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SEO Manager

A planting calendar for search work done in-house

Back to the planting calendar

Packet 01 · The job and the keysExample sowing: January–February

What an SEO manager looks after

Inside a business, the person running search looks after how Google finds, reads and shows the site, and holds the keys to Search Console, the free Google service that reports on all of it. Google describes SEO as helping search engines understand your content, and helping people find your site and decide whether to visit it from a search.

Nothing on this page is a job title or a rule. It is the work Google’s own documentation describes, gathered into one plot so you can see its edges.

Four people, often one person

Google’s help page for Search Console names four kinds of people who use it, and what each gets from it:

  • Business owners: even if someone else does the hands-on work, Google says owners should know the tool exists, understand the basics of search optimisation, and know which Google Search features there are.
  • SEO specialists or marketers: it helps them monitor site traffic and make informed decisions about how the site appears in search results.
  • Site administrators: it helps them spot problems such as server errors, slow loading, hacking and malware, and fix some of them.
  • Web developers: it flags markup problems, such as broken structured data, for them to fix.

In a small business, all four may be you. That is the job this guide is for.

The beds, and what Google says about each

The parts of the job, each in Google’s own words, with the page it comes from
The bedWhat Google saysWhere it lives
Being found Google mainly finds pages through links from pages it has already crawled. Before doing anything else, search Google with the site: operator to see whether your site is already there. SEO Starter Guide
Being seen properly Google needs access to the same files a visitor’s browser loads, such as CSS and JavaScript. The URL Inspection tool shows how Google sees a page. URL Inspection tool
Titles Give each page its own title, short and clear, that says accurately what the page holds. Avoid vague words like “Home”, and repeated boilerplate across pages. Title links
Snippets The snippet under a result comes from the page’s own content, and occasionally from the meta description, which should be short, unique to the page, and hold its most relevant points. SEO Starter Guide
Images Use sharp, clear images near the text they relate to, and give each descriptive alt text. SEO Starter Guide
Moving pages When a page moves for good, use a 301 redirect; if the move is temporary, a 302. A page that is gone should return a true 404, not a soft 404. Maintaining your website’s SEO
A secure site Google recommends HTTPS rather than HTTP, and says sites on HTTP can be marked “not secure” in Chrome. Maintaining your website’s SEO
Watching Google’s suggested rhythm is the one row on the planting calendar that comes from Google itself. Get started with Search Console

The keys to the shed

Search Console has three levels of access. An owner has full control and can add and remove users; a full user can view all data and take some actions; a restricted user can view most data. Every property needs at least one verified owner; without one, nobody can get in.

Keys get lost when people move on. Google’s help pages say what to do, in this order:

  1. Verify more than one way. You can add several verification methods, in case one fails: Google’s example is a site verified with an analytics tag, where someone changes a template and the tag disappears.
  2. Know that a broken token is noticed. Search Console periodically checks that each verification token is still there. If it can’t confirm one, it tells you, and the owner’s permissions expire after a grace period if the problem isn’t fixed.
  3. If the only verified owner leaves, verify ownership yourself to keep or regain access to the property.
  4. When you take over a site, you can remove previous owners after you verify, by removing their verification tokens, such as an HTML tag on the site. When you remove an owner, delete all their tokens too, or they can re-verify.
  5. If you don’t recognise an owner, Google says you might have been hacked.

If all verified owners lose access, every user loses access to the property. Data keeps being collected, but nobody can see it until someone verifies ownership again.

Weeds not worth pulling

Google’s starter guide lists ideas it believes you shouldn’t focus on. They are worth knowing, if only so you can say no to spending time on them:

  • Meta keywords. Google Search doesn’t use the keywords meta tag.
  • Repeating words. Keyword stuffing is against Google’s spam policies.
  • Keywords in the domain. From a ranking perspective, keywords in a domain name or URL path alone have hardly any effect beyond appearing in breadcrumbs.
  • Word counts. Length alone doesn’t matter for ranking; Google says there is no magical word count target.
  • Heading order. Semantic order helps screen readers, but for Google Search it doesn’t matter if headings are out of order.
  • E-E-A-T as a ranking factor. Google’s answer: “No, it’s not.”

Where the time goes

Google’s starter guide says content people find compelling and useful will likely influence a site’s presence in search results more than any of its other suggestions. The technical beds keep the ground workable; the content is what grows in it. Packet 04, helpful content, sets out how Google suggests you judge your own pages.

All six packets