Part 12 of 22

Monitoring: SEO is a loop, not a launch task

Everything above decays without monitoring. The minimal setup:

  • Google Search Console — submit the sitemap, then check weekly: Pages (indexed vs excluded and why), Core Web Vitals, and Performance for query trends. "Crawled — currently not indexed" on important pages is your earliest quality warning.
  • Bing Webmaster Tools — five minutes to set up; Bing also feeds ChatGPT's browsing.
  • Lighthouse CI in the pipeline — performance budgets fail the build before a regression ships.
  • Log AI crawler visits — grep your access logs (or edge analytics) for GPTBot|ClaudeBot|PerplexityBot to see whether the AEO work is being consumed.
  • After every release that touches routing: spot-check curl -I on a few key URLs (status, canonical, cache headers).

Checklist:

  • Search Console + Bing verified, sitemap submitted
  • Weekly look at index coverage and CWV reports
  • Performance budget enforced in CI
  • Post-release smoke check of status codes and canonicals

01—22

All topics in this guide

  1. 01Rendering strategy: what does the crawler actually see?
  2. 02Metadata API: titles, descriptions and the template pattern
  3. 03Canonical URLs and hreflang: one page, one address
  4. 04Open Graph and dynamic OG images
  5. 05sitemap.ts and robots.ts: file conventions instead of hand-written XML
  6. 06Structured data: JSON-LD that earns rich results
  7. 07Images, fonts and scripts: the classic performance trio
  8. 08Core Web Vitals: the three numbers Google measures
  9. 09Redirects, 404s and status codes
  10. 10Caching and content freshness
  11. 11AEO/GEO: getting cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews
  12. 12Monitoring: SEO is a loop, not a launch task
  13. 13Trust and E-E-A-T: making your site believable
  14. 14Image SEO: turning pictures into traffic
  15. 15Internal linking and site architecture
  16. 16Search intent: pages that match what people actually type
  17. 17Programmatic SEO in Next.js: pages at scale without the spam
  18. 18SEO migration: replatforming to Next.js without losing traffic
  19. 19Pagination and faceted navigation without index bloat
  20. 20Accessibility and SEO: one job, two rewards
  21. 21Content decay: refresh, consolidate or prune
  22. 22Off-page for developers: earning links without buying them

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