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📡 An SEO watchtower

7 min read

The outcome: a weekly scan of where you rank, where competitors took ground, and which topics you should own but don’t - each opportunity arriving not as a report to read but as a mission on your board, sized and ready to schedule. SEO stops being the thing you audit guiltily twice a year.

  1. Seed the keyword universe. Ask your research or content agent: “Build our SEO doc: the 20-40 queries that matter, mapped to our pages, plus which competitors rank for each. Save as SEO Watchtower.”
  2. Set the weekly scan (Configure → Scheduled Tasks) - instructions below. Weekly is the right cadence: rankings don’t move daily, and neither should your attention.
  3. Let opportunities become missions. The magic line in the instructions: real opportunities get FILED on the board, not buried in a report. Your content engine (see that playbook) picks them up as candidate angles.
  4. Review the monthly digest ticket. Once a month the run opens a ticket with the trend: what you gained, lost, and the three bets it recommends next.

The weekly SEO scan

Every Friday: check our SEO Watchtower doc’s query list. For each: our current standing, movement, and who gained. Update the doc (dated).

For any NEW opportunity — a competitor page slipping, a query we could win with one focused piece, a topic our audience keeps asking about — create a mission titled “SEO: [opportunity]” with the evidence and a suggested angle in the description. Never more than 3 missions a week; pick the best.

First Friday of each month: open a ticket with the month’s trend and your top-3 recommended bets.

💡 Tip: The cap of 3 filed missions a week is deliberate. An SEO tool gives you 400 opportunities and you do none; a colleague hands you 3 and you do them. You’re building the second thing.

What good looks like: month two. The board carries a steady trickle of “SEO:” missions, each traceable to evidence, most feeding the content engine. The monthly ticket reads like a strategist’s memo. When a ranking drops, you know within a week - with a recommended response attached - instead of noticing in a quarterly panic.