Most SEO plans I inherit have more running work than anyone can maintain, and almost none of them have a stopping rule. Things get added when someone has an idea, and removed only when someone quietly gives up.
The test I try to apply is simple. For every recurring activity, can I name the last time it changed a decision? Not the last time it produced output, the last time somebody looked at the output and did something different because of it. A monthly report nobody has acted on in six months is not a report, it is a habit.
That test kills more work than people expect. It usually kills a recurring crawl nobody reads, a rank tracking set full of keywords the business no longer sells, and at least one dashboard.
Where it fails me is work whose value is insurance rather than output. Monitoring that has never fired is doing its job precisely by producing nothing, and my test cannot tell that apart from waste.
How do you separate the two?
Swiss Knife SEO ModeratorAdministrator