Step by step guide to prioritizing your SEO efforts

We all know that there are a lot of different strategies you can do to improve your SEO performance, which is why SEO is considered its own industry. Knowing this, many companies will try popping up and dominate in the industry, as search engines such as Google, Bing and others keep evolving, there will be many businesses that will need to have a solid SEO strategy that caters to their needs. In order to do this you will need to prioritise tasks which will be the backbone in making your SEO strategy a success.

Every business has different priorities and there is not a “one hat fits all” approach to it. While certain tasks will naturally take priority over others for every company, other tasks in between will vary. It is therefore important to understand how to prioritize your SEO tasks so you can create a custom plan of action for your business to succeed.

In order to create a custom plan, you will need to set up a table within spreadsheet to record all of the information you’re about to put together, below are few title suggestions that can be used within the table;

• SEO Tasks
• Impact
• Resources Needed
• Cost
• Who it should be completed by
• Deadlines
• Notes

Once you have completed your table and filled it with tasks, you fill it in with facts.

Below we have a few tips to help prioritising your SEO efforts;

Create a set of tasks that need to be completed

You can start with the big SEO tasks like link removal, internal linking, content removal and publishing & design. Once this is done which is a big and long winded task, you can then focus on smaller SEO tasks such as A/B testing certain headlines and optimizing your images and also videos if you have any.

It helps to have other employees create a list of all the small SEO tasks that need to be done. You may think that it is a lot of work or a waste of time for everyone, but this can actually be beneficial to you as many people can come up with different tasks.

Splitting tasks into groups by High, Medium or Low impact

This helps you break up how you want to prioritize. While it’s easy to take your list and simply start trying to put things in order, this can lead to errors. The less data you have to work with, the better chance you have at accuracy, and categorizing all of the tasks is a great way to make this happen.

Noting down all of the resources and costs

The resources you need to get a task done will decide where you want to prioritize it, like if you wanted to start including more content on your website’s blog, you may need to hire more writers or freelancers. Another thing could be that you have broken links on a few of web pages, this is a simple task and can get someone to fix the links. The same can be said for cost and depending on your budget, something that costs a lot of money might be moved to a lower priority status than something that is free but has the same impact.

Analyze your data to create priorities

Although your marketing team or person will take most of the work, by writing down who should complete which task, you can again start to make your data smaller and see where you are with tasks being completed.

Once you have all of this information noted, you can start putting together a real prioritized list. If you have a big team then having one list for each department would be more beneficial. The best way to make this happen is to move all of your high, medium and low impact items together and then prioritize from there.

You should always be re-prioritizing SEO tasks and evaluating the success of all the work you’ve done. This would come under the SEO audit, this is essential to your website as it highlight errors and things that need to be fixed in order to have a better SEO friendly website, generally it’s important because Google is constantly updating and adding in new features and tools to utilize, also your rankings and audience may change so you need to take action somewhere on your website to keep ranking good and staying ahead of your competitors.

Do you need help identifying which SEO tasks deserve priority? Contact us for more information on all your SEO services.