Defining an SEO Project Plan

You just landed a new client, your team just scheduled a kick-off call and over the next several weeks, perhaps months, you have to pull together an SEO project plan that will see the campaign through to success.

Where would you start? You can go in guns blazing and start optimizing this, that, and the other. You can ask the client where they left off with their last SEO partner. You can build new pages and sprinkle keywords like it’s seasoning.

There are endless ways you can start an SEO project and engagement but if experience has taught me anything, it’s that without painting yourself a picture of where you are and where you want to be, your campaigns and strategies may all be for naught. That is, when you’re starting a new relationship with a client, you’re going to have to build an SEO strategy and a project plan that can guide you to a desired state. Failing to plan is planning for failure – if you don’t believe me, read about my worst migration project.

I’d like to walk you through how I’ve kicked off SEO projects with clients in the past and how creating project plans helps serve as a North star.

SEO project plan and SEO strategy: the differences

Before getting into the main point of the article I wanted to clarify the difference between a SEO plan and a SEO strategy, since I’ve seen many people use them interchangeably, even though they are not the same.

What is a SEO project plan?

A SEO project plan (or simply SEO plan) is a document that states a determined course of action to achieve an specific goal or objective.

A plan helps to provide structure and direction, ensuring that teams stay focused and organized while working towards their SEO targets.

A SEO project plan involves:

• Analyzing the current state of things
• Diagnosing issues and detecting opportunities
• Setting objectives
• Creating strategies to reach the objectives
• Defining a timeline for the project
• Listing the activities to be completed
• Estimating the resources needed to complete the project
• Managing and tracking the execution of the plan to guarantee its success

Don’t worry, we will review more of this process later in the article.

What is a SEO strategy?

A SEO strategy is one of the parts of a SEO project plan.

While the objectives tell us where do we want to get, the strategies tell us how are we gonna get there.

The SEO strategy originates from the analysis section of the SEO plan, and from the opportunities detected in this analysis.

In the same way, the SEO strategy is the origin of all the SEO tasks of the project, but don’t get confused, a strategy is not a checklist. More than that, is the sum of three elements:

• The Analysis – What issues are affecting the site? What is the reason behind them? What is the diagnosis?
• A guiding policy – Think of this as a principle that will give direction (and put a limit) to all the SEO actions. If an action strays away from this principle, it should not be part of the strategy. Simply put: Of all the possible courses of action, which one are we taking?
• Coherent actions – This are the initiatives or tasks that conform each strategy.

You can read more about the components of an effective strategy in this article by Tom Critchlow.

SEO Plan vs. SEO Strategy

In brief, they are not the same, but you need both. 

Strategy can’t exist without a plan, and a plan is not complete without strategy.

You need the SEO strategy in order to have clear and actionable tasks that make the project tangible.

But you also need the SEO project plan, to give context to the strategy, to manage the execution of activities and to track results.

6 steps for a successful SEO plan and strategy

1. Understand the Scope of a Project

Understand what the scope of the project is (what the project entails and what you’re responsible for); this is particularly important if you hadn’t been as involved in the Request for Proposal (RFP) and pitching phase of the project. That’s not to say that you don’t have access to what the engagement was agreed upon. You can lean on your statement of work (SOW), or the contractual description of responsibilities and requirements for your project.

You may ask why any of this is important? Why does this take priority over getting a conversation started with the client via kick-off call or getting work started for your client?

Well, I’ve been in conversations where teams hadn’t been aware of what was in scope and it’s best to understand what your responsibilities are going forward. Granted, some of it may be legal jargon and some might be boilerplate, it’s crucial to understand some of these details otherwise you risk burning through your SEO budget. This is especially important during website migration projects where there are several moving pieces, budget is limited, and there are very heavy items such as building a redirect strategy or building a 301 redirect map.

Additionally, reviewing the scope of your project will help you understand what resources you may have and what you may need. This in turn, can help set the stage for an upcoming project plan, where you have a better understanding of possible limitations and better prepare for it.

2. Host a Kick-off Call

Now it is time to meet the client by hosting a kick-off call. 

The kick-off call serves several purposes, all of which can help you as a partner provide the best service possible. A kick-off allows you to do the following:

Make introductions to you, your team, and the client team

It’s a lot easier talking to someone when you’re able to place a face to the name and understanding the dynamic of the team, what the role of each team member is, and who the main point of contact will be.

Know who your direct client contacts are

Tying it in with the above statement, you want to be able to communicate to the best suited person for the program. That is, if you’re engaging in SEO, you’ll want to maintain contact with the person on the client side that manages their SEO program or digital marketing efforts.

Understand client needs and struggles

They hired you for a reason. Try to focus on where their search pain points are and how you can provide value. Attempt to tie their needs to their business goals as well as their current state of search. Additionally, attempting to understand their struggles up to this point will allow you to provide additional value-add if you’re able to devise a solution for such struggles or mitigate concern associated with those struggles.

Identify goals and KPIs

Try to understand what’s important for their business. Maybe it’s not revenue, maybe it’s contact form submissions, email sign-ups, or some type of lead. Whatever it may be, understand what they are trying to accomplish and with what metrics. Doing so, you are able to establish benchmarks you can measure against and grow search in a fashion that aligns with their business goals.

Gauge their search experience / history

It’s crucial to understand where your client has been to help them move forward. Maybe they’ve optimized certain aspects of their site and require out of the box opportunities; that’s where you come in. Perhaps they’ve been burnt before and are wary of making site changes; it’ll help you understand in what ways you have to be sensitive / aggressive in your recommendations.

Get insight into their competitors

Understanding a client’s competitors will help you understand the industry as well as the search landscape better. What’s more, it’ll give you an opportunity to see what has been done and by whom. Lastly, a competitive list will allow you to keep track of select sites you can measure performance against.

Identify analytics and tools

SEO is an industry where progress can’t be measured by a single metric, in my opinion. It’s crucial to understand what tools the client is already using (e.g. Google Search Console, Google Analytics, SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc.) and whether you may be able to adopt them or pivot to ones you’re more comfortable with. Gaining access to the right analytics packages and tools also allows you to start gathering benchmark data you can track progress against.

What’s more, it’ll give you an idea of what tools you might need to ensure a smooth project. For example, if you’re in a migration project, it might call for website migration tools rather than content strategy tools.

Set meeting cadence

As you progress, you want to ensure the client is in the loop with all that is going on in the campaign and that you have access to all you need from the client. Setting a meeting cadence holds both you and the client accountable. It allows you to voice concerns and share wins. It also gives the client an opportunity to share news around what is happening on their end that can impact their search visibility.

3. Take a Snapshot of the Current State of SEO

This is where the fun happens.

Now you’re aiming to understand where to unravel the opportunities that exist for your new client. What better way to gain a snapshot of the level of maturity of the site, their current state, than performing a series of audits.

There are several ranking factors and best practices you can audit against but I recommend viewing audits as tiers. And in each tier, there will be ranking factors that impact SEO performance.

I recommend four different types of audit:

• Technical SEO Audit
• On-page SEO Audit
• SEO Content Strategy Audit
• Off-site SEO Audit

See below for a brief explanation of each one and a few checks you should include.

I. Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to the process of improving the access / crawl of a website and focuses on its infrastructure. A technical SEO audit would include factors such as:

• Mobile Friendliness
• PageSpeed
• HTTPS
• Canonical
• Robots.txt
• Sitemap.xml
• Webpage Status Codes

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II. On-page SEO

On-page SEO takes the content of a web page and ensures it speaks to user trends, with relevant content and keywords, so it provides a hyper relevant experience. Areas to audit against include:

• Page Title
• Meta Description
• URL Structure
• Navigation Structure
• Header Tag Structure
• On-page Copy

III. SEO Content Strategy

An SEO content strategy expands on content by incorporating (keyword) themes and topics at a larger scale. It helps assess what opportunities exist for ongoing content generation. This type of audit would review material such as:

• Content Gap Analysis
• Content Calendars
• Topic / Theme Opportunities

IV. Off-site SEO

Off-site SEO refers to factors outside of a website that impacts rankings within search results. They include:

• Backlink Profile / Inbound Links
• YouTube Optimization
• Google My Business
• Social Profiles

Are those 4 SEO audits 100% necessary?

In all honesty, performing all 4 of the above would be a very labor intensive effort and may not even be necessary for the client. For examples, a client who has no SEO experience, or who hasn’t tackled SEO fundamentals, may not see any benefit in a comprehensive content strategy at the onset of an engagement.

As such, I recommend starting with a Technical and On-page SEO Audit. This way you can aim to remove any major visibility blockers to the site via a Technical SEO Audit, and you can identify where to serve up relevant content in some of the most needed areas via an On-page SEO Audit.

Depending on which SEOer you talk to, they may want to manage the above differently; and that’s completely fine. I felt the above has helped me on numerous occasions but the auditing aspect of an SEO engagement will vary based on the needs of the clients.

4. Build Keyword Universe

At this point, we want to build a keyword universe reflective of your client’s target keywords. The goal of this exercise accomplishes a few valuable tasks, including:

• Helps you understand your clients content, products, and service offerings
• Allows you to cross-references your clients content with user search trends
• Verifies search behavior for the targeted topic
• Guides your client’s site content strategy and structure

Let’s look at some items to note when building your keyword universe:

I. Keyword Research

Keywords are phrases that represent your product or service offerings but are also searched in Google by your target audience. This exercise identifies how audiences are searching, their intent with specific phrasing, and any gaps or opportunities to sync your site content with search trends.

Regarding keyword targets, remember to stay relevant and lean, when necessary, on Monthly Search Volume. Monthly Search Volume, or MSV, is how often a keyword is searched in a month within Google. The higher the MSV, the more traffic it can drive if you’re ranked in a higher position.

A mistake I’ve seen clients make is they identify and track all keywords under the sun and label them as an SEO priority. They’re not all priorities; some keywords might not be relevant or might not even accrue enough monthly search volume to be a priority. To help see what keywords might be relevant and what their MSV are, perform keyword research using tools such as:

• Google Keyword Planner
• KeywordTool.IO
• Google Trends
• Answer the Public
• Keywords Everywhere Extension

There are a slew of others, both free and paid; for another great list of keyword research tools, see here. 

Focus on relevant keywords that your audience cares about. Let’s say your audience buys “dog bandanas”, which accrues 49,500 MSV, but you also found “bandanas” which you want to track because it accrues 673,000 MSV. “bandanas” isn’t as relevant for your target audience, despite the larger MSV, and there’s less need to place it within your keyword universe.

Let’s say, you performed an incredible amount of keyword research and have amassed a keyword universe that reflects your client’s website and their product / service offerings. What do you do with it now?

II. Categorize Keywords

This is an interesting tactic.

We’re attempting to make sense of our keyword research by compartamentalizing the information. We do this by identifying themes to the keywords.

For example, using the dog bandanas example, we not only found keyword opportunities for “bandanas” but also for “leashes”. So now we can group all “bandanas” keywords under a “Banadana” category, and the “leashes” into “Leashes”.

The benefit to approaching it in this manner is, a few fold:

• You can prioritize keywords based on monthly search volume
• You can better assess rank tracking data by category performances
• You can (eventually) identify keywords and content gaps

I perform this tactic before actually tracking my client’s ranking for each keyword. Doing so, I’m not bogged down by individual keyword targets but rather I can focus on performance at a more holistic level.

In my experience, having categorized data had made analyzing my client’s performance significantly better as well. If rankings go down, I can attempt to identify patterns to better understand to what degree. Some thoughts that come to mind include but is not limited to:

• Was performance down for the whole site?
• Was performance an issue for a specific category / site section / topic?
• If it’s just a category / topic on my site, why?
• Was there an issue wrong with specific pages, site section, etc.?
• Is a competitor performing better?
• Did Google react unique to the topic?

You now have all the keywords that are relevant to your brand. You’ve also just categorized and now, you can check the rank of those keyword opportunities.

III. Rank Check Keywords

Pull your client’s, and if possible, their competitors’, ranking position. This then serves as the snapshot of where their website(s) sit within search results. This allows you to better understand what keywords are ranking high, which are low hanging fruit and can be a quick win, and which one will definitely require work. All of which can feed into your SEO Strategies and SEO project plan.

For a list of keyword ranking tools, see here. 

Remember, building a keyword universe fulfills a few purposes:

1. It’s meant to be a guide on how users are searching in your clients’ space, which can feed SEO Strategies
2. Helps identify keyword ideas that can impact how your client’s content is built
3. Gives you a benchmark for how your client is sitting in the space, pre and post-optimizations and
4. It serves as an indicator to progress, issues, or opportunities

5. Define an SEO Project Plan

At this point, you’ve amassed a great deal of information; way more than what you had during your kick-off meeting. You’ve:

• Identified Technical SEO opportunities that can help improve the visibility of your site in the eyes of search engines
• Identified On-page SEO opportunities that can be optimized and improve the level of relevancy your client has with their target audience
• Built a Keyword Universe that is reflective of your client’s industry and consumer searching habits, which can then feed into your SEO Strategies

None of the above 3 are an easy feat.

Take into account that not all takeaways are created equal. Meta data optimizations for a site section or building a holistic content strategy might be a part of a longer term SEO strategy than optimizing a robots.txt file.

You can take each of the learnings from the above and make them more digestible tactics, allowing you to prioritize each action item based on their level of effort as well as their impact. The most successful projects I’ve been a part of are when we can attribute the level of effort, impact, and tangible dates to each tactic that was uncovered. This allows you to be able to prioritize accordingly and makes completely each tactic and goal way more tangible.

With the above, you can then estimate a project plan timeline and assign responsibilities to each member of the team.

Which takes us to the last point.

Now it’s time to take all that information and put together the rest of the plan.

I. Highlight the main opportunities

Write in simple terms the main opportunities in your analysis, and an estimation how much this opportunity represents.

For example, let’s say that during your analysis you find out that the blog content is not ranking because all the competitors offer more quality information and include original, high-quality pictures. And let’s say you identify this opportunity can get you an estimated 10,000 visits.

II. Set the objectives

Make sure to use a framework that allows you to have clear objectives. A simple way to do this is to write them with the following formula: From X to Y in Z time

Following the example, let’s say you are currently receiving 3,000 visits. Your objective could be: Going from 3,000 organic visits to 10,000 in 12 months. Pretty clear.

Note: Don’t get oversaturated with objectives, prioritize. Set only one or two big initiatives. This will keep all the efforts focused. Once that’s done, you can move forward to the next big objective.

III. Create the strategies

Make sure to make them actionable and specific. Remember the strategies tell us how we will reach the objective. If they are not actionable and specific, the team might get lost.

In the example we can set an strategy such as: Update 5 pieces and content focusing on answering all clients questions on the topic and using high-quality media

Note: Think about the constraints

Make sure to include which resources do you need to execute the strategy. Keep in mind the client’s budget and human power. No use in suggesting things that are not feasible.

Let’s say you suggest not updating 5, but updating 50 articles a month. The problem is, the client only has two copywriters and no budget to hire more.

Also, don’t forget to understand the business model. If your suggestions don’t make sense in the context of the business. It won’t work either.

IV. Create tactics for each strategy

Take each of the learnings from the above and make them more digestible tactics, allowing you to prioritize each action item based on their level of effort as well as their impact. 

The most successful projects I’ve been a part of are when we can attribute the level of effort, impact, and tangible dates to each tactic that was uncovered. This allows you to be able to prioritize accordingly and makes completing each tactic and goal way more tangible.

6. Find a Project Tracker

Now you have a list of opportunities that can serve as a guide for SEO tactics. At this point, you now have to be able to take the results of our projects and track on a regularly basis.

I’ve typically used Excel workbooks and Google Spreadsheets as well as project management tools such as Jira, Trello, etc., to help house my project plans, timelines, tactics, etc., but I’ve seen various clients and vendors use a mixture of tools, based on their familiarity or organization protocols, such as development support or strategy.

Your goal at this point should be to take tactical items in your project plan and place it in a format you will revisit and update often. Remember a project plan should be a living and breathing resource if you’re actively working towards a positive impact to your client’s site.

With that said, when working with a client that either doesn’t have access to or budget for a project tracker, I typically lean on a pretty straightforward Google Spreadsheet. To get you started, feel free to use the project tracker I’ve prepared here.

It doesn’t contain any sophisticated functionality and it is meant to be a great starter for someone who wants to consolidate SEO tactics and strategies in a digestible format. That said, it does contain pieces of information that have frequently helped me move my projects forward, including

• Project – The overarching goal or theme of various SEO tactics and action items. That is, you can take “Build Keyword Universe” and make it a project unto itself. Then you can take the various tactics, such as “Keyword research page content and intent” and feed it into the project.
• Tactic – These pieces are actionable efforts that are on the ground level. That is, they feed into either an overarching strategy or project. SEO tactics shouldn’t be confused with strategy; holistically, tactics will support a major effort. For example, your strategy might be to create a new content site section but a tactic would be to do the keyword research that would drive the content creation.
• Level of Effort – This, in tandem with Level of Impact, lets your clients know how to better prioritize both tactics and strategies. Once you’ve laid all you SEO tactics on the table, you can pick and choose which items you can move forward with. Once defined, I typically hide this column – it has valuable information but once we’ve defined the effort, we have marching orders and can can move forward in a specific direction.
• Level of Impact – This, in tandem with Level of Effort, lets your clients know how to better prioritize both tactics and strategies. Once you’ve laid all you SEO tactics on the table, you can pick and choose which items you can move forward with. Once defined, I typically hide this column – it has valuable information but once we’ve defined the impact, we have marching orders and can can move forward in a specific direction.
• Owner – It’s going to be necessary to identify the current owner of a tactic. The owner will update based on the phase of completion and can go back and forth between you and your client. The goal of having this value assigned is to have accountability and understand where the task currently sits.
• Est. Start Date – By now you should have an understanding of what tactics are going to be a priority. Being realistic also means knowing you won’t start on all items right away but you can look ahead and have a start date for future tasks.
• Est. End Date – You have to ensure everything you work towards is tangible so it’s crucial you assign an end date to a specific tactic. You may find yourself not being able to meet an end date; that’s OK, you have to be open with your client and assess why not, and scope out what a more appropriate due date will be. The goal is making the tactics you know will drive positive performance a reality and having an end date gets you that much closer.
• Status – This field is a client favorite. You’re able to create a status based on progress or hindrances. Similar to the Est. Start and End Date, the Status of a tactic makes its completion that much more of a reality. As you move forward with completing your projects, you’ll find yourself having more and more completed tactics. Before you get to a completed state, you may find yourself in one of the below Statuses
  • In Queue – Your tactic is in the roadmap and queued up once other tasks are complete
  • Started – You’ve already started on your tactic or task and are actively tracking updates against it
  • Blocked – There is hindrance preventing you from moving forward on the task and you need to bring it to the client’s attention
  • Completed – You’ve done everything you’ve sought out to do and in accordance with best practice; you’ve completed your tactic / task
• Updates – This is essential. You have to track against what progress has been made and by whom. The Updates column provides a retroactive view and is meant to track what work has been done. You can place information such as team member contributions, details around blockers, or when a task has been completed. I personally love using dates in this column as it provides a timeline of progress.

I hope the above has been helpful in laying out your steps to success. Again, please feel free to use my project planner here.

Final Thoughts

There are over 200 ranking signals and you can easily get overwhelmed with how much work exists in a new SEO engagement. You want to ensure that your approach doesn’t lack direction or have any misaligned expectations.

An SEO project plan tailors the opportunities that exist for a client and structures it in a manner that makes organic search success more of a reality.

Remember, failing to plan, is planning to fail – even in SEO.