analytics) and going to the organic traffic report.

Once you’re here, compare last month’s organic sessions to the previous month or the same month last year. Are there noticeable changes? If you see a dip, try to pinpoint if it’s site-wide or specific to certain pages.

Now you need to know your key pages, which are typically your:

• Homepage
• Main product/service pages
• High-traffic blog posts

Check how these pages did in terms of clicks and impressions with either Analytics or Search Console’s Performance report. If your bankers dropped off in clicks randomly you need to find out why. Did its average position drop for important keywords?

So this is where it’s handy to have a rank tracking tool (Semrush, Ahrefs, etc.). Examine the ranking positions for your critical keywords.

If you normally have a list of, say, 50-100 target keywords, look at the ones that changed notably. Perhaps your page slipped from #3 to #9 for a high-volume keyword. And that would explain a traffic dip and warrant action like re-optimizing the content.

3. Identify and Fix Broken Links (Internal & External)

Broken links create dead ends for users and search crawlers. If a visitor clicks a link and hits a 404 page, it’s frustrating and they might leave your site immediately.

Google’s crawlers also waste time on broken links, which can even dilute your crawl budget. Fixing them improves your site quality and shows that you maintain your site properly.

So use a crawling tool like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb to run a crawl. It should report all the URLs that returned a 4xx or 5xx status. Then you can check those reports and see where on your site the broken link is coming from.

4. Run a Fresh Crawl to Detect Technical SEO Issues

We’d recommend doing a site crawl with an SEO auditing tool on a regular basis (monthly if possible, especially for larger sites, or at least quarterly for smaller ones). Even if nothing seems obviously wrong.

The crawler will systematically check each page and report issues that might not surface through manual checks or GSC alone.

When you run a fresh crawl, pay attention to common technical SEO trouble spots such as:

• New broken links or images
• Duplicate content or tags
• Missing or too-short title/meta tags
• Header hierarchy and H1s
• Orphaned pages
• Server issues
• Redirect loops or chains
• XML sitemap and robots.txt checks

Running these crawls and reviewing the issues is a bit like going through a checklist of technical SEO best practices. The first time you do it, you might find a lot to fix. But the idea is that over time your site’s health score will improve and each subsequent crawl will (hopefully) show fewer errors.

5. Optimize Title Tags and Meta Descriptions Where Needed

Title tags and meta descriptions are your clickable storefront in the search results. So as part of monthly maintenance, it’s worth reviewing and tweaking them on key pages so you know they’re still optimized and compelling 

This doesn’t mean rewriting every title/meta each month, but just keep an eye out for pages that could use improvement or that have issues like duplicates or missing info.

Start by checking if any new pages (or updated pages) have missing or duplicate title tags or meta descriptions. We touched on this in the crawl section: those issues should be fixed promptly.

If your SEO audit or Search Console HTML Improvements report flags duplicates, sort them out. It’s a common problem: around 35% of sites have duplicate titles and 30% have duplicate metas, according to a Semrush study. That can hurt your click-through rates and confuse search engines about which page to show for what.

Next, consider performance data: use Google Search Console’s Performance report to see click-through rates (CTR) for your pages’ search appearances. If you notice a page ranking well (say positions 1-5) but with a low CTR compared to other pages, that’s a flag that your title or meta might not be as enticing as it could be.

Try refining it. For example, maybe your title is currently “Services - Our Company” and isn’t descriptive. You could make it more user-focused like “Our Company Services - [Solution or Benefit] for Your Needs”.

Just don’t over-optimize your titles and metas to the point it sounds spammy or stuffing keywords. Google is quite good at identifying unnatural titles. Keep it natural and user-friendly, while including your target keywords once if it makes sense.

6. Spot and Fix Indexing or Crawling Problems

Anything that stops search engines from crawling or indexing your content ruins all your other SEO efforts, so catching these is important. Some ways to spot these problems include:

• Server Logs or Crawl Stats: Look for any anomalies if you have access to your server logs or use a tool that reports crawl stats. For instance, did Googlebot activity suddenly drop off? If there’s a sharp decline, maybe your robots.txt was unintentionally changed or the site had uptime issues.
• Render Testing: Use the URL Inspection tool in GSC or a platform like Deep Crawl’s rendering test to see if Google can render your pages properly. This is important if you use a lot of JavaScript. Sometimes changes in scripts can inadvertently hide content from Google.

And if you do find an indexing/crawling issue, sort it out quickly:

• Accidental Noindex Tags: This happens more often than you’d think.  A developer might copy a noindex meta tag from a staging site to live, or a plugin update toggles something. If a page that should be indexed is marked noindex, remove that tag ASAP and request indexing.
• Robots.txt Disallow: Similarly, make sure you’re not blocking important sections in robots.txt. A quick check of your robots file each month (especially after site updates) is wise because it hides the entire blog from Google until you catch it.
• Broken Canonical or Hreflang Tags: If you use these, verify that they point to the right URLs. A bad canonical can cause Google to skip indexing the current page in favor of one that might not even exist or be meant for another region.
• Site Downtime or Slow Response: If your site had downtime or is consistently very slow, Google might crawl less. And a consistently slow site could lead to fewer pages being indexed over time because Googlebot’s getting timed out.

7. Update Outdated Content or Refresh Top Pages

Content needs to be refreshed to stay relevant. One of the highest-impact monthly tasks is identifying which content on your site has grown stale or could use an upgrade, and then updating it. This is especially true for pages that drive a lot of your traffic.

Refreshing content can be as simple as:

• Adding a few new paragraphs with up-to-date info
• Replacing outdated statistics with current ones
• Improving the title to be more catchy
• Re-publishing (with a note about the update)

In many cases, this can significantly boost your traffic. In fact, 53% of marketers saw higher engagement after updating old content, and 49% saw increased traffic, which you can see in the graph below.

Besides performance-driven updates, also do a quick scan for factual accuracy and freshness on key pages. Does that “Ultimate Guide to XYZ 2023” need a title and content change now that it’s 2025? Are there references like “recently, in 2019…” that are now obviously outdated?

These little details can erode trust with readers (and search engines, which prefer fresh content when it’s needed). So keep your tone and references up to date.

Don’t forget to update things like meta descriptions or title tags if the content angle changed after your refresh. And if the page’s focus keyword changes slightly due to new content, adjust your on-page SEO accordingly (headers, etc.). For example, your old post might have been about “best smartphones 2024” but now you’re targeting “best smartphones 2025” - make sure the on-page reflects that.

8. Analyze and Improve Internal Linking Opportunities

Internal links help:

• Distribute PageRank around your site
• Guide users to related content
• Signal to Google which pages are most important

So reviewing them on a monthly basis gives you a nice boost with relatively low effort.

Start by examining your site’s internal link structure for any gaps. Are there high-value pages that aren’t getting many internal links from other pages? If you published a good new blog post last month, have you gone back to older relevant posts and linked forward to this new one? It’s an easy win to do so.

Google uses internal links to discover content and pass authority, so you want to ensure your newest (or most important) pages are well-integrated into your link graph.

Also use tools or crawl data to identify orphan pages (pages with zero internal links). Unless a page is intentionally standalone, give it at least one good internal link from a relevant page.

Lastly, watch out for broken or redirected internal links as we discussed in step 3. When you find those, update them to point to the correct URLs so you’re not sending users through a redirect or to a dead page.

9. Disavow Toxic Backlinks (If Necessary)

Backlinks are generally great to have, but not all of them are good. Some can actually be harmful, for example:

• Spammy blog comments
• Irrelevant forum profiles
• Links from low-quality sites that look like link farms

You might need to do a quick cleanup with Google’s Disavow Tool if you’ve identified any toxic backlinks pointing to your site.

This is a more advanced task and not something every site will need monthly. But it’s worth including as a checkpoint, especially for sites in competitive niches where negative SEO could happen.

So look for any sudden influx of strange links. For instance, 100 new links from a free web directory site in a language/country your business has nothing to do with. That’s suspicious. Or links with anchor text that is clearly not related to your brand (or is overly commercial in a manipulative way).

If you identify links that are spammy, you have a couple of options:

• Ignore Them If They’re Negligible: Google has gotten pretty good at discounting spam links. A few bad apples usually won’t hurt you so you don’t need to panic about every odd link.
• Disavow If They’re Numerous or You Suspect An Impact: Preparing a disavow file can be wise if there's a pattern of spammy links. This file basically tells Google “ignore these links when evaluating my site.”

Make sure you’ve read Google’s guidelines on disavowing. Only list domains or URLs that you’re confident are toxic and that you haven’t been able to get removed manually. The disavow tool is often a last resort. That said, doing a periodic backlink audit is healthy.

As part of maintenance, you might also schedule a quarterly deep dive where you export all new referring domains from Search Console and scan them. Are they legit sites? If 90% of new links are fine and maybe 10% look bad, you might choose to disavow that 10%.

However, note that Google’s Penguin algorithm now mostly devalues bad links rather than penalizing, so disavow is a bit less dire than it used to be. Still, if you’ve previously had a manual action for unnatural links, you definitely want to keep up with disavows as needed to maintain your clean status

If you do disavow, update your file with any new bad domains and re-upload. There's no need to resubmit the whole file monthly if nothing changed; only do it when you have additions. And don’t disavow good links by accident.

10. Monitor Core Web Vitals and Site Speed

Site speed and user experience metrics are integral parts of SEO maintenance, especially with Google’s Core Web Vitals (CWV) now being search ranking factors..

The three Core Web Vitals are:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how quickly the main content loads
• First Input Delay (FID): how responsive the page is to user input
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): how stable the layout is (no jumping buttons, etc.)

Google’s threshold for “good” is LCP under 2.5s. And then the FID under 100ms and CLS under 0.1. You can see how you’re doing by checking your CWV report in Google Search Console or Page Speed Insights.

Also, use PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse (in Chrome DevTools) so you can audit specific pages. They’re good because they give you actionable suggestions: e.g., “Eliminate render-blocking resources” or “Defer offscreen images.”

Sort out the ones with the biggest impact (they’re often ranked by priority). Some common quick wins:

• Enabling compression (GZIP/Brotli) on your server.
• Implementing a CDN for global content delivery.
• Compressing and resizing images appropriately (or using modern formats like WebP).
• Minimizing heavy JavaScript or using it more efficiently (maybe that third-party script you included is slowing things; consider if it’s worth it).
• Improving server response times (TTFB) by using caching or upgrading your hosting if needed.

It’s also a good idea to monitor any platform or plugin updates. For instance, if you run on WordPress and a certain plugin update causes a slowdown, your CWV might catch it.

Additionally, consider running a site speed test from user locations (tools like GTmetrix or WebPageTest) to see if any regions are slow. Sometimes a site is fast in the US but slow in Asia, so that tells you to use a CDN or a server closer to that audience.

Monitoring these metrics monthly means you can steadily improve or at least maintain them, rather than finding out a year later that your site is considered “slow” by Google’s standards.

It’s easier to make incremental improvements continuously. And the payoff is more about having a faster site that boosts conversions and user satisfaction rather than just SEO.

11. Audit Mobile Usability and Responsiveness

With the majority of web traffic now on mobile devices, you’ve got to make sure your site’s mobile usability is sound. Google primarily uses the mobile version of content for indexing (“mobile-first indexing”), so any mobile UX issue can directly affect SEO.

Doing some hands-on testing helps here. Grab your own phone or use your browser’s device emulator to view key pages (homepage, important landing pages, blog post template, etc.) on different screen sizes.

Is everything displaying correctly? Are images or tables breaking the layout? Sometimes a page looks fine on a desktop but a certain element might overflow or look awkward on a small screen. For example, maybe an embedded YouTube video isn’t responsive and goes off the screen - you’d want to fix the embed code or CSS to make it scale down.

And check navigation on mobile: Is your menu easy to use? Do all dropdowns work with touch? A common issue here is having a hover-based menu that doesn’t translate to tap, which means mobile users can’t access certain pages. If you find that, implement a mobile-friendly menu (like a hamburger menu with tap-to-expand sections).

Also consider site search and forms on mobile. Are they accessible and easy to use? If a contact form’s submit button is off-screen or a user has to pinch-zoom to fill a field, that’s a poor experience.

Page speed, as discussed in the previous point, is also tied to mobile experience. Mobile users often have slower connections, so the optimizations you do for CWV directly benefit mobile usability.

Remember, as of now around 60% of global website traffic is from mobile devices. If your site isn’t comfortable for that 60%, both your users and search rankings will suffer. Check the chart below to see current device share.

12. Evaluate Backlink Growth and Identify Gaps

Backlinks are still a big part of SEO authority. Part of your monthly maintenance should involve checking in on your backlink profile growth and strategizing around it. It’s less of a “fix” task and more of an analysis and planning task, but it’s important to keep momentum (or identify a drop-off) in your link building efforts.

Each month, look at how many new referring domains or backlinks you acquired. Tools like Ahrefs or Semrush are helpful here and give you a timeline of new links found.

Also, identify gaps or opportunities by doing a quick competitor link comparison. See where your competitors are getting mentions or links that you aren’t. For example, if a competitor got listed in a “Top 10 Tools” article on a popular blog and you offer a similar tool but weren’t listed, that’s a gap to potentially fill (maybe reach out to the author for inclusion or aim to get mentioned in a similar roundup).

And if you notice that one month you hardly got any new links (and you normally do), investigate why. Maybe you paused content production or outreach which is fine, but then you know that needs ramping up next month.

Or maybe a partner site that used to link to you often has shut down or changed content strategy. Keeping an eye on these trends stops you from stagnating.

On the flip side, check if you lost any significant backlinks recently. All sites naturally gain and lose links, but if you lost a really valuable one (perhaps a site removed an article that mentioned you, or your link got replaced), you might attempt recovery.

If it was a manual outreach link (like a guest post or partnership), maybe you can refresh it or get a new one. If it was editorial (you had no control), consider why it might have been removed (was the content outdated?). Maybe updating your content could earn a new link from somewhere else.

Bonus: Monthly Tasks for Local SEO (If Applicable)

If your business has a local presence (e.g., a brick-and-mortar store or services in specific cities), there are a few additional maintenance tasks on the local SEO front.

You’ve got to take care of things here like Google Business listings and directory citations. Here are some bonus monthly tasks for those doing Local SEO:

Common Mistakes to Avoid in Monthly SEO Maintenance

Having an SEO maintenance routine is great, but it’s easy to fall into some traps while executing it. Be mindful of these common mistakes so none of your efforts go to waste: