If you spend a few hours on any SEO blog, you'll learn all about how to review a website, identify SEO problems, and propose solutions. But proposing solutions alone doesn't get them fixed. Clients and managers will be much more likely to implement your recommendations if you propose clear, concrete action plans that prioritize steps based on expected cost and benefit. It's helpful to include a spreadsheet at the end of each audit that looks something like this:
A five column table probably doesn't look too intimidating, but when you get down to it, there's a lot of work involved in arriving at the right piece for each column, so I want to go over each step thoroughly (letters correspond to columns on the table):
- Writing concrete actions
- Prioritizing recommendations
- Identifying resources needed
- Estimating costs
- Compiling pieces for final ranking
A. Writing concrete actions
The difficult part of our job is figuring out the what and the why, so we often leave off the time consuming yet simple last step: how. For example, many SEO reports might something like this:
That covers what the problem is and why you should fix it, and broadly outlines what you should do to fix the problem. But imagine that you're a web developer who read that report: did someone just tell you to spend days clicking all the links on your site looking for 404 errors?!
As experienced SEOs, many of you reading this probably jumped slightly in your seats. No, you did not just ask them to manually go through the site - there are so many tools that can do that for them! Just run a Screaming Frog crawl and look for 404 errors! But the truth is, as knowledgeable as web developers are, there are many tips and tricks of SEO that they don't know about. Even if they do know about Screaming Frog, consider how much more helpful this report is:
We crawled your site and found a number of broken internal links that are creating 404 errors and losing PageRank. By checking your internal links and correcting any broken links, you will retain PageRank, increasing rankings across the site, and create a better experience for your visitors.
We have compiled a list of all broken links across the site, their location, and their anchor text. We recommend that you review these and either remove the link or find an appropriate live page to direct visitors to.
Without this last step, you're relying on a savvy web developer to do the manual labor for you. With this last step, you're allowing the project manager to pass on your solution to an intern and forget about it. Even if it technically costs the company more to pay you for those 15 minutes of work than their developers, it prevents mistakes and dramatically increases the chance of the work actually getting done.
Whenever you're creating an action plan, don't stop at high level solutions. Outline the steps it will take to complete the plan, and do as many of the steps as you can yourself.
B. Prioritizing recommendations
This step is vital, yet rarely included. As easy-to-implement as your actions may be, passing on over 20 actions to any group may seem overwhelming. Where do they start? What will get them the most traffic for their efforts?
If your client or manager wants traffic or revenue estimations, that'll take some time (and deserves its own forecasting blog post). But most clients I've worked with are fine with a high/medium/low scale.
What counts as high, medium or low? I've ranked the most common issues that I find while reviewing clients' sites from largest impact to least. Just be sure to modify the final high/medium/low ranking based on how widespread the problem is.
1. Penalties
You probably already knew this, but: always fix penalties first.
If your site is under penalty, any other SEO fixes will have less of an impact. And there's always the worrisome possibility that the penalty will lead to bigger/worse penalties (i.e. an algorithmic penalty could lead to a manual review, a manual penalty could lead to a manual review of other issues, an unresolved penalty could receive harsher punishment).
Clients and managers are much more willing to invest in regaining traffic they once had than making changes to get more traffic. If you can spot and prove a penalty, it should be easy to identify value lost and how much more they will gain from unpenalized rankings than they will lose from fixing the problem.
1a. Manual penalties
Manual penalties typically cause results to drop a set number of places in rankings. To check for a manual penalty, search for the site's brand name. If it isn't ranking #1, you probably have a manual penalty on your hands. To remove a manual penalty, you'll have to submit a reconsideration request with Google. Lewis Sellers put together a great post detailing how to do this thoroughly (otherwise, your request will be denied).
1b. Algorithmic penalties
Algorithmic penalties still get the "high" prioritization, but are usually less severe than manual penalties. Unlike manual penalties, algorithmic penalties won't knock your rankings evenly across keywords, but you'll see an overall drop in organic search traffic.To identify an algorithmic penalty, look through Moz's handy log of algorithm changes to find which changes Google implemented right before or during the site's organic traffic decrease. They include links to articles, which should help you find a solution for the penalty.
Note: There's a difference between algorithmic penalties and changes. A penalty is when Google's algorithm determines that you have done something against the rules and ranks your sites' pages lower than they would otherwise rank. Fix the core issue, and your site can start to rank well again. But when algorithms change, there's no way to "regain" lost traffic. The landscape has just changed.
Here's an example: if your site is getting less traffic because Hummingbird answers the query above search results, there's nothing you can do or fix to get your traffic "back." Instead, you have to be a marketer rather than an SEO. What's the site's core strength? How can you move your efforts towards more fruitful channels?
1c. Potential penalties
2. Pages that don't rank
Broken links, incorrect redirects, or low quality/seemingly duplicate content will often cause Google to miss pages or ignore them completely. Site owners often incorrectly assume that this has to do with keyword targeting when they can't find their page for a relevant search term. But there's nothing that content can do to make up for not being in the index in the first place.
2a. Poor link structure
Most commonly, a page won't make it to Google's index because:
- There are no links to it
- There are supposed to be links to it, but they're broken
- There are 302 redirects to it, so the original URL stays in the index
- There is one link to it at the bottom of a 3,000 word article with 300 exit links
- Navigation is 100% JavaScript that loads text after the page is loaded, so Google can't read it
In all of these cases, Google either can't find the page or doesn't think that it's important enough to add to its index. This is easy enough to fix on a one-off basis, but you don't want to have to keep checking for lost pages.
The best way to make sure that all pages are found is to build a solid navigational structure that links to all pages on the site so that you're not relying on body links for content to be found.
2b. Duplicate or extremely low-quality content
If Google thinks that a page contributes nothing to the world wide web, it may choose not to rank your page unless you search for the URL explicitly. Historically, this would happen when a page had almost no content (less than 50 words) or was very clearly keyword stuffing, so always make sure that a missing page is readable and has enough text content that Google can understand its meaning. You can check to see what Google can read on a page by loading Google's cache of a page, in the text-only version.
You're more likely to run into duplicate content issues, though. If Google finds two pages on the web that have nearly identical content in the body of the page, Google will choose one page as the "original" and ignore the rest. To check to see if you have duplicate content, copy a long string of text from a page and search for it in quotes.
You or your client may have accidentally kicked your own content out of the search index if you:
- (Ecommerce sites) Shared product content by taking the manufacturer's description. In this case, add your own review or work to encourage visitor reviews. Google will not punish you if only a portion of your page is duplicate content.
- (Content-based sites) Syndicated your content on more authoritative sites without getting a rel="canonical" back to your page. If you have done this in the past, reach out to get those canonical tags, and make sure to make that a standard part of all syndication.
- (International corporations) Shared content aimed at different countries. This is a bigger issue, so check out Kate Morris's recommendations around international SEO.
Note: If you find duplicate or low-quality content that still is ranking, fixing it is still a high priority. It means that the page has enough authority to overcome the issue, but if you create unique, valuable content, the page will do much better in search engine results pages.
3. Confusing content
As smart as search engines are, they're still machines that try to match searchers' queries with your content. Pages are most likely to rank well when they make it clear which questions they're answering, by clearly focusing on one to two subjects per page, and using a similar vernacular to searchers' queries.
3a. Keyword targeting
Most keyword research posts I read start from nothing, assuming that you have a topic in mind but haven't written content yet. The truth is, most of us are editing content that's already live, so it's more about verifying that the text was written well than it is about coming up with a list of target keywords.
The first step to verifying keyword targeting is reviewing a page and figuring out what questions it's answering. Then ask yourself, "if I had this question, how would I search for it?" Write up a thorough list of possible queries, both based on the words that are already in the page's text and other words that you think are relevant. If you're an in-house SEO, look through forums and other user-created content to move away from your internal speech patterns. Cyrus Shepard wrote an awesome ebook on identifying keyword groups that should help you with this.
Next, search for those terms in Google Keyword Planner. Do they get traffic? Does the keyword planner recommend similar, but more popular keywords?
If the content is very different from what people are actually searching for, this is a high priority issue. Google understands synonyms, but it doesn't rank them as well as direct matches. If the content is not ideally targeted, this is still a good recommendation, but it's a lower priority.
3b. Topic cannibalization
Even if each of your pages is perfectly targeted, you may find that you're targeting the same queries with multiple pages. In SEO, we've typically covered this topic with "keyword" cannibalization, but with Google working to understand meaning more than individual words, the problem really comes in when you have two pages that both apply to the same queries, and Google thinks your site should only occupy one results place.
When you review pages for keyword targeting, make sure that you don't end up with the same list of keywords for multiple pages. If you do, consider combining them for one stronger page (301 redirects, please!).
4. Other technical issues
Once you've made sure that your site isn't being penalized, all pages are indexed, and content is understandable, other issues are much less pressing. Prioritization of those issues has more to do with how extreme the problem is, and how many pages are effective. Run through Geoff Kenyon's complete Technical SEO Audit Checklist to identify these issues, and prioritize accordingly.
C. Identifying resources
It's fairly easy to identify the general department that will handle an action, but slapping up "Dev Team" for all HTML-related changes might not be the most efficient allocation of resources. Action plans are much more helpful when you start by learning about all available resources to make sure you assign tasks correctly, make sure that you include all resources needed on the spreadsheet, and understand a bit about their workload and work speed.
Know All Available Resources
If you're in-house, this probably isn't an issue.
If you're a consultant, though, you have a very limited view of resources available. Unless you directly ask for a list of internal teams, tools, and agencies, you'll usually only hear about the internal teams that do high-level work, like the content team, web development team, and creative team. But what about the interns, the tools, the outside agencies?
When you mis-assign work to a more in-demand team, team members will often recognize that an intern or tool can do the work and hand it off accordingly. But busier teams take longer to get to projects, so you'll end up waiting weeks for the dev team to clean up broken links, only to have developers had the project off to an intern the second it lands on their to-do lists.
To be as efficient as possible, make sure that you assign tasks to the department or team member who will be able to work on it as fast as possible and/or for the lowest cost. You don't necessarily need to know of all employees and their skills, just make sure that you have a comprehensive list before you assign them yourself, or ask an employee who knows the lay of the land, like a project manager, to go through your list with you.
Include all needed resources
Many SEO recommendations seem very technical, but require a bit of writing or design work. When you add action items like "rewrite page titles," or "move this link into the top navigation," you're asking for more teams to be involved than just the development team.
In these cases you have two options: do the writing or design work yourself (which makes your recommendations very actionable; I do this often myself) or make sure that you identify all resources needed and include them in the spreadsheet.
Understand how quickly resources can complete tasks
This is a tricky step, because no one will tell you that, say, their design team is slow. It's better to ask questions about past projects: Last time you designed a new navigation, how long did the brainstorming take? Are employees often interrupted from their long-term goals to complete short-term assignments?
Information like this will help you select resources and estimate cost. Going back to the example of fixing broken links, the web development team may be able to fix them programmatically, but they might not get around to it until next month, and it'll take them a day to write the code. Meanwhile, there may be an intern who is quick and efficient and has free time right now. Many teams (especially developers) like to take the most "efficient" route, but your organic traffic will do much better if you complete tasks as quickly as possible rather than as efficiently as possible.
D. Estimating cost
I used the word "cost" here because money is the most universal way to compare effort spent between employee involvement, outside resources, and tools. However, most SEO recommendations require manual labor, often carried out by in-house workers, in which case companies may be more used to measuring in terms of time to implement or effort. Your "cost" will make much more sense if it's in the same format that they're used to seeing.
Again, most companies are happy with a scale of high/medium/low, but if you have enough experience with the company, more precise estimates will make it easier to prioritize actions.
E. Prioritizing SEO actions
The final prioritization decision should take into account all of the pieces above, plus the company culture and goals.
Notice that I didn't say SEO goals. You should prioritize SEO actions that compliment all goals for the company, including (but not limited to) SEO goals. If the content team is already rewriting product pages, start on keyword targeting before you worry about reworking the navigation. Integrating SEO wins into current projects is one of the best ways to minimize budget.
In addition to explicit goals, you should also think about what will make your team and management feel that the project has been successful. If you're working with an agile team that's used to quick wins and/or a company that is skeptical of the value of SEO, you should start with easy-to-complete tasks that turn the needle immediately. If you're working with a company that takes a bit more time to complete projects, you may want to start them on big plays right away, to make sure they get maximum SEO value for the few projects they're able to complete. As brilliant as you may be, you won't retain clients unless they see the wins.
Is all this effort worth it?
Yes. Being a consultant or an employee requires much more than simply doing your job; you will look a million times smarter if you're more effective. Plus, your coworkers/clients will love you for it.
Great post Kristina, and very useful indeed.
I'd like to add just one thing and related to "keywords mapping" and "keywords/topic cannibalization".
Just very recently in Google Webmaster Tools we can the queries details of what pages are more visible in the SERPs and receive more clicks.
That kind of data is extremely useful, because it helps grouping the pages that are competing one each other for the same topic/set of keywords, and quite easily understand if the page we desire is the one ranking better or not, hence being able to correct the issues if they exist.
Not that we could not perform this kind of analysis before, but it surely was a longer process and... well, if Google gives us the data directly...
Good point! I should have included that.
Since keyword data has been removed from Google Analytics, most people at Distilled have been using SearchMetrics, but we're really excited that Google has been giving us more data via Webmaster Tools. In the past we've been slightly wary of how inaccurate GWT seems, but I've heard it's getting better. Hurrah!
Is there a way to see what pages rank for the same keyword within GWT? I can see a tab for queries and a tab for pages, but how can I see both data in one place?
Great point by the way! Thanks!
Not as far as I know. But you can always test it manually, to see which page ranks by searching for the keyword. (Time intensive, I know.)
Adding an easy-to-read table at the end of SEO audits that clearly identifies the most important problems could be the difference between losing a client in a large dollar amount and winning a client over (even for just a small project or two). This is great.
This is a great start to the week Kristina. Great tips and suggestions to prioritize our work and to present the plan (which actually looks workable and effective) before the management/client. Many times we have seen this that we have resources but if don't utilize them properly, we are not going to achieve what we have been expecting from our efforts that way.
Also, presenting your plan in such effective manner will encourage your management to provide you missing/unavailable resources (a situation we face many times) to get job done effectively. :)
Glad I could help! So much of being an effective consultant are little things like this - not just getting it right - so I wanted to share that. It's hard to learn on your own!
Thanks for the post Kristina. I especially like your section on Topic cannibalization. As an in-house SEO I deal with this constantly, from content both old and new. Sometimes companies take a "let's throw everything we can at Google on keyword-x and see what sticks!" approach, not realizing that they are only undermining their efforts. Combining content into one authoritative page and 301-redirecting the old pages to that page is a very sensible and actionable approach.
For those of you who enjoyed this post and would like the most awesome Site Audit template in the entire universe, check out Annie Cushing's SEO Audit Checklist - It's been shared many times here, in the SEER blog and also is available with a complete walkthrough on Distilled's blog containing a video of her original presentation at Search Love Boston. Using this will totally help you complete the goals Kristina maps out in this post. Thanks Kristina!
Good point! Old school SEO usually broke down pages to be targeted to very specific keywords, but we need to pull back and consolidate.
And, I agree, Annie Cushing's audit checklist is very thorough, thanks for sharing!
Just tried the Annie Cushing's SEO Audit Checklist. Its awesome. Thanks for sharing it Dana.
Great post, I wish I was this organized!
So do I. This is the ideal, really.
Pretty cool, Thanks for sharing all the tool details. This will defnitely going to make a good return on the local seo.
It was amazing to know better prioritized plan for SEO tasks,
thanks for this post.
Thanks to Kristina and Dana (For Annie's Check list)
Many a time the Entire Process failed just due to lack of resources to work. In most of my consultation career I have seen the agencies (the smaller one) have no enough resource to work effectively. After researching a lot I prepared a list of lots of free as well as some essential paid tool, but when Cyrus wrote this post I forgot my list and Started using it as a reference.
After reading your comments I realized that it is not only me who is unorganized. The post is really of great help for many including me. Thanks for it.
Regards
Sasha
Yes, it's all too often that companies don't have enough resources for SEO or don't allocate them because it's a new field. Which makes prioritization like this EXTRA important!
Kristina, this is an excellent post! Too often many SEOs (myself included), employ the scatter gun approach. Whilst this may improve results somewhat, it is definitely not the most efficient way to go about improving organic results for a particular website.
As for resources, as an in-house SEO most of the time, and a private SEO consultant the minority of the time, these can differ greatly from day-to-day. Wish I had my own intern!
Glad you liked it!
And, if you track your time like this, you may be able to show your managers how much mind-numbingly boring manual labor you have ahead of you and use it to convince them to hire an intern rather than pay your salary to get it done. Just a though. :)
Like @Nick Stamoulis said, it's easy to jump around from one thing to the next. I like your action plan and how it's broken down. Should be an industry standard :)
I certainly try to make it a personal standard!
Yes very true, it will actually help people in setting an action plan, than a generic scattergun approach.
"Proposing solutions alone doesn't get them fixed", I think Edison has an appropriate quote for this one: "
“Vision without execution is hallucination.” Execution is key..
I wish you were with me when I wrote this post! That would have made a great addition.
Nice Read. ! Great Post Kristina. This will be really helpful while planning the SEO tasks for the all involved teams.
Thanks a lot for such a well organised post.!!
I really much motivated after reading your blog. This blog is very helpful for SEO.
via codingbrains dot com
Thanks for this great Post Kristina!
Could you elaborate on the statement you made in the section about Duplicate or extremely low-quality content. On your fist bullet point about Ecommerce sites and the manufacturers description, you mentioned that Google will not punish you if only a portion of your page is duplicate content. I have that exact issue on my ecommerce website. I have about 400 products that currently have only the manufacturers description and a list of parts. My project plan is to add a 150-200 word unique description for the products and also convert the parts list to a PNG image file to avoid duplication. Based on your statement, do you think that converting the product parts list to images is overkill and is there any SEO benefit to avoiding duplication to that level?
Bob S.
Yes, I don't think that it's necessary for you to get rid of the list of parts, as long as there's more unique content on the page than there is duplicated content.
Really impressive and helpful post for me, i know how to check broken link and anything but i have one question how can i check my quality of content for my website, it's look like user friendly content. how can i prove my content is quality and user friendly ,,,, Please help me Kristina Kledzik........
thank in advance Kristina
Writing good content is a huge task, so not something I can help you with in a comment, unfortunately. But look out for great content marketers like Adria Saracino: this post is very straightforward and might help you get going.
Good luck!
It is such a great and more valuable post Kristina, I like your ideas and found it more useful and attractive to apply to the activities I am using for my SEO strategy and I know by applying these ideas everyone can get the desired results in SERP and in increasing its sales. All these ideas are perfect and more important for the SEO professional to apply on their SEO techniques.
Great and wonderful article very helpful.
Thanks
Thanks @Kristina Kledzik for this wonderful post. It's very useful topic.
Awesome Article Kristina, really would help me and my SEO team here at Spinta. I would set this as our company standards in terms of action plan :)
Best article I've read in this entire 10-week course!
Good point! Old school SEO usually split down webpages to be focused to very specific search phrases, but we need to withdraw and negotiate.
Thanks for this great Post Kristina
Kristina,
Thank you so much this is actually something I was working on right at this very moment. And I needed the answers that you supplied this is truly perfect timing and I cannot thank you enough. Fantastic job of laying it out now I just have to summarize it for the client they kinda know what they want but they have to listen to their experts I think this is a fantastic post and thank you so much. Sincerely Thomas
Why, thank you. I'm glad this came at a good time. :)
@Kristina.. this site is very useful for me. I know this site from my SEO teacher. He asked to to learn more about SEO for my Website www.MahkotaProperty.com and www.rumahdijualgadingserpong.com.
He said if I want to master SEO, I have to read Moz.com..
I will start reading this site again and again. thank you so much
Joe
Great post Kristina! Definetly of use for us as we build a checklist ourselves.
This is a fantastic post, and will certainly be put to use in helping our team better communicate short-term and long-term projects and their shifting priorities.
While I think many SEO experts would be pretty savvy about designating priority level, are there any resources that you have to measure priority for particular issues? For instance, if many of your broken links do not necessarily act as landing pages for visitors, they may not move the needle all that much for a client. Only curious!
Thanks for sharing!
Hi Richie,
The best way to designate priority over different issues is to look at potential traffic increases if the change is put into effect.
When it comes to something like broken links to pages that wouldn't be landing pages, I'd argue that you still want to prioritize pretty heavily. That's a user experience issue as well as an SEO issue, and could contribute to lower brand satisfaction. You could always find traffic lost from broken links (provided you're tracking that with your analytics software) and use that as a metric to estimate the value in fixing those broken links.
Sorry, it's hard to give a more specific answer! Good luck!
Dear Kristina Kledzik,
Its a very Informative post and I agree with you more then 100% but is there any way you can convert all that Wording into an Excel Sheet, I will be very thankful to you.
Regards,
Ahmed Adnan
Really impressive and helpful post but i have one question how to check quality of content, it's good quality content or not because sometime if we like to read but quality is not good or low quality copy content how to decide that content is good or not ?
Well, there are a few levels of "good."
First, there's "good" in that Google will read it over without thinking that you're keyword spamming, and will understand the message of the content. That's what I covered in this post. To break down this sort of "good" qualitatively, I'd say good content is a) has over 150 words, b) doesn't repeat the same phrase more than 2 or 3 times, and c) uses the same phrases that visitors are searching for.
Then, there's "good" that will be interesting enough for visitors to read. If you're looking for this level of good, I'd read anything by Adria Saracino. You can start with this.
Finally, there's "good" that will get you noticed and shared on other websites. This involves PR, a good creative team, and some significant trial and error.
The type of "good" that you're aiming for depends on your goals, of course. :)
Thanks for this, I think an SEO ... or inbound marketing strategy is key instead putting all energy into tactical pieces. On the resources pieces a lot of modern businesses have overlapping resources and responsibilities. I would say if you are in house it is key to get buy in to the strategy from the wider business otherwise your tasks will be deprioritised when shared resources get other demands.
Exactly! Plus, the teams whose responsibilities you help support as an SEO benefit will love you forever.
I think your priority list is spot on. When you tackle a website with a lot of issues you have to pick somewhere to start. It's easy to work on thing A, then thing B (without finishing A) and jump around and around. You have to create a plan of attack for yourself so things get done in a reasonable time frame, not to mention they get done well.
Too true! At Distilled, we all try to turn our recommendations into 3 month action plans. We see WAY more of our ideas implemented when we have start times and due dates and everything.
Great post Kristina!! Thanks For sharing..
I really like the structure and approach you take to organizing and getting results for a clients' website. In much simpler terms, I generally do the same thing by first making sure everything is well optimized and structured on the website and then focus my efforts on off-site activities.
That's the same way we typically work! You don't want a technical issue weighing down your outreach.
Yes, it is absolutely right that client and manager will more likely to implement our recommendation if it is clear and complete. You have covered complete step by step details that makes action plan clearer. Thanks for sharing such a useful post.
Point D is *very* important. Understand what the company's internal currency is - man hours, GBP, USD, etc, and use that. Don't make your contact have to convert what you send in order for it to be understood.
Also, I'd add an addendum - give an estimate of the size of the prize for any and every piece of work that you are recommending
True - I was vague with "priority" rather than "estimated increase in X." If you have a very numbers driven client, you may need something like that. But many clients I've worked with realize how hard that would be to predict and don't want me spending hours and hours laboring over that piece, so I usually get away with high/medium/low. :)
Veyr nice, organized guide to an organized plan. Everyone should read all this staff before rushing into a SEO work. Thank you.
A nicely simple and concise plan. I can think off many ways to add-to and so overcomplicate this, but having such a simple checklist can be a real help in getting things done. You could also extend it to off-site tactics if you need to spread those around a few people, for example by including the product team if you are going to send out freebies to get reviews, the sales team if you're going to repurpose existing offline content, or the individuals in the content team who will be actioning an item.
Yep, I don't think that this should be a hard-and-fast action plan. It should definitely be tailored to your client. But, I think it helps to follow a plan like this when you're just starting out, then start to learn where you can modify it as you get more comfortable.
Glad you liked this!
I have read and ENJOYED reading your post!
Thanks for sharing your valuable thoughts. Very interesting point for me here is fixing broken links and tool (screaming frog) which you mentioned. I will follow your action plan, once again many thanks for you.
Broken links seem like such an obvious problem that it wouldn't be common, but I find them all the time, especially on old sites. Definitely check into them!
Great post and great step-by-step structure! I love this kind of layout, it is also to be considered though that if a client has a large concern it should also be towards the top of your prioritized list – just to appease the client themselves. Well done though!
True, you often have to start with compromises. I would still recommend that you push fixing penalties before their agenda, though.
Great post, Kristina. Really good point about "knowing all available resources"... As a consultant I learned quickly that not all dev teams are created equal. And the same goes for creative/design and many of the other resource tiers we have to work with as SEOs. I also try to network with designers and developers as much a possible so that if projects are being bottle-necked by 3rd parties, I can make an alternative recommendations for the client. Depending on how "hands on" you are as an SEO, working the right professional team can make all the difference. Thanks for sharing.
Very true!
@Kristina
great idea to break that topic open, "pages that don't rank" i mean.
Often we forget to check the pages that don't rank and focus too much on the things that do rank already.
If those are not ranking very good, the problem is in the other stuff: structure, cannibalization. Great post.
We recently de-index about 200 pages just to test an impact... another approach that worked fine. Also.. cannibalization... an underestimated topic. Changing focus on pages could help a lot.
Great post!
Yup, I tried to focus in on common problems I see rather than the technical checklist. Glad to hear that we're on the same page.
Great post Kristina! It's full of tips to prioritize work and establishing a plan
Good read in regard to technical SEO! From the title I was expecting a more comprehensive/ in-depth action plan (content strategy, targeting, link acquisition plan etc.) but certainly enjoyed the tips.
Re "#2-Pages that don't rank" ...you can also make sure that you are identifying QUALITY content pieces that do have the potential for more traction with an active content publicity/link outreach/social sharing strategy!
Alas, I wish this could have been more comprehensive! But this is 3,000 words as it is, any longer and I'd need to write an eBook.
We always engage in scheduling the action plans for our SEO projects but we never went in so organized way. Thanks for presenting such an outlook Kristina. Well said by Gianluca regarding the keyword report in webmasters. Also I would like to include innovative content planning according to the industrial updates. Thanks for such a great synopsis!
Well written Kristina and helpful not just for us associates but along all levels. One suggestion I would make is instead of writing "low, medium, high" in your prioritized SEO action plan, instead use numbers "1, 2, 3" (1 being low and 3 being high). In this way you can have a "Total" column so you can see right away which items are the priority. You can also add columns like "when is the deadline and time demand" and "will problem get worse if not taken care of". Does that make sense? Continue posting! This blog was great.
Yep, sorry if I wasn't clear, but the "Priority" column should definitely be numbered. I didn't cover that much because the weight of cost vs impact varies by situation, so I can't really tell you how best to order them.
And, yes, a note to everyone: add columns as required! I tried to keep this simple, but you'll probably find that each company needs some extra variables to make this list optimal.
What a lovely post! I actually read this as the "Hierarchy of Needs" for SEO. Similar to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs in the study of psychology, SEO also has its own hierarchy of importance that needs to be tended to before starting off on the others.
You got to make sure number 1 is fulfilled before you jump to number 3 or 4. Otherwise, you're throwing all of your efforts off balance.
Haha, yes, SEO does have it's own hierarchy, but only we SEOs seem to know about it. Carry on the message!
Wonderful article, Kristina!
XLS files showing a course of action so everyone knows what is to be done and when is crucial. We also use BaseCamp for other tasks and deadlines for our team and any clients who want to be a little more in the know about their online marketing.
Your point 1a. Manual Penalties hit close to home we are working with a new client removing links and getting ready to submit our Reconsideration Request soon. Thanks again for the great post! Thumbs up - Patrick
Good point; I explained how to do this in Excel, but if your client is using Basecamp or any other project management software, use what they use!
I honestly prefer Basecamp ,Excel is awesome for so many different things but for invoicing and project management Basecamp really has become a more evil tool in my opinion as you can simply paste in any thing that must be Excel generated content into Basecamp using cloud app for copy and paste
Great post Kristina Kledzik ! Agree - on completion of an SEO audit and/or SEO recommendations plan it is ideal if everyone can walk away knowing where to start (prioritize), who can/will implement from available resources and expected cost vs. walking away with great ideas but not knowing where to start or who will do. This is a great read and base point guide. Thanks for sharing!
Yes! Prioritizing tasks like this is an excellent way to train the mind to think step by step and not get intimidated by the big picture. I love these prioritized task matrices and I've experimented with a few myself. One helpful addition could be to have a column for estimated hours. Additionally, priority score can be determined by a calculation of impact x cost x hours x resources.
Yep! If you can measure hours, I would put them in the "estimated cost" column, unless there are dollar amounts needed for outside work as well. :)
Nice tips Kristina, being organized will help us to achieve our goals & targets efficiently. MINIMUM EFFORTS & MAX OUT OF IT... :) Contributors like you are helping us get better & better....
Thanks...
@Kristina Kledzik this post with your impressive research will surely help us to get the new clients as well as to retain the old clients.
thanks a lot for writing this post over here !!