Rankings and traffic aren’t enough anymore, yet replacing them feels risky. A practical look at how SEO KPIs need to evolve. Most SEO teams believe they need more data to report success, but what they actually have is metric debt, at least that’s what I keep seeing. The accumulated cost of optimizing for key performance indicators that no longer reflect how growth happens. The environment has changed, mostly because economic pressure has shifted expectations. At the same time, AI search, zero-click results, and privacy limits have all weakened the connection between traditional SEO KPIs and business outcomes. Yet, it’s not unusual to see teams measuring success in ways that reflect how SEO used to work rather than how it works today. This is exactly the point where I think we need to rethink how we’re measuring things. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/why-your-seo-kpis-are-failing-your-business-and-how-to-fix-them/

Successful SEO requires a balance of strategy and tactical implementation with consistency. A framework with a cadence for what is important helps prioritize focus. From SEJ Corey Morris Planning is not an exciting topic, I admit. Yet, I wrote a book recently on the topic of planning, introducing a framework for doing it for digital marketing. Over the two decades of my career, I have found that the best and quickest positive outcomes nearly always came from a strong plan and a planned approach to SEO work. With AI dominating the headlines, I know how hard it can be to commit to a structure, cadence, or specific approach for doing anything in digital marketing, including SEO. However, I continue to advocate for having an agile, yet planned approach that includes the things you should do daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually. No, you don’t get to check your brain at the door every day and mindlessly do mundane SEO tasks. But, you also don’t need to panic every day over every little change, ebb and flow of visibility, or rip up your plan and start over. I have outlined the cadence and frequency of things I believe go into a strong SEO process and approach to help you on the journey. Daily Educate Yourself Staying up to date on industry news is a critical aspect of SEO that must be built into any maintenance or ongoing management plan. This ranges from the mission-critical alerts and updates the search engines announce to keeping tabs on SEO best practices and breaking news from sources like Search Engine Journal. AI news seems to be constantly disruptive, and we have to be mindful of how SEO is not just all about Google or concepts that we have applied in the past (if you’ve been in the game for a while). Big shifts in the industry are hard to miss (whether they are about AI or not). But smaller, more subtle changes can become magnified when you miss them or best practices become outdated.