The first week as a new marketing manager can feel like a whirlwind of trying to understand the people, processes, technologies and campaigns being developed.
When you combine this with the “owning SEO” aspect of the department, people may ask themselves, Where do I even start?
Given that SEO is not a one-time program, you’re looking for the most impactful actions you can take to set the stage for your long-term SEO success.
The advice here is from a marketer’s perspective in mid-sized, multi-location businesses.
The most important goal of the first week is to understand your organizational, departmental and team goals.
These north stars ensure alignment with your teammates and organizational mission before you get started.
In addition to understanding your team and available resources, there are systems that prioritize and ensure accurate data is provided.
1. Installation site and conversion analysis
It will take you over a week to review your analytics system and ensure your session and conversion data is 100% accurate. However, having any level of analytics tracking is better than nothing.
On a baseline, make sure that Google Analytics tracking fires on your website, landing page, and blog.
If your website is hosted on one CMS and your blog is hosted on another CMS, you will need to check both locations to ensure tracking is configured correctly.
GTM/GA debugger is my favorite free browser-based tool for quickly debugging bugs or duplicate GA and GTM trace code in the field.
Run a debugger on your site to make sure you don’t see multiple pageviews on each page.Here are a few examples showing that GA or GA4 The code fires only once on the page.
Screenshot of GTM/GA debugger, April 2022If you see multiple pageviews per page, you know you have an analytics problem to solve.
2. Set up Google Analytics alerts
After configuring the baseline analysis, it’s time to set up custom alerts in GA. Alerts are an easy way to get notified if your website traffic or conversion rates suddenly drop.
Feel free to configure this alert for your own site, you can access it in the admin settings.
Google Analytics screenshot, April 20223. Implement Rank Tracking
You may spend your first few weeks on the job getting to know your buyers, products, competitors, marketing channels, and more.
One of the easiest-to-understand metrics to help your team track your SEO performance is the overall increase in first page, non-branded Google rankings.
In theory, as you create content, optimize your website, and increase your backlink portfolio, you should see an increase in first page rankings for non-branded keywords.
During your first week, you can benchmark this value and start to understand which topics/keywords are on the cusp of ranking on the first page of Google.
Think of these keywords as your “low-hanging fruit.” If you’re looking for quick wins, focus on improving the content on the pages that are about to rank on the first page.
Here is an example samlash Reports track these metrics to quickly provide your team with this baseline:
Screenshot of Semrush, April 2022It may take you more than a week to identify the topics you need to build your content and SEO strategy, but this will at least give you a starting point.
4. Set up Google Search Console
At a basic level, GSC Track your ability to be crawled and indexed in Google, and highlight potential issues affecting Google’s crawler access to your site.
During your first week, you will need to check for:
Your sitemap has been submitted and the number of pages listed in the sitemap matches the number of pages indexed in Google (as described in the coverage report).
They may never match exactly, but if you see a 50% difference (pages in your sitemap vs. active pages in your coverage report), there may be content quality or technical issues that prevent Google from giving your site index.
You don’t have any manual actions or security concerns.
If you’re not sure what your ex did from a marketing or CMS security standpoint, check these areas to make sure you’re not affected.
Any spikes in impression or click data listed in the Search Results report.
Pull in the past 16 months of data and note the specific time frame in which your site saw these effects in search.
Screenshot of Google Search Console, April 20225. Set up brand mention listening
The easiest way to generate backlinks to your website is to make sure any other websites that mention your brand also link to yours.
If you don’t have SEO tools yet, feed Follow industry publications and brand mentions.
However, my favorite SEO-specific tool is Semrush’s brand monitoring tool, which allows you to track unlinked brand mentions.
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Screenshot of Semrush, April 2022
6. Verify Google Business Profile Listing
The complexity of your marketing department increases when you are also responsible for the local digital presence of individual branches, franchises or sales offices.
During your first week, make sure each location has a Google Business Profile page with accurate name, address, and phone number information.
As part of this process, Start the claim process to verify your listing. This may take a few weeks so you need to get started.
7. Set Notes
If you’re lucky, your ex has a record of the most important dates in your company’s marketing history, including website launches, CMS migrations, campaign start/end dates, and more.
Some of these records may be stored in Google Analytics Notes This allows you to leave detailed notes on any events that might impact your traffic, conversions, or revenue data.
During your first week, if there are no other questions, review notes from past years and add the dates you started working at the company to show your progress after hitting the 90, 180, and 365 day marks in the organization.
8. Install Google Tag Manager
The best configuration for managing tracking scripts for most organizations is through Google Tag Manager.
properly implemented GTM allows you to see all the scripts running on your site and the pages those scripts are triggering.
If you’re moving into a new role without getting clear tech stack documentation, Google Tag Manager can help you with which systems to use in the field for tracking, advertising, and more.
9. Run a crawl to establish a baseline
Ideally, when you start your new role, you already have a general idea of the new organization’s network presence.
in your first week, Crawl with ScreamingFrog or other crawlers to determine the number of SEO problems to solve and gain a better understanding of your information architecture.
Whatever crawler you use, make sure it can crawl all subdomains connected to your site, so you can gather a complete picture of all the web properties you might be using.
Below are examples of visuals to help you understand information architecture.
Screenshot of Screaming Frog, April 202210. Take stock of your MarTech stack
As spending on SaaS applications continues to grow, your new organization may use 20 to 150 different applications across the organization.
You don’t need to know the ins and outs of all of this.
If you can document all your marketing and sales tools and their respective uses, you’ll have a better idea of what you can start using right away (versus going through the buying process for other tools).
Your first week will soon be over. If you can handle this list, you’ll have the groundwork to track, optimize, and launch your upcoming campaigns.
More resources:
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