Running the week
What keeping the clients healthy actually looks like, day to day.
This is a first draft. It was written from how the platform behaves, not from having done the job for a year. Correct it as you go — especially the timings, which are guesses about how long things take.
#The platform's own clock
Everything below hangs off what the system does automatically.
The schedule is set in UTC. The UK is on GMT in winter (same as UTC) but BST in summer (UTC+1), roughly late March to late October. So for about seven months of the year everything below happens an hour later than the raw schedule says.
| Schedule (UTC) | Winter (GMT) | Summer (BST) | What runs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Daily 05:00 | 05:00 | 06:00 | Pulls Search Console, Analytics, Business Profile, rankings · Google Ads sync |
| Daily 05:30 | 05:30 | 06:30 | Decline detection — finds rankings that have dropped |
| Daily 07:00 | 07:00 | 08:00 | Site health probe (quick) |
| Daily 09:00 | 09:00 | 10:00 | Email sequences send |
| Mon 02:00–06:00 | 02:00–06:00 | 03:00–07:00 | Full health scan · competitor intel · local grid · verdicts · new recommendations |
| 1st of month 08:00 | 08:00 | 09:00 | AI visibility check |
So: Monday morning is the week. By 06:00 UTC — 7am while we're on BST — the platform has re-scanned everything, scored the changes it made a month ago, and produced this week's recommendations. Everything else is lighter.
If you start before that, you're reading last week's data. Worth knowing in summer, when the gap is an hour wider than you'd expect.
#Every morning (20–30 minutes)
#1. Declines first, always
Detection ran at 05:30. A ranking that has dropped is more urgent than a ranking you could gain — a page that fell off page one is losing money today, and the cause is usually something we did.
For each new decline: look at what changed on that page recently. The platform correlates changes to declines, so start there. If one of our changes preceded the drop, say so and roll it back — don't defend it.
#2. The leads inbox
Every client, every new enquiry. Two things to check:
- Did the client actually receive it? A lead in the dashboard that never reached their inbox is worse than no lead, because everyone assumes it was handled.
- Does it look real? Spam gets through. Don't delete it — flag it. Deleting leads is admin-only for a reason.
#3. Health probe
The 07:00 probe flags sites that are down, slow, or serving errors. Anything red gets looked at before anything else on this list. A client site being down is the only true emergency here.
#Monday (2–3 hours)
#1. Read the verdicts before the recommendations
The platform scores changes made ~28 days ago as better, neutral or worse against a real baseline. Read these first, because they tell you whether last month's judgement was any good.
A run of "worse" verdicts on one kind of change means stop making that kind of change. This is the only honest feedback loop in the job — use it before deciding this week's work.
#2. Work the recommendation queue
New recommendations landed at 06:00. For each one:
- Does the target URL exist? Open it. The AI has invented plausible-looking URLs that 404 — six out of ten on one report. Never approve a change pointing at a page that isn't there.
- What does this page already rank for? If the change removes a phrase the page ranks on, that is a ranking risk. The platform flags it and won't let a non-admin approve it. Rewording to keep the phrase is almost always better than escalating.
- Is the claim true? Anything asserting a review count, an accreditation, insurance, years in business or a case study is rejected unless the client has confirmed it. On fire-safety and trade sites this is absolute.
- Would you say this to the client's face? If the copy is generic filler, reject it. Thin content that reads like AI does not rank and does not convert.
Reject freely. A rejected recommendation costs nothing; a bad approved one costs a ranking.
#3. Rank tracking sanity check
Don't trust the tracker blindly — it has been wrong. It once reported a page at #1 that was invisible in a real search, because it wasn't looking deep enough into the results.
Once a week, take two or three keywords per client and cross-check the tracked position against Search Console's average position for the same query. If they disagree by more than a few places, the tracker is wrong, not Search Console. Flag it rather than reporting the flattering number.
National rankings are reliable. Local ("near me", town-level) positions from the tracker are not — they come from a datacentre, not from the town. Don't put local positions in front of a client without checking.
#4. Blog and content schedule
Check what's queued, what's drafted and what's published. Two rules:
- Nothing publishes without being read end to end by a person.
- A post exists to answer a question people are actually searching. If you can't name the query, it isn't ready.
Keep a steady cadence rather than bursts. The platform limits how much changes per week on purpose — over-tinkering makes the verdict scoring meaningless because you can't tell what caused what.
#5. Keyword and area coverage
Per client, ask: are we tracking the words they'd actually be hired for, and the towns they actually serve? New services and new areas come up in conversation and never make it into the platform.
Adding a keyword or an area is member-level work — do it.
#Monthly
- 1st: AI visibility runs. Worth a look, don't over-read it yet.
- Reports: each client's monthly report should be checked before they see it. Numbers come from Google and their own site — if something looks impossible, it probably is.
- Business Profile data lags two days by design. A "missing" recent day is not a bug.
#Things that are not your call
Escalate rather than decide:
- Approving a change the platform flags as risking a live ranking
- Deleting a lead
- Connecting or changing a Google Ads account
- Anything involving DNS or a client's email
- A client asking for something that would mean stating a claim we can't evidence
#The judgement, in one line
Most of what goes wrong is one of three things: changing a page that already ranks, believing a number without checking it against Search Console, or publishing something we can't evidence.
If you catch yourself about to do any of those, stop and ask.
#What "running smoothly" actually means
At the end of a good week: no client site is down, every enquiry reached its client, every decline has either been explained or reversed, this week's recommendations have been worked through rather than left, and nothing has been published that anyone would be embarrassed to defend.
Not: "the queue is empty."
Internal documentation. Not for clients, and not for search engines — this page sends noindex, but the link itself is the only thing keeping it private.