You will set up a monthly review that compares results with your baseline and keyword map and produces a fix list.
Most small businesses look at their search data in bursts. Something goes wrong, or a competitor seems to be everywhere, and the owner spends a weekend in Search Console, makes a dozen changes and then does not look again for six months. The changes are never checked, the data from those six months is never read, and the next burst starts from scratch.
A monthly review replaces the bursts with a routine. It takes about an hour, it uses everything you have built in this course, and it ends with a short list of actions. This project sets up the routine and runs it for the first time.
Set up a monthly SEO review for your site and run the first one. The review compares this month with your baseline from lesson 1.5, Check how Google sees your site today, and with your keyword map, checks the health of the site, reruns the AI visibility and local checks, and produces no more than five actions for the coming month, each with an owner and a date.
You will need your spreadsheet with its tabs so far: the baseline, keyword map, SEO log, technical check, local audit and AI visibility tracking. Add a new tab called monthly review, with one column per month, so each review sits beside the last.
Start with performance. Open the Performance report in Search Console. Set the date range to the last full month and compare it with the month before, and filter the country to your market. Export the data. Search Console lets you export the tables to a spreadsheet or a file, and you should save each month's export with the date in the file name.
Then look at your priority pages one at a time. For each, filter by page and record clicks, impressions, CTR and average position for the month. Lesson 9.2, Read the Performance report, explained why average position needs reading alongside the other three, and per query where possible. Note the main search for each page from your keyword map and where the page now sits for it.
For the health check, open the Page indexing report and check whether any priority page has moved into a not-indexed reason since last month, using what you learned in lesson 9.3, Page indexing and URL Inspection. Check the Sitemaps report still shows success.
Then check the Manual actions report and the Security issues report. Both should say no issues detected. If either shows a problem, it goes to the top of your action list, because a manual action or a hacked page can undo everything else.
Next, line up what changed with what you did. Open your SEO log and read the changes you made last month and the month before. For each priority page, compare this month's figures with the baseline and with last month. Where a figure moved, look for a logged change that came before it, remembering that changes often take weeks to show and that seasons matter. In Priya's own data, impressions for P5 searches tend to climb in the months before the PSLE, whatever she does.
Write one line per priority page: what moved, and your best explanation. "Probably" and "not sure yet" are acceptable answers. The point is to keep linking actions to results, so you learn which kinds of work pay off for your site.
Run your ten AI visibility questions from lesson 8.5, Check your visibility in AI answers, with the same wording in the same places, and add the results as a new column. Then do your local profile routine from lesson 7.4, Audit a local profile against its competitors: photos, hours, special hours for upcoming public holidays and review replies. If you have no local profile, skip this part.
Then gather every possible action the review turned up: fixes, rewrites, new pages from your keyword map, link pitches, profile updates. Then rank them by expected impact on your priority pages and cut the list to five. Give each an owner and a date. Anything below five waits for next month.
Five is deliberate. A small business rarely gets more than five meaningful search tasks done in a month alongside everything else, and a short list gets finished.
A finished first review has a monthly review tab with the month's figures for each priority page, this month's Search Console exports saved with dates, a note on indexing, sitemap, manual actions and security, one line per priority page comparing it with the baseline, the AI visibility results added, local tasks done, and five actions with owners and dates.
Priya's first five read: rewrite the P5 page title and description to match "primary 5 maths tuition", which had high impressions and few clicks (Priya, by the 10th); publish the heuristics guide from her content brief (Priya, by the 20th); follow up once with the parenting blog (Priya, by the 8th); add the PSLE overview page to the menu (Priya, by the 5th); ask the developer to fix the map embed (developer, by the 30th).
Put the review in your calendar on the same day each month. Then run your first one now, save the exports, and write your five actions with owners and dates, as the activity below describes.
Run your first monthly review using the template, save the exports, and write the five actions for next month with owners and dates.
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