A core skillset of a strategic SEOer is to effectively relay recommendations to diverse teams.
As the number of recommended changes stack up, another challenge emerges…
Which recommendations should be executed, why and when?
A bottle neck for SEO moving forward is the lack of priority across recommendations.
That is, you have a list of SEO opportunities but there is no differentiation between which should take precedence.
Today, I’d like to talk through how the lack of priority hinders SEO progress and how you can position your recommendations for a higher chance of implementation.
Alongside this newsletter, I’ll relay a template I use to share priorities for SEO recommendations via a priority matrix; if you’d like to look at the template, skip to the “Communicating Impact vs. Effort” section.
Let’s get started.
Why priorities matter
As an organization assesses its competitive positioning, they must identify areas that require attention and action. In strategic planning, this assessment is akin to Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT).
However, a brand is bound by limitations as they seek to improve their positioning. Typical limitations an organization can expect are,
- Time
- Personnel
- Capital (dollars)
How does an organization sift through which opportunities in light of limitations?
Strategic prioritizations.
These prioritizations are tailored to an organization’s circumstances, including limitations and goals.
As strategic priorities are communicated, larger teams begin allocating resources around a project.
This focus strengthens the project and increases the likelihood a priority will materialize.
Watch 5 tips for communicating SEO priorities effectively
How SEO recommendations fall short
When we relay SEO recommendations to stakeholders, we face the same limitations referenced above,
- Time
- Personnel
- Capital (dollars)
However, strategic priorities are often disregarded; in its place, a de-prioritized list of recommendations is shared.
The lack of strategic priorities stems from a number of reasons; below are the most common trouble areas I’ve seen SEOers needing to overcome,
- Inability to scope web / organization ecosystem
- Inability to interpret SEO needs to diverse teams
- Heavy reliance on automated SEO software
With the lack of experienced SEO resources, the first 2 bullets become prevalent; which drives the 3rd bullet to occur more often.
Because there’s no strategic direction on why items on the list matter, all items are unequally weighted.
As such, budget for initiatives may be minimal, non-existent, or totally unknown.
SEO needs a budget; this is particularly true if our recommendations impact the infrastructure of a website and require development support.
Lastly, there are sprints that have been queued and resourced for months, if not quarters; no team wants to drop their current queue to prioritize a de-prioritized SEO list.
An example of failing to prioritize SEO
Let’s walk through an example from a recent project.
We have 2 individuals working for an online health supplement retailer, Strong Co., geared towards competitive weight lifters.
- Charlie has been at Strong Co. for 7 years, leads multiple teams and sees the blog and content creation as an opportunity to strengthen Strong Co. as a leader and expert in the space. He’s looking for a path forward on what the brand can do to improve the blog.
- Sean, has been at Strong Co. for a year and is continuing to familiarize himself with the brand’s processes, needs, as well as SEO best practices.
Let’s say Charlie communicates to Sean the former’s hopes and aspirations and is looking to weigh strategic opportunities.
Sean mulls it over and relays the below recommendations.
“To improve blog performance, high SEO priorities are,
- On-page content
- Header tags
- Better authority
- Internal links”
This isn’t bad advice, per se, but remember, Charlie wants to position Strong Co. as a thought leader and an expert in the health supplement space.
Sean relayed areas the team can work on but not what takes priority or how to tactically move forward in relation to Charlie’s request.
Because there are still several unknowns, Charlie may not carve out a full budget for Sean to optimize the blog.
As such, Sean is left without budget and SEO recommendations come to a stand-still.
How can Sean have improved his priorities to Charlie?
Breaking out general recommendations
One of the largest blockers in pushing recommendations forward is the sheer size of the endeavor – a recommendation such as “On-page content” is vague and gargantuan.
Sean can offer easier-to-swallow recommendations or tactics and lay the foundation for the broader picture. Sean can break down each of his recommendations from above into the below,
Sean’s recommendations have become more actionable and provide direction on how to optimize.
For example, rather than recommend “On-page content”, we broke it down to 4 tactics to improve content,
- Create above the fold content
- Break out [long form] paragraph blocks
- Update content format
- Create table of contents
Let’s talk about how we can begin taking our actionable recommendations and making them more tangible.
Understanding the Impact
Now that we have smaller recommendations, we can assess each pieces’ impact to your organic performance.
To understand each recommendation’s impact, and strategic priority, Sean has to understand the individual tactic in relation to the brand goals.
How closer will each tactic get the brand to their overall strategy? (re: denote expertise in the health supplement space)
Some tactics will go leaps and bounds for your strategy; these may be higher impact. These can be backed by data you’ve pulled and analyzed, including,
- Competitive data
- Google Search Console
- Google Analytics
- SEMrush or Ahrefs search data
Others, not so much; these may be lower impact.
But it’s critical to be realistic on each recommendations’ impact, nonetheless.
Although measuring impact is more of an estimate, understanding that some will have a larger effect than others will allow you strategically assign priorities.
This is where a lot of brands and marketers fall short…
Not only is everything a high priority but there’s no distinction on anything’s impact.
It’s all expected to have the same effect.
And if all are treated equally, none are strategically prioritized.
Sean is inching closer to more actionable and strategically-geared prioritizations.
Weighing the Effort
Assessing the effort of the recommendations will help you, and our friend Sean, weigh them against one another.
We have to ask, which recommendations will be lighter and which will be heavier?
Understanding the difference in effort between the two will give you a sense of what is feasible in the short and long term.
It’s helpful to understand as much as you can about the dynamic of the teams, technology, existing roadmaps, etc.
Being cognizant of existing, overlapping work streams, supports the case for your involvement but also helps you tailor a recommendation specific to the current environment.
These are necessary details in assessing a level of effort, especially if the effort is on another team.
That said, a heavier effort may require greater resources, including team members, budgeting and project plans; and a smaller effort may require less resources.
Communicating Impact vs. Effort
Now that we have broken out Sean’s tactical pieces of a strategy, assessed impact and effort for each, we can aggregate what we know into a matrix.
Below we have the Priority Matrix.
On the Y-axis, we have our Impact; on the X-axis, we have our Effort.
The goal is to weigh Impact vs. Effort, where the a team can find “low hanging fruit”, or initiatives that are lower effort and adequate impact.
What’s more, there’s the benefit of laying all the tactics on the table, allowing one to make an informed decision as an SEO roadmap is built.
This view has made my recommendations more digestible, timelines more tangible, and SEO more manageable.
It grounds consultants into the reality of limitations and has helped me maneuver through them.
Each recommendation should come with a slew of research and thought, which feeds the impact and effort in relation to the brand’s goals.
As our character, Sean, takes these recommendations back to Charlie, the latter has a better idea of how to realize a strategy and, with it, comes security knowing where the efforts will go.
Summary
In the example above, Sean forwarded a list of general priorities.
In my experience, that never works out. At least not with supplemental information.
Remember, you’re the SEOer but you also have to be a strategist – that means digging to make an informed decision on what’s best for organic search.
No more “here’s a general list of SEO recommendations”; we have to understand our brand goals, break down our strategy and examine each opportunity more thoroughly.
Based on what you know around a brand, its goals, its ecosystem, you have to work towards though-out priorities to make any change and impact to your site.
I hope the above has been helpful and I hope your recommendations come to fruition.
Happy prioritizing!
