Some saucy opinions in this thread. Getting into SEO can be overwhelming (especially if you're tasked with "general management" for a single brand), and having worked at a plethora of companies -- and dealing with some pretty bad management in the past -- I can feel for you. To everyone else criticizing someone (an intern, no less) seeking guidance on this complex topic: Ask yourself how frustrating and terrifying managing SEO was when you started out. "Suck it up", "hope your boss doesn't see this", and other comments like that are not helpful nor warranted. This is a forum intended to help fellow SEOs and webmasters. We should all be adhering to that standard, especially you seasoned SEOs. Experience with a "gritty personality" is not impressive.
Here's a typical snapshot of my daily tasks, in order of importance. I manage SEO for a niche eComm company:
- Link building and guest post/guest content creation. Links are the currency of SEO. The fact your boss told you not to focus on this tells me that your company is new to real, "professional" SEO. I would try to convince him/her to reconsider this valuable task. I use Ahrefs to scan the link profiles of my competitors. Once I find a prospect, a potential link source, I grab that domain and input into my dashboard. I check that site's top, competing domains for other, related backlink opportunities. IMPORTANTLY, I take the time to carefully review each prospect and suggest topics with keywords and analyses. Read their About page, who they are, who their editors and writers are, who their audience is. Review their key words and traffic, identify opportunities for them, and give them analytics that show how you can contribute to their improving their own site with your own, written guest content. I get a good response/success rate (around 20%) with this careful approach.
- New content creation. I analyze what keyphrases and topics I have a chance at ranking for - or stealing traffic from my competitors - and generate new content on a regular basis. Usually 2-3 long-form guides posted a week, ranging from 900 to 3000 words.
- Content audits and re-works. Most companies probably have old content written prior to their latest SEO initatives. That content is likely thin, not optimized or SEO-friendly, or could use a refresh or second look. I use G Analytics to review the performance (traffic, bounce rate, session time, click-through) on all the content on my sites. I identify ones that can be re-written or re-worked if they're ranking poorly or getting no traffic, and update them accordingly, with SEO best practices and competitor research.
- Technical and on-page SEO. Double-checking product descriptions, headlines, tags, meta, internal links, image alt tags and title tags, and all other on-page and technical best practices are being adhered to. Constantly looking for opportunities to improve the site structure, user experience, and content being displayed on products and customer-facing pages that aren't for the blog/publication.
- Keeping a pulse on search engine updates, algorithmic changes, and the general direction that SEO best practices are going. For example, September saw a plethora of updates that concerned new Webmaster Guidelines and standards for good Your-Money-Your-Life content, indicating Google is changing the way they look at financial and eComm-centric content. There was also an update that greatly enhanced rich snippet results. This would be an opportunity to bolster your site in SERPs by adding structured data, re-working YMYL pages, etc.
These are the general "core" of SEO. Regardless of where you are, what niche you work in, or what your other responsibilities are, you can be confident these tasks will (or probably should) comprise much of your work.
