SEO Maintenance: A Checklist for Essential Year-Round Tasks

So, you’ve got a website for your small business. That’s a great start! But just having a site isn’t enough these days. To actually get people visiting your site—and not just your mum or your best mate—you need to keep your SEO in good shape all year round. Don’t worry, it’s not as scary as it sounds. With a bit of regular TLC (that’s Tender Loving Care, not the 90s girl group), your site can stay healthy and visible on search engines like Google.

This guide breaks it all down for you. Think of it as a helpful checklist of simple tasks you can spread across the year. It’s designed with small businesses in mind, so nothing too techy or expensive here. Just stuff that works.

Why SEO Maintenance Matters

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) isn’t a one-time job. Search engines update their algorithms, people change how they search for things, and your business might even change too. That’s why it’s important to keep on top of your SEO, a bit like how you keep your car serviced or your inbox (kind of) tidy.

If you ignore it, your site might slowly drop down the search rankings, get fewer visitors, and miss out on potential customers. But if you stay on top of things with regular maintenance, you’ll give your site the best chance to shine online.

Your SEO Maintenance Checklist

Let’s break this into bite-sized tasks you can tackle throughout the year. You don’t have to do everything at once—just keep chipping away month by month.

Monthly Tasks

1. Check for Broken Links

Broken links are links on your site that don’t work anymore. Maybe the page was deleted or the link was typed wrong. Search engines don’t like them, and visitors find them frustrating. Use a free tool like Broken Link Checker or Screaming Frog to spot them, then fix or remove them.

2. Review and Update Key Pages

Look at your most important pages—like your homepage, services, or contact page—and see if anything’s out of date. Maybe you’ve changed your phone number or added a new product. Keeping these pages fresh shows both Google and your customers that your business is active.

3. Check Google Search Console

This free tool from Google tells you how your site is performing in search results. You can see which keywords people are using to find you, if there are any errors, and whether your pages are being indexed properly. It’s super useful, and once you get the hang of it, checking it monthly will only take a few minutes.

4. Monitor Your Rankings

Keep an eye on how your site ranks for your main keywords. There are free and paid tools to help you do this, like Ubersuggest or SERProbot. If you notice a big drop, it might be time to dig a bit deeper and figure out why.

5. Post Fresh Content

Blog posts, news updates, or even new product pages can help keep your site active. Google loves fresh content, and it’s a great way to target new keywords or answer questions your customers might have. Aim for at least one new post a month if you can.

Quarterly Tasks

6. Do a Content Audit

Every few months, look through your older content. Is it still accurate? Could it be improved? Are there opportunities to combine similar posts or expand short ones? Keeping content useful and up-to-date helps it rank better.

7. Check Your Competitors

Take a look at what other businesses like yours are doing. Are they writing blogs? Have they improved their website layout? Are they ranking for new keywords? This isn’t about copying—it’s about staying competitive.

8. Test Site Speed

People hate slow websites, and so does Google. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to test your site’s speed. If it’s slow, things like image sizes or unnecessary plugins could be the culprit.

9. Tidy Up Technical SEO

This sounds scary, but it doesn’t have to be. Check for things like duplicate title tags, missing meta descriptions, or messed-up URLs. Tools like Screaming Frog or Yoast (if you’re using WordPress) can help point these things out.

10. Update Your Sitemap

If you’ve added or removed a lot of pages recently, update your sitemap and resubmit it in Google Search Console. This helps Google crawl and understand your site better.

Half-Yearly Tasks

11. Review Your Keywords

Trends change. The words people use to find your products or services might not be the same now as they were six months ago. Use keyword research tools to see what’s popular and update your content accordingly, but remember that some searches tend to have peaks and troughs, here in the UK for example a search about tax returns peaks when people need to submit a return  (May/June, October and December/January).

12. Refresh Your Design (If Needed)

If your site looks like it was built in 2005, it might be time for a little makeover. A clean, mobile-friendly design not only looks better but helps with SEO too. You don’t need to go full rebrand—sometimes just updating fonts, colours, or layout can make a big difference.

13. Check for Mobile-Friendliness

More and more people are using their phones to browse. Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to see how your site performs. If it’s hard to read or slow to load on mobile, that could hurt your rankings.

14. Look at User Behaviour

Use tools like Google Analytics to see what people do on your site. Are they leaving quickly? Are some pages more popular than others? Understanding how people use your site can help you improve it.

Yearly Tasks

15. Do a Full SEO Audit

Once a year, do a deep dive into your whole site. Look at everything—technical stuff, content, backlinks, keywords, user experience. You can do it yourself with checklists or hire someone to help if you prefer.

16. Review Your Goals

Are your SEO efforts helping you reach your business goals? Maybe you wanted to grow your mailing list or sell more of a certain product. Take a step back and see what’s working and what’s not.

17. Refresh Top-Performing Content

Find your best-performing blog posts or pages and make them even better. Add new info, update links, include fresh images, or turn a blog into a video. This can help keep the content ranking well and bring in more traffic.

18. Clean Up Your Backlinks

Backlinks (links from other sites to yours) are important, but not all are good. Use tools like the Google Search Console to check your backlink profile. If you’ve got dodgy links from spammy sites, try to remove or disavow them.

19. Back Up Your Site

This isn’t strictly SEO, but it’s still essential. If anything goes wrong—hackers, server crashes, or just bad luck—a recent backup can save your bacon. Make it part of your yearly routine (or better yet, do it more often – we backup on a daily basis, but a weekly or monthly schedule may be enough depending on how often the site is updated).

20. Plan Ahead

Set your SEO goals for the next year. Do you want to rank for new keywords? Target a different audience? Launch new products? Planning ahead helps you stay focused and keep improving your website’s performance.

Bonus Tips for Busy Business Owners

We get it—you’re busy running your business. Here are a few tips to make SEO maintenance less overwhelming:

• Set calendar reminders: Break tasks into small chunks and spread them out.
• Use tools: There are loads of free and paid tools to help automate checks.
• Delegate: If you’ve got a team, share the load. If not, consider hiring a freelancer.
• Keep learning: SEO is always changing. Following blogs or podcasts can help you stay up to date.

Final Thoughts

SEO maintenance might not be the most exciting part of running a small business, but it’s one of the most important. A well-optimised site can bring you more visitors, more customers, and more sales—all without paying for ads.

By following this checklist and spreading the tasks across the year, you can keep your site in great shape without it taking over your life. Think of it like brushing your teeth—do a bit every day (or month!), and it saves you pain down the line.

So, set those reminders, bookmark this checklist, and give your site the regular care it deserves. Your future customers—and Google—will thank you for it.