Somewhere in the wee hours a laptop transforms from a late movie and nightlight to an SEO ATM. It starts with reports from the day before and usually comparing traffic that includes the entire month or last 45 days or so. If your advertisers have minimal analytics, the information might be dodgy, but simply knowing impressions and having your own tracking to compare it to is enough to get started. The two may not always match or be automatic, "close enough" will do if you consider some human factors like editing the advertisers code to reduce size or to use the site's style sheet and accidentally remove the tracking image.
At this point it's good to mention that when pages are redone, there should be backups made of the site before mods or, in the case of high traffic pages like the homepage, the old file can be renamed to include the date it was replaced, then the new page uploaded to take over.
To determine each days tasks, the regular results checked are click-thrus, conversions and impressions, which are usually the first thing to compare against server logs for hits. If there seems to be a large difference with traffic, that has to be figured out, but once it's handled, it should be a rare issue. This is where the sites files should be checked for previous updates and how it might relate to the current problem. An example of this happened with conversions for a site and it turned out to be an error in a search box creative that was missing a form field. Once it was discovered that a site was getting 6000% clickthru rates, the code was "unmodified" in the right place. From studying user/customer flow, design and layout changes can be planned, A/B tests are a good way to handle this if you are advertising, but for others that can't or don't need advertising, following the above "note" for saving old pages, or something similar, and monitoring like discussed here continues into the future.
Once you know everything is tracking properly, the search results are analyzed, mostly for rank increases for key phrases or ones that may not have been coming up before. Researching keywords and phrases in search engines usually takes a bit of time if you're the type to check for more than just where your site ranks, but checking the competitors or new sites around yours as well. Next, traffic increases and decreases are noted and with the two of these done, the updates are pretty well spelled out for you. Around here, the monitoring phase ends early, few if any changes are made right away except on CMS sites where edits are online and don't require FTP clients.
Unlike an ATM, getting money out of your computer takes more than PIN numbers. There is a numbers game to all this, but playing with the object being dollars is not how it's done. Increasing the site's number of visitors (SEO) + finding relevant and better monetizing ads (Marketing) + optimized ad placement (Design) = MONEY! Getting paid for all the work is the result of it all, of course, but providing a good user experience is where it starts.
