SEO is the backbone of your company’s digital strategy, and without it, your company is leaving revenue on the table. You know by now that making time to get it right is essential to doing good business.

That said, we know you aren’t made of free time — so to make improving your SEO rankings a little easier, we built you the ideal SEO schedule. It breaks down how to dedicate time from your days, weeks, and months to improve your digital presence.

Is the schedule worth it? Absolutely. Is it viable for everyone? Maybe not. But at the very least, let it serve as a guide as you build an SEO improvement schedule that’s doable for you.

Related: SEO is just one part of a strong digital ecosystem. Check out the rest.

Your Daily SEO Ranking Improvement Schedule

Time: 10 minutes/day

Block out 10 minutes each morning to take a hard look at one piece of content on your site. During that time, think about two magic questions:

1. What search term are you targeting?
2. Is your content serving the reader’s needs?

If you come up empty in either of those two answers, rework the piece appropriately. If you stumble across some woeful piece of content that needs more than 10 minutes of attention, set time on your calendar that week to get it up to snuff.

Before you move on with your day, make sure you take note of whatever search term you want the page to rank for, and come back and check in each week for the next two or three months. Did your content move up in the SEO rankings in a meaningful way? If not, either throw another 10 minutes at it to see if you can move the needle, or build out time with your content or marketing teams to replace the page entirely.

No matter how strong you think a certain webpage is, if it’s not drawing traffic, it’s not serving any purpose.

Tip: Build a master spreadsheet of your current pages and their SEO targets. It’ll help keep everything straight.

Your Weekly SEO Ranking Improvement Schedule 

Time: 30 minutes/week

Set aside 30 minutes at some point each week to think a little bigger — namely, what kinds of terms you actually want to be ranking for. This is your opportunity to see how competitive your desired terms are — and how your competitors are faring in their SEO ranking efforts. (Again, a spreadsheet would be helpful for this.)

There are two primary ways to investigate the search terms you’re interested in:

• Using paid tools like SEMrush, Moz, and Ahrefs, which are cost-efficient and can provide you with remarkable insights on keywords, search engine patterns, and websites.
• Googling terms you’re interested in.

A Four-Step Guide to Choosing Keywords (Sans Paid Tools)

1. Type a term you want to rank for into Google.
2. Jot down whoever is ranking in the first 10 spots.
3. Read over the next 30 to 40 SEO ranking spots. Write down where your site falls as well as where your competitors’ sites fall on that list.
4. Click the first five results and evaluate how those sites are presenting their data. Take notes on how to improve your own content accordingly:

• How can you better serve a reader?
• Is there something aesthetic or textual that all the top-ranked sites share?

Use the weekly insights to help inform your daily content check-ins. You’ll be surprised how quickly your confidence will grow once you have actual data to work with, instead of just blind guesses.

Your Monthly SEO Ranking Improvement Schedule

Time: one hour/month

Close the circle with a one-hour window each month dedicated purely to the keywords you’ve either neglected to write content for or new ones that your company has decided are important. It’d be tough to write, edit, and post content in just an hour, so use this time to:

• Identify the hole you’re trying to fill.
• Draft an outline or concept for the page you want.
• Build out the schedule (with a live date).
• Pass it along to your content team for creation.

Once you’ve got finalized content back, make sure your two primary questions are answered — is it targeted to a keyword, and does it address reader needs — and then, just like in your weekly SEO ranking efforts, take note of the current landscape for that keyword.

Check in on your content frequently. If it’s dying on the vine, you’ve got 10 minutes set aside each day to make changes.

The Big Picture

It’s important to realize that even though you can make changes to any piece of content in just a few minutes, the SEO ramifications will likely take much longer to manifest.

While Google maps the internet every second of every day, and does so at brilliant speeds, the web is a huge place. Crawlers may not visit your site every day; even when they do, there’s no assurance they’ll map every one of your pages during each pass through. Even if your changes are immediately mapped by Google, the search behavior metrics have to reach a certain degree of mathematical significance before Google decides to start moving around search results.

So don’t get frustrated if you don’t see big changes right away. Just keep checking in and making small improvements. Soon enough, you’ll start leapfrogging competitors up to those coveted first 10 search result spots.

Want to keep talking about SEO ranking? Read more of our digital strategy content.