Here are a few tips on how to prioritize SEO efforts:
1) Get all of your goals and tasks on “paper.”
Before you can begin to prioritize your SEO strategy, you have to actually
know what tasks need to be handled.
The best way to get started is to create a spreadsheet of everything you
think you’ll need to do for your SEO endeavors.
Even if you think you’ve already completed something, still write it down so
that you have it for the future.
This includes:
- removing
duplicate content
- building
links
- web design
considerations
- connecting
with influences
- Growing
your social media following (yes, this can help your SEO!)
- and more
This is going to take you some time, but it’s worth it in the end to make
sure you don’t forget anything.
Another tip I highly recommend is getting others in your business involved.
Create your list with a few marketing employees, but then send that list out
to all of your departments to see if they think you missed anything.
The chances are that departments like Sales and IT should know a thing or
two about SEO, especially how it relates to them, so they may have one or two
important tasks to add.
2) Do research on SEO and fill in the blanks you may have missed.
Naturally, you won’t be able to think of everything, so this is when it’s
time to turn to the internet.
You’ll want to be careful with this step because things can get
overwhelming, so be sure not to get too hung up on finding every little thing
related to SEO.
Give the web a quick scan, see if you missed anything, add whatever you
missed to your list, and move on.
This step shouldn’t take you as long as Step #1 unless you’re completely new
to SEO.
The key here is not to stress out. You probably will miss a task here and
there, but as long as you have the major ones on the list, then you’re good to go
at least to start.
3) Split all of your tasks into on-page and off-page SEO efforts.
This is important because on-page SEO should always come before off-page
SEO.
How you go about prioritizing for your specific company may differ from
other companies (more on that in the next few sections), but this is one thing
that’s true in every situation.
You should never work on driving traffic to your web pages if your web pages
aren’t optimized for readers to begin with.
After all, what would be the point of sending people to your website if they
click off immediately because you’re not ready?
4) Slice your tasks further to sort by department or by the expert in
charge.
So now you should have two lists of SEO tasks.
It’s important to further slice and dice all of the tasks you have written
down so that things are manageable.
I find that at this point it helps to create different lists of things that
need to be done based on department or who will be in charge.
This helps you prioritize by making it easy to complete more than one task
at once, to make sure the right person is in charge of making it happen, and it
helps keep such a long list manageable and less overwhelming.
At this point, you should now have several different lists of SEO tasks
delegated to members of your staff (or your department if you’re keeping things
centralized with your marketing team).
5) Rank what you need to do in order of importance.
Now that you have different tasks ready to go and assigned to different
people, have those tasks listed by order of importance.
Always think in terms of impact high, medium, and low to determine which
tasks are most important.
In many cases everything will be pretty equal, but really think about it and
think about the outcomes that each task will have on your company.
Is there a task that can benefit your sales greatly? That should probably be
prioritized first.
If there is a task that is merely a luxury or cosmetic from your standpoint,
that can be put to the bottom of the list.
6) Get working!
Once you start going through and getting things done, you may find that new
tasks pop up, and that’s okay.
As long as you keep good notes and have all of your tasks narrowed down so
that those who need to handle them are not overwhelmed, adding a task or two
won’t be a big deal.
You should also always continue to check and re-check your work every few
months and spruce things up for the best long-term results.