One hour a month: the tools routine
Trends, autocomplete, Search Console and PageSpeed are useless consulted once. Here is the monthly routine that ties them together, minute by minute, and what to note along the way. Tools series, fifth and final part.
Four parts, four tools, all free. The risk, now, is known in advance: opening them once, nodding, never coming back. Yet these instruments are only worth anything through repetition, because what they measure moves slowly. Here is the routine that ties them together, calibrated to fit into one hour, once a month.
The first twenty minutes: Search Console
Start with the Performance report, period compared with the previous month. Three questions, always the same: which pages are climbing, which pages have many impressions and few clicks, which new queries have appeared. Note one title correction to make, one page idea, no more: the routine dies the day it produces a list of fifteen tasks.
Then spend two minutes on indexing: the pages report says how many are indexed and why the others are not, which the part “Why your page is not on Google” taught you to read. An occasional check with the site: command in Google, documented here, completes the picture: it lists what Google knows of your domain, and an important page missing from that list is the first thread to pull.
The next twenty minutes: the raw material
Ten minutes of autocomplete on a single topic, the one of the moment, private window, harvest into the spreadsheet. Ten minutes of Trends for the season ahead: what peaks in two or three months? Now is when you write the October page, not in October, since indexing and ranking are counted in weeks.
The last twenty minutes: upkeep
PageSpeed on the month’s most visited page, mobile first, purely to check that nothing has degraded: one image added without compression is enough to sink a page that was doing fine. Then the business profile: accurate hours, one fresh photo, a reply to any waiting reviews. Those moves are not measuring-tool work, but the same hour carries them.
What not to do
No daily checking: a week’s numbers mean nothing, and the habit of watching them turns an instrument into a source of anxiety. No paid tool as long as the free ones are not used to the full, and they rarely are. No dashboard of thirty indicators: four tools, one hour, three notes. Consistency beats sophistication, every month.
This series ends here. The next one comes at the problem from the other end: the practices that promise shortcuts, why Google punishes them, and why they are bad business anyway.
Who writes these notes
This journal is kept by the workshop that designs and maintains the house’s websites. Everything described here, the Search Console, internal links, the business profile, is part of the work delivered with a site: if you would rather someone took care of it, that is precisely the trade.