Summary
- Think of an SEO roadmap as a plan with actions and deadlines.
- “The best time to have a map is before you enter the jungle.” – Brendon Buchard.
- Each SEO roadmap is different depending on the maturity of the company.
- There are low hanging SEO best practices. Tackle those first to get the ball rolling.
What is an SEO roadmap?
An SEO roadmap is a document that lists a set of actions to take to improve the company’s search visibility.
Why do you need it?
“The best time to have a map is before you enter the jungle.” – Brendon Buchard.
SEO is a marketing strategy that involves a lot of unknowns. Google has kept their ranking algorithm a secret since the beginning. Matt Cutts, ex-head of Google Search mentioned that even their engineers don’t know some of the code in their codebase.
However, what we SEOs know is there are a list of SEO best practices that have been proven to improve (or increase the probability of improving) your search rankings such as:
- Fix or redirect 404 errors
- Improve page titles and heading tags
- Internal link relevant pages
- Add meta description to improve search CTR
- Improve page load speed
How to build it?
Firstly, not all SEO roadmaps are the same.
An authority website such as Amazon will have a totally different roadmap than a startup website.
The timelines for each tasks for a bigger website would take months whereas the same task for a smaller website could take days.
Secondly, the type of tasks is different too.
A local manufacturing company will need more local SEO such as Google My Business optimisation whereas a Saas company who sells to multiple countries might not need that as much.
Thirdly, the stakeholders are different too.
Making changes to a large website will require you to work with different departments to implement those changes.
My approach
In SEO, there are industry best practices then there are also low hanging fruits. Combine those two and you have your low hanging SEO best practices.
These are the list of things that will yield the best result in terms of effort / time ratio.
For example, 301 redirecting 404 pages don’t require a lot of effort. Depending on the organisation, you would just need to work with IT to redirect those 404 pages without negatively impacting the other departments.
Another low hanging SEO best practice is adding or improving H tags (H1, H2, H3) to existing blog posts. It won’t negatively impact anyone except your competitors!