Every winning SEO strategy needs a solid blueprint — an SEO roadmap — in order to scale.
You can develop this roadmap one of two ways:
Both approaches work, but only one of them allows you to consistently create the best search experience for users at scale. In this post, I’ll show you how to create and implement an SEO roadmap that aligns your SEO strategy with the goals of your company.
Watch a 5-minute summary of this article here!
An SEO roadmap is a strategic document an organization uses to keep all SEO-related activities on track, eliminate errors, and streamline decision-making. It outlines details about every tactic the company uses or intends to introduce to its SEO efforts.
An SEO roadmap also defines key responsibilities, various workflows, and standard operating procedures when performing each tactic.
You know how to deliver the strategy, after all. You also know how to work on each of its elements, what to do and when. Why create an SEO roadmap, then?
There are two important reasons to create an SEO roadmap:
The roadmap will provide guidance and a reference point in both situations. It will either help explain the reasoning behind some of your decisions or help new people familiarize themselves with how you execute the strategy.
Essentially, a roadmap helps keep everyone on track and eliminates the risk of potential errors. It informs every stakeholder interested in SEO progress about your actions, plans, and procedures to meet them.
There are three main steps to creating an effective SEO roadmap:
Let's dive into each step in the process.
The first step in creating an SEO action plan is to define the components of your SEO strategy that you will need to complete on a daily basis.
A typical SEO roadmap will focus on the following aspects of your work:
Once you have defined the core components of your SEO strategy, you can then break them into standard operating procedures (SOPS) and workflows.
Both SOPs and workflows are critical for an SEO roadmap since search visibility rarely depends on the work of a single department.
Link building involves outreach, creating quality content that is worthy of backlinks, and more. And many technical SEO issues can be fixed by the IT team only.
Good results only happen if all SEO stakeholders understand their roles and responsibilities, and always complete tasks to the same standard — which is exactly what SOPs and workflows help ensure.
A standard operating procedure is a set of step-by-step instructions that define how to carry out a specific, often routine task. They typically involve tangible tasks and are almost never used to define the process of completing a specific objective.
It's also important to know that SOPs are set in stone; once an organization defines how employees should go about a specific task, they should complete it the same way each time. Think of them like checklists.
While many people don't like SOPs for this reason, their unchanging quality allows them to consistently improve SEO strategy. As our co-founder, Mitul, pointed out in an earlier post:
Replacing inconsistency with purposeful, measured and directed effort is CRITICAL to an enterprise's ability to be successful.
It’s only when all teams, often scattered across the globe, approach SEO tasks in the same way that an organization can achieve the scale needed to achieve its SEO goals.
Common search engine optimization SOPs include:
Many digital marketers never optimize their articles for SEO. And so, before any blog posts go live, another person, perhaps an SEO expert, should review the target keyword and identify semantic terms to enrich the copy further.
This ensures the content marketing strategy matches SEO best practices.
A sole reliance on Google Search Console will only provide you with a list of keywords driving organic traffic — not strategic semantic terms. As an alternative, you can use Content Fusion, our AI-powered content writing tool, to uncover semantic insight automatically, based on a deep-learning algorithm.
Here's a look at the must-use topics for the keyword "things to do in Florida":
The SEO should also identify potential interlinking opportunities. Again, you can do this manually or you can use a dedicated platform to reveal such insight.
Recommended Reading: Internal Links Workflow: How to Optimize and Gain More Site Authority
The last step for optimizing new blog posts is to ensure correct keyword placement in title tag, meta descriptions, and other on-page elements.
This process should be repeated for every piece of content.
If your team is working to create content (new content, that is) they should follow this simple procedure:
In an opposite situation, when taking down existing content, an SEO should always:
As you can see, none of these SOPs are long. However, they guarantee that regardless of who works on a specific task, they always complete all relevant actions.
A workflow defines all stakeholders in the project, their responsibilities, and timelines for completion. In short, it gives structure to a combination of SOPs and helps achieve a specific objective.
Recommended Reading: How to Create SEO Workflows for Consistent, Scalable Results
Data analysis is key to any marketing strategy. When assessing a site's analytics and performance, an SEO team should:
This workflow would begin with an SEO analyst evaluating crawling and indexation errors.
From there, the next step is making a list of top priorities. Start by defining an end goal for your organization. What do you hope to accomplish when addressing these errors?
Consider the most important pages to address if you're concerned about conversions.
Then, determine which issues will require the least effort and have the biggest value for your SEO. Those tasks should be top priority for your IT team, so they can attack and eliminate the technical issues on your site and enhance the overall user experience.
This workflow could involve several individuals within your organization – an SEO analyst, an SEO manager, a content writer, and an editor.
This example features the following:
Once approved, the SEO manager will verify if the requirements have been fulfilled with this workflow and push the content to go live.
For each of the above workflows, it's important to define your timeline before getting started. So, in the case of that last example, the workflow could look like this:
|
Task |
Responsibility |
Timeline |
|
Identify underperforming content to improve, and create a project report. |
SEO Analyst |
1 day |
|
Approve the project. |
SEO Manager |
2 days |
|
Identify ways to optimize the content, and write new copy. |
Content Writer |
3 days |
|
Evaluate new copy. |
Editor |
1 day |
|
Update the content on a page. |
SEO Manager |
1 day |
|
Evaluate on-page optimization and publish on live site. |
SEO Manager |
1 day |
Identifying and implementing SOPs and workflows is just the beginning. Once they are complete, they have to be constantly monitored to assess the quality of outputs.
After all, any process that doesn’t boost organic traffic and deliver desired results is ultimately nothing more than a distraction.
So, continuously review and improve your SOPs and workflows, paying particular attention to:
Having a fully defined SEO roadmap can be a game-changer for any organization, as long as you use it.
I always recommend making the roadmap accessible and easy to understand to all stakeholders, not just the SEOs.
This way, you'll reduce the friction your non-SEO colleagues may have from having to understand complex search engine optimization procedures.
A simple spreadsheet detailing all the aspects of the SEO strategy, and listing planned activities per month is, in most cases, the most accessible format to use.
Most of the stakeholders will have no problems with using it, and reporting on it will be easy, too.
Building a strong SEO roadmap requires identifying and consistent application of standard operating procedures and workflows. We want to make it easier for you with our free template:
Remember: an organization can only achieve the highest search visibility at scale when all teams involved in delivering specific SEO projects know what to do, when to do it, and how to be successful.
What’s left for you to do is to start defining and implementing SOPs and workflows in your organization — digital marketing efforts are related to all teams!
<<Editor's note: this blog was originally published in 2020 and has been updated.>>