Monthly SEO Checklist: What to Check in 60 Minutes

The 60-minute monthly routine

Compare 28 days with the previous 28 days, not month with month: months have different lengths and weekend counts. For seasonal businesses, also compare with the same period last year. Search Console keeps 16 months of Performance data.

What to do with what you find

• A new indexing error on many URLs: usually a template, plugin or redirect change. Find what changed that week. The indexing problems fix guide covers each reason.
• A page lost clicks: open it in Performance and click Queries. Lost position on one query? Check who now ranks above you and what they added. Same position but fewer clicks? Search the query yourself: a new AI Overview, ads or a map pack may sit above you.
• High impressions, low CTR: rewrite the title and description to be more specific. Patterns: title and meta swipe file.
• Queries at position 8 to 20: add the section, table or example the top 3 have and you do not, and link to the page from 2 or 3 related pages.

Example (fictional): northwind-outdoors.com finds /guides/winter-camping lost 38% of clicks month over month. Position held at 4. Searching the query shows a new AI Overview at the top. The fix is not the title: the team adds a clear gear table near the top so the page is more quotable, and logs the change with the date.

When the whole site drops

If clicks fall across most pages starting on one date, do not change pages one by one. First check:

1. The Google Search Status Dashboard for a core or spam update on that date.
2. Seasonality: the same weeks last year.
3. Tracking: did Search Console and analytics both drop, or only one?
4. A site change that week: redesign, migration, robots.txt or noindex.

Then follow the traffic drop recovery playbook, or the Google core update checklist if an update lines up.

Quarterly additions (2 to 3 hours)

• Run the full 90-point checklist.
• Check new and lost links in Search Console > Links.
• Review your keyword map: one main query per page, no two pages competing.
• Refresh the 3 posts or pages that lost the most clicks over the quarter.
• Ask your 10 main buyer questions in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google and note who is cited.
• Run a full Search Console audit.

Keep a change log

SEO changes take weeks to show. Google says some changes take effect in a few hours and others take several months (SEO Starter Guide, updated December 2025). Without a dated log, you cannot tell which change helped. Keep four columns: date, URL, what changed, why. Judge each change 28 days after Google recrawls the page (URL Inspection shows the last crawl date).