How to ensure that your SEO Recommendations get implemented!

Phase 1 - Information Gathering

This phase begins once you on-board a new SEO Client or a new SEO in-house project. Here you need to be on top of your observation and data gathering, evaluation skills. The key things that you need to understand in this phase includes the below, if there was SEO activity performed by the client or the organization earlier.

Previous mode of operation for the SEO Channel if any.
Pre-onboarding Growth numbers – Aspired vs Achieved.
Set of current KPI’s if any.
All Documentations done before you onboarded – Audits, Keyword research, On-Page, Off-Page and Reports.
Key stakeholders that were involved for the Organic Channel.

Get all these data organized as this will clearly help you to understand how the organization or client approached SEO earlier, what were the key goals they went after, which were the bottlenecks that they faced and so on. Just gather the data, organize the same and spend some regular time with this accumulated data. It’s great to get in touch with the previous teams that worked on the SEO Channel if possible.

Phase 2 - The SEO Foundation

Once you have organized the past data and spent enough time with the same, there would be two situations that would emerge based on your experience and knowledge. Either you are convinced with the current approach and would like to continue with the same and focus on expansion or you might want to tweak some processes or refine a few files like keyword research etc.

Irrespective of the situation do go ahead and initiate a technical audit for the website as it might help you to discover some more optimization opportunities. Also, once you make a final decision as to what situation you are going forward with, go ahead and create the foundation files for the SEO Channel, which will be used moving forward. This can include the below files:

Keyword Research
Keyword to URL Mapping
Technical Audit Tracker
On-Page Implementations
Off-Page Implementations
Reports

The Information Gathering and the Foundation phase can be completed within the first three months of the project. However, depending on the scale of the project and the team size allocated for SEO this phase might extend as well. Do not hesitate to give more time to the foundation phase if required as this will be the key pillar for your SEO campaign. Consider this SEO FOUNDATION same as a building foundation, if you get it wrong then irrespective of the amount of efforts and time you put in, you would not be able to scale strongly and at a faster pace.

Phase 3 - Concrete Output & Identification of "SEO Board Members"

The aim of this phase is to get some “Concrete Output” by whatever resources that you have in your hand through the activities that you can execute. Now, this “Output” becomes a vote of confidence for SEO Channel efforts and can give a small trailer regarding the potential of the SEO Channel. You need to share this with your client or the organization and speak about the same whenever you get an opportunity.

While you are creating the “SEO Trailer” start understanding the key stakeholders that you will require help from. This generally involves, a person from the tech team, someone form the PR Team, and a member or two from the content team. You need to make them understand how they have been and how they will continue to contribute to the SEO channel and thus the bottom of the funnel. Also, giving credit for the past achievements to these teams help. SEO will not move a needle without cross-team collaboration across these teams. Hence it becomes essential to get this in place to scale up SEO in a smoother way. You need to show them the “Concrete output” and how they have contributed to the same.

Also, if you can identify some key decision makers in the organization or at your client’s end who can push through the entire system it would make a great difference. Usually if there’s a CMO at the organization or at client’s end who you can be in touch with indirectly or directly will help you a lot.

You can get a concrete output within the next 3-6 months of the foundation phase. Try to identify the low hanging fruits which can help you to gain decent improvement across the KPI’s. Sometimes you can get a concrete output earlier as well if you are able to identify good opportunities.

Phase 4 - Significance of SEO - Communicate, Communicate, Communicate!!!

Now since you have already created an “SEO Trailer” which is a “Concrete output” from the organic channel, start highlighting the same at your organization or if it’s a client you can ask them to speak about the same within their organization. The aim here is to show the potential of SEO as a marketing channel and how it can help drive business outcomes once approached strategically. Be sharp with your numbers and speak through data. Get an understanding of the key business need of the organization and how SEO can help to achieve the same.

Also, do not miss on sharing how the tech team, content team and the PR team contributed to this “Concrete Output” if they have. This helps the organization to understand that at the end of the day – SEO is an Organizational Activity.

This can be done for the period of 1-1.5 months after you achieve a concrete output. Also, this is not a one-time activity, you can do it at regular intervals.

Phase 4.1 - The SEO Movie Script - Plan of Action

By now, you have an “SEO board” in place, things would be moving at a decent pace, and growth should be coming at a decent pace. So, now comes the time to get aggressive with SEO. Based on you understanding of the project, create a Sprint Project. A six-month plan of action to achieve the current business objective through SEO. This can include your Traffic Projection, Ranking Projection, how SEO can help you to achieve the current business objective.

Phase 4.2 - System Penetration

Time to put your leg on the accelerator. By this time, you would know what needs to be done, who can help you with different set of activities, and incase if you encounter any blockages who can help you to unblock them etc.

Prepare a deck highlighting the below:

Key achievements in the past 7 months, also highlight the cross-team members who helped you in some or the other way.
The Sprint Project POA, SEO Strategy and how it can help the organization achieve its business goals.
Current bottleneck if any.
Key asks if any.

Share this deck with the “SEO Board” and key decision makers if they take keen interest in the SEO channel after going through the “SEO Trailer“. You can even consider having a meeting with the “SEO Board” if possible and taking them through the deck. Try to get different perspectives and maybe tweak the deck, if necessary, based on different business priorities. So now you are ready to execute the sprint project POA and also have an “SEO board” who can help you with implementations at a faster pace if necessary. The implementations will generally take place faster now as the entire board is now completely aware of how their activities are contributing to the business objective.

Phase 5 - SEO Board Meetings

Initiate a bi-monthly SEO Board meetings for the next six months with the entire SEO board which will highlight the current progress of the Sprint project, what has been achieved so far, key bottlenecks if any, accommodation of any other strategy that can assist in changed business priority. If you can manage to have CXO’s in these meetings it would work wonders for the SEO Campaign as well as the SEO Board members. This will depend on the kind of numbers that you are driving.

Phase 6 - Aim to beat all the Competitors and have the best SEO visibility in your Category.

Expand your keyword buckets or keyword universe and repeat 4.1 and the 5th phase so as to ensure a consistent pace of growth for the SEO Channel.

Once you start obtaining the desired growth & establish how SEO is helping organization achieve its business objective, you can reduce the talking/communication as the results & data will start speaking on your behalf and you will no longer have to keep on pushing to get your recommendations implemented.

This will also open up the door for more experimentations without any need of justifications as to how much traffic gain would happen if this thing got implemented. Now the entire SEO board is involved in the success of the SEO Campaign which makes things a little easier.

Do not forget to enjoy the results once in a while, as an algorithm update can sometimes take away your happiness any day 😛

Please See – Avoid using SEO Jargons in the initial phase of your project or maybe the first six months.

Thanks for reading till the very end! I would like to know your perspectives as well in the comment section 🙂