Even good search engine optimization (SEO) strategies can fail during execution. Despite your great ideas, real progress entirely depends on what happens after those recommendations leave the strategist’s hands. That gap between knowing what should be done and making sure it actually gets done is where project management comes into play.
The Basics of SEO Project Management
The role of an SEO professional is highly strategic, but it’s also partly operational. We need to explain what should be done, why it matters, who needs to be involved, and what happens if the work continues to be delayed. A strong recommendation is only the beginning. Someone still has to translate that recommendation into effective action.
Still, the simple truth is that SEO agencies can identify valuable opportunities, but we don’t necessarily get to control our clients’ internal workflows. I can’t even begin to count the number of times my own recommendations have been buried in inboxes, strategy decks, and meeting notes that don’t get the attention that they deserve. Nevertheless, it’s still our responsibility to keep those recommendations moving forward. An SEO professional could endlessly identify technical problems and propose content opportunities, but none of those efforts will improve organic performance until the recommendations are actually implemented.
The Value of an Actionable Roadmap
If you take away nothing else from this blog post, my hope is that you’ll at least understand the value of a well-documented SEO roadmap. In its simplest form, an SEO roadmap can be a spreadsheet designed to break down past, present, and future SEO recommendations into specific projects and milestones. Anyone should be able to open it and find out exactly what your SEO team has been up to. I, for example, have some client relationships that have spanned nearly half a decade, and I can tell you exactly what changes were made to their website each and every single week. By listing out all of your deliverables, what still needs to be done, and who is responsible, you can streamline the communication between all parties involved.
A roadmap also gives you something concrete to return to during every client meeting. Instead of relying on memory or scattered emails, you can easily review each item and establish next steps. Over time, this creates accountability on both sides and makes it much harder for important recommendations to quietly disappear.
SEO Project Management Tactics
Sometimes, keeping an SEO project moving requires more than just a spreadsheet. You may need to follow up more directly. By implementing the right project management tactics, you can make it easier for both your team and your client to understand what needs to happen next. Here are a few strategies that I employ on a regular basis.
Establishing Clear Ownership
While this isn’t always applicable, I have some accounts with several contact persons. It’s great to have leadership, writers, developers, and other brand representatives all together, collaborating on SEO projects, but sometimes there can be too many cooks in the kitchen. I try to make it abundantly clear who is responsible for approvals, who is responsible for implementations, and who is currently the bottleneck for a multi-faceted project. My favorite place to display this information is on the aforementioned roadmap.
Prioritizing Tasks
After a major content audit or technical evaluation, your client may come away with a long list of actionable items. No doubt, each of these tasks is important, but I’ve found that ranking each item by its SEO value is a great way to give your clients a bit of a push. By highlighting easy-to-implement and high-impact tasks, some clients may be more eager to jump right into specific tasks. Similarly, if a client begins to fall behind on implementing weeks’ or even months’ worth of recommendations, try to help them refocus by consolidating, ranking, or reorganizing those tasks.
Setting Realistic Deadlines
In a perfect world, SEO recommendations would be implemented the day they’re made. However, depending on how complex our suggestions are, content and development teams may need days or weeks to implement our suggestions. On top of that, some tasks get passed back and forth (see my first subhead about “Establishing Clear Ownership”), delayed, or forgotten about entirely. One way to combat this chaos is to set deadlines for everyone on the account, including yourself! Try to set reasonable deadlines based on how busy your client teams are and how long certain tasks will take.
Creating a Follow-up Schedule
Some recommendations are bound to slip through the cracks eventually, but make it your own responsibility to resurface these unfinished tasks on the regular. While we don’t necessarily want to annoy our clients with endless emails, it’s in their own best interest to implement our SEO recommendations, so don’t be afraid to speak up. Consider discussing outstanding action items during your regularly scheduled meetings or sending a follow-up email if you don’t see any changes after a week. Discuss what will motivate them the most so that you have permission to help them remember rather than just nagging.
Quality Assurance for SEO Changes
When a task is marked complete, changes still need to be reviewed to confirm that they were carried out correctly. Even relatively simple updates, such as changing title tags or adding internal links, can be implemented incorrectly or differently from what was originally recommended. Quality assurance gives the SEO team an opportunity to compare the finished work against the original request.
It is also important to remember that clients and development teams may interpret recommendations differently. Ensuring that your notes are clear when sent to the client is one thing, but it’s even more critical to ensure that the live website is up to snuff. A reliable SEO workflow should therefore include a final review, following up with any errors, and confirmation that all necessary corrections have been made.
Measuring SEO Project Performance
Once all of your SEO recommendations are live on the website, continue to track performance for any and all pages that were affected. In this way, SEO project management helps maintain client confidence, and nothing reinforces that confidence more effectively than clear, measurable evidence that your strategy is delivering results.
Record the exact date that the SEO recommendations went live on the site so that you can tie specific performance improvements to actions. And, once again, a great place to save these dates is in your SEO roadmap.
Adjusting the SEO Strategy When Resources Are Limited
With shrinking developer bandwidth, downsizing, and budget cuts always on the horizon, a continually delayed SEO roadmap is a recipe for disaster. Instead of trying to execute everything as quickly as possible (but possibly poorly), these scenarios might instead call for some heavy-handed prioritization.
When resources are limited, it’s time to adjust your focus towards high-yield tasks. For example, a navigation optimization might have a huge impact on your organic search performance, but may need to be sidelined in favor of quicker wins. By treating implementation bandwidth as a strict, non-negotiable limit, you can ensure that every hour spent on the account directly moves the needle.
SEO tasks are notorious for causing bottlenecks, but it’s our job to eliminate them. It may occasionally feel like pestering, but (respectful) persistence is what keeps our hard work from disappearing into the SEO aether. After all, a recommendation can’t improve rankings, traffic, and conversions until someone implements it!
