10 Monthly SEO Checks (That You're Probably Skipping)

SEO is not a “set it and forget it” rotisserie chicken. Rankings shift. Competitors publish content. Google tweaks its algorithm like a DJ who can’t stop touching the EQ. If you’re not checking in monthly, you’re flying blind.

Here are 10 things to audit every month. None of them take long individually, and together they keep your site from slowly sliding into search result oblivion.

1. Meta Descriptions

These little text snippets are your storefront window on Google. A meta description checker tells you which pages are missing descriptions, which ones are duplicates, and which ones got cut off mid-sentence because someone wrote 250 characters instead of 160.

No description = Google writes one for you. Google is not great at copywriting.

2. Title Tags

Your title tag is the single most important on-page ranking signal. It’s also what people actually click on. A SEO title and meta previewer shows you exactly how your pages look in Google results, so you can stop guessing whether your title gets cut off or not.

Keep them under 60 characters, make them unique per page, and for the love of all things indexed, put your keyword in there.

3. Keyword Density

There’s a sweet spot between “I mentioned my keyword once in 3,000 words” and “I put it in every other sentence like a malfunctioning chatbot.” A keyword density analyzer helps you hit that 1-3% range where Google goes “ah yes, this page is about that thing” without penalizing you for keyword stuffing.

4. Internal Links

Broken internal links waste crawl budget and make your visitors sad. Click through your main nav paths monthly. If anything returns a 404, fix it. This is the web equivalent of checking for burned-out lightbulbs.

5. Page Speed

Nobody waits for slow websites anymore. We’ve been spoiled. If your landing page takes more than 3 seconds to load, people bounce back to Google faster than you can say “but the hero image is only 4MB.”

Test your top pages monthly. Compress those images. Minify that code.

6. Mobile Usability

Over half of all web traffic comes from phones. Pull up your site on your phone right now. Can you read the text without zooming? Are the buttons big enough to tap without precision surgery? Does anything scroll sideways?

If you answered “uh…” to any of those, you’ve got work to do.

7. Duplicate Content

Duplicate content confuses search engines the way identical twins confuse substitute teachers. Check for:

HTTP and HTTPS versions of the same page both being indexed
Pages with and without trailing slashes
WWW and non-WWW variations
Paginated pages that copy content from page one

Pick a canonical version. Redirect the rest.

8. Image Alt Text

Google can’t see your images. It reads alt text like a book report. Every meaningful image needs descriptive alt text. Bonus points if it naturally includes a keyword. Zero points if every alt tag says “image1.jpg.”

9. Sitemap

Your XML sitemap is basically a table of contents for Google. Make sure new pages are in it and dead pages are out. It’s like updating your restaurant menu: if you’re still listing last season’s special, things get awkward.

10. Core Keyword Rankings

Pick 10-20 keywords that actually matter to your business. Track them monthly. Look for trends over time, not day-to-day wobbles. If something drops steadily for three months, that’s not a fluctuation. That’s a problem waving a red flag.

Make It a Calendar Event

The difference between sites that rank well and sites that don’t is often just consistency. Block 30 minutes on the first Monday of each month. Run through this list. Fix what’s broken.

The b2kit toolkit includes free SEO tools that run in your browser for quick checks. For deeper site monitoring and competitive analysis that goes beyond monthly spot-checks, SCOUTb2 keeps an eye on things so you don’t have to remember.