to create a SEO roadmap

A document roadmap is essential when implementing a SEO campaign for a number of reasons.

An SEO roadmap, created in Google Sheets, or another tool such as Jira or Asana is the best way to complement a solid and well-researched marketing strategy. Ideal is to leverage technologies that your team already uses.

This article explains why an SEO road map is important for your strategy. Learn how to build a solid SEO road map to help prioritize tasks and work with your team.

You need a SEO roadmap

Here is a link for to copy my SEO roadmap in Google Sheets.

A SEO roadmap is similar to SEO in general, and it can’t exist as a separate entity. This is true both for your own research as well as your team in the larger business.

You should have a complete SEO strategy that includes:

You should then be able layer all that on top of the larger business context. Included in this are:

This information is important for the SEO roadmap, as you will initially focus on low-effort, high-impact tasks. These tasks will vary based on the organization.

Understanding your business objectives will help you:

You may want to rethink where to start your roadmap if you know the people, budget and tools available.

You’re about to launch a new product within the next three-months, but your development team will be at full capacity for a month following its launch. You could start by collaborating with your content team to create a new hub-and spoke content in your area of expertise.

When I was working at Optus in Australia, a major telco, it was difficult to make any changes to the website from June to September, because we were getting ready for the iPhone launch.

In that case, I was part of the launch team and had more freedom to do things than I would have otherwise. But you get the idea.

It’s also important to understand your tech stack. In some configurations of the tech stack, especially on smaller websites and with SPAs a 301 or 404 redirect may seem simple, but it is more complicated than usual.

SEO is a difficult field to generalize. While you might want to say it’s a low-effort, high-impact task to resize 10MB images for your product pages, there could be a good reason.

This context will help you identify sticky situations before you create a SEO roadmap.

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Terms.

Create your SEO roadmap in 3 easy steps

1. Prioritize

This is my first round of priority setting, where I evaluate the SEO impact on a single silo.

The one thing I consider to prioritize is the percentage of the website affected by the potential problem.

After I have a good idea of the size, I try to estimate the effect. It can be challenging to quantify impact, but here are some ways you can do it.

We can estimate SEO’s impact and size with confidence, but we are less sure about the effort.

I will still try to estimate effort but I will bring in experts to help me do it right.

2. Estimate and assign

SEO is sometimes like herding cat because you depend on others to implement your strategies.

It is for this reason that I begin my roadmap by what many may consider the last step: determining who will be doing the job and asking them how long they expect it to take.

I will ask them if they have any doubts about their ability to complete the task and if they need anything else, such as budget, in order to accomplish it.

I am not an expert on design, UX or front-end web development. They are.

While I can make a rough estimation of how long a job will take, based on what I’ve seen from other clients, or what’s been said online, this is only a Tshirt size, and it could be wrong for reasons that I do not know.

I’m not aware of the legacy code that runs through our website, or that sometimes it can take an hour to replace images because a buggy CMS will randomly fail to apply changes to filenames.

I don’t even know if that’s a page where we are running CRO tests 20 times or if it’s an unofficial code-migration.

My teams know more than I do.

I then take my SEO plan, which I have probably been working on for several months and agonizing over, and pull out the tasks that I believe a certain team will perform.

I then take this and do an initial grooming and sizing with someone who is knowledgeable about the task – typically, with the product owners of that squad.

If you don’t recognize them, now is a great time to meet new people. Being curious and kind is 90% of what it takes to be an SEO.

Note Depending on the organization you work for, your team may estimate things differently. Sometimes, it’s in days. Sometimes, it uses an agile Fibonacci or similar scale.

You’ll need to be consistent. The Fibonacci Scale can make it more difficult to translate the days into an estimate of time. I would still ask the team to provide an average execution time, so that you can at least estimate delivery.

This process can be useful for companies at the enterprise level because, as long as you have a good conversation, it’s like getting a “soft yes” from your team.

It will be easier to say yes when they get the job later.

After that, I’m mostly doing paperwork.

3. Do the paperwork

Gantt is the best format for me when it comes timed work.

You can use the software versions of Jira and Monday or Google Sheets to build it.


Define headings

You can base your headings on your strategy.

You may, for example, have buckets devoted to content, infrastructure or engineering.

My strategy and roadmap are aligned with the primary teams who will be handling each area. This is how I keep track of everything.

It may be a good idea to align them with other KPIs, such as your team or business goals.

It could be “site speed, accessibilty, expertise”, where site speed and accesibilty would be the responsibility of development teams and expertise would be a mixture of SEO, content and development tasks.


Define your tasks

Each person has a unique perspective on which tasks should be included and excluded from an SEO road map. There are two major considerations:

As I work primarily with large clients, I am not able to do many tasks myself.

This means that my SEO roadmap often duplicates tasks assigned to other people, such as JIRA tickets for developers and Asana tasks or tasks for designers.

It is easier to track my progress in SEO with the SEO roadmap than to create a list of tasks for myself and my team.

If you are able to do most of the work, that’s great.

If you are able to do more than half of the tasks on your roadmap yourself, I would suggest reducing the list and focusing only on SEO. Tracking non-SEO tasks can be done in another tab or somewhere else.

When it comes to the size of the tasks, you should aim for the middle – neither too large nor too small.

It would be inappropriate to include “change the title on the blue widget webpage”. If you have an enterprise website, “change all title tag on the site” may be too big.

You could also choose to “Rewrite all title tags formulas” or “Rewrite the title tag formulas for product pages template.”

It is possible to break down a task like “Product Page Optimization” into smaller tasks like:

If you are creating a SEO roadmap for a full year, it is better to have a manageable amount of rows than hundreds or thousands.

It’s likely that you would feel overwhelmed and not confident about starting. Analysis paralysis can be real.

4. Prioritize your tasks, assign them and schedule them.

You need to be laser focused when using the SEO roadmap. After you’ve categorized and assigned tasks and determined how long it will take to complete them, it’s now time to review the order of your priorities.

After taking notes from my team about the dependencies and requirements to get the job done, I use a variety of lenses to prioritize tasks.

First, let’s look at the Eisenhower matrix.

The simple scale that combines urgency and importance is a great way to get a better understanding of what you should be doing. You may find yourself deleting more than you thought.

These are usually listed in my project management tool or notebook, which I label “If/When Time Allows.”

After the initial grooming, I probably realized that some tasks or aspects of tasks were not worth the effort.

Then I go back to my original prioritization, and consider the efforts estimated by my team.

We are back at the beginning. It’s now time to start the project.

When I tap the execution team on the shoulder, it’s to confirm that they will be doing the work.

I begin the “Let’s make this Official” tasks for the six-week schedule. If all goes well, these should be low-effort and high-impact activities.

A well-defined SEO roadmap will help you achieve better SEO results

If you were unsure, yes, it is a circle. There’s a good reason why I began and ended my process with the same tasks around assigning or estimating.

SEO maps are dynamic and flexible. They can be adapted to the changes in business and the Internet. It’s a living, flexible document.

My advice when creating a SEO roadmap is:

You can now build a flexible and strong SEO roadmap for clients, your company or your employer.

The first time Search Engine Land published the post How do you create a SEO roadmap.

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