A weekly SEO routine for founders with several products

SEO for one product is a habit. You check Search Console on Monday, notice a page slipping, and fix it by Wednesday.

SEO for three products is a list of tabs you mean to open. Each site gets attention when traffic falls off a cliff, and the slow, fixable things go unnoticed for months: a search that has sat at position 12 since spring, a title nobody clicks, two blog posts quietly fighting over the same query.

You do not need a bigger SEO tool to fix that. You need a short routine that looks at the right five things, in the right order, for every site. Here is the one we use. It runs on free data from Google and Bing and takes about 20 minutes for all products together.

Before you start: use the data search engines give you

Most SEO dashboards lead with estimated search volume and keyword difficulty. Those numbers come from third-party panels and often disagree with each other. For a small site, the data that matters most is free and exact: Google Search Console tells you every search you appeared for, how often, where you ranked, and how often people clicked.

Two definitions are worth knowing before you read any of it. An impression is one appearance in a result someone saw, and position is your average spot across those impressions, with 1 at the top. Google explains both in its guide to the Performance report metrics. Search Console also runs a couple of days behind, so do not panic over a quiet Sunday.

Use the last 28 days for each check, and compare it with the 28 days before. Week to week is too noisy for a site getting a few hundred clicks.

1. Find the searches on page two

Open the Performance report, show the Queries table with position turned on, and filter for position between 11 and 20. These are often called striking distance keywords. Google already thinks your site is relevant for them, but page two gets a small share of the clicks that page one gets.

Sort what is left by impressions. The top few are your best bets: lots of people search them, and you are close. For each, find the page on your site that best answers the search and ask one question: does it answer this exact search, plainly, near the top? Usually the fix is a new section, a clearer heading that uses the searcher's words, and a link to the page from two or three related pages.

If no page answers it, that is next week's article. If you want to try this on an export without logging in to anything, our striking distance keyword finder does the filtering in your browser.

2. Fix the titles people skip

Next, look at page-one searches with a low click rate. "Low" should mean low for your site, not against a chart from someone else's industry. Work out your site's overall click rate (total clicks divided by total impressions), then list page-one queries and pages that fall well below it.

When a page ranks on page one and still gets skipped, the problem is almost always what people see in the result: the title and the snippet. Google builds the title link mostly from your page's title element, and often uses your meta description for the snippet. Rewrite both to say plainly what the page gives the reader, using the words from the searches it already shows up for. No clickbait; a title that overpromises gets clicked once and bounced from.

Change one or two pages a week, note the date, and check them again in four weeks. Changing everything at once makes it impossible to tell what worked.

3. Look for pages competing with each other

This one is easy to miss when you write a lot. Two pages on the same site both show up for one search, each getting a real share of the impressions. Google tends to pick one at a time and can switch between them, so neither ranks as well as one strong page would. It is often called keyword cannibalization.

In Search Console, click into a query and open the Pages tab to see which of your pages appear for it. If two pages each take a sizeable share, decide which one should be the answer. Then either merge the weaker page into it and redirect, or make the difference between them obvious and link from the weaker to the stronger. If the pages are near copies, tell Google which one you prefer with a canonical link, as described in Google's guide to consolidating duplicate URLs.

Do not chase every overlap. A page that gets a handful of impressions for a search is noise. Look at the searches with the most impressions first.

4. Check that new pages are indexed

A page Google has not indexed cannot rank at all, and new articles are the ones most likely to be stuck. Take anything you published in the last month and run it through the URL Inspection tool in Search Console, which tells you whether the page is on Google and, if not, why. The same check is available as the URL Inspection API if you want to automate it.

The common reasons a page is left out are fixable: a stray noindex tag left over from staging, the page missing from your sitemap, or no other page linking to it. Search engines that support IndexNow can also be told about new pages the moment they go live.

5. Glance at speed for real visitors

Last, and quickest: check Core Web Vitals. Google publishes the thresholds on web.dev. Loading (Largest Contentful Paint) under 2.5 seconds, responding to input (Interaction to Next Paint) under 200 milliseconds, and layout shift under 0.1 count as good, judged at the 75th percentile of visits. Google recommends good Core Web Vitals for success in Search, and they matter more to visitors than to rankings.

Use field data from the Chrome UX Report, which comes from real Chrome visits, rather than a single lab test from your fast laptop. You are only looking for one thing here: did a number cross from good into needs improvement since last time? That usually points at a recent change, like a new font, a heavy image above the fold, or a script added to every page.

Write the short list

End the same way every week: at most three actions across all your products, each with its reason. For example: add a section to the pricing page for a search at position 13, rewrite the title of a page seen 4,000 times and clicked 20, merge two posts that split one search. Next week, start by checking whether last week's three got done, then run the five checks again.

If you want this as part of a broader weekly review, with revenue, uptime, and errors alongside, the weekly review routine covers the rest.

Doing it with LopeBase

We run several products ourselves, so we built this routine into the LopeBase SEO tab. It reads Search Console and Bing for every product you connect. The Overview shows the last 28 days against the period before, an opportunity map with page-two searches picked out, and your own click rate at each position. The Pages tab lists pages seen but rarely clicked and pages competing for the same search. Health checks indexing, Core Web Vitals, and on-page basics, and Links shows who links to you. Every finding can be copied as a prompt for your coding agent or sent to the content autopilot as an article.