How to prioritize technical SEO tasks
Great content is essential, but technical SEO is the foundation that supports it.
Even the best content will struggle to succeed if your website can’t be crawled, has rendering issues or suffers from poor indexing.
Without a solid technical base, getting to Page 1, earning a link in an AI Overview or driving organic traffic will be nearly impossible.
The problem?
Technical SEO often feels like no man’s land. Marketing teams don’t understand it due to jargon like server codes and meta tags, while engineering teams don’t prioritize it because the website functions fine and their QA tests pass.
As the SEO, you’re stuck in the middle, the bearer of bad news, responsible for creating a technical SEO roadmap. But without clear prioritization, your plan can quickly fall apart and you risk losing support.
Define your goals and set a benchmark
Many SEOs make the big mistake of jumping directly to the technical audit and the fixing part.
- They fail to understand the business’s goals and define SEO KPIs that are aligned with them.
- They also miss setting a benchmark for both the current state and the desired outcome in 6 or 12 months.
Without clear goals and a benchmark, other teams and the leadership might easily deprioritize your SEO efforts. The reasons are simple:
- If your KPIs aren’t tied to business objectives, you miss the chance to translate technical issues into a business language that earns support.
- Without a current-state benchmark, progress becomes difficult to prove, making your work seem like a never-ending task.
- And without a future benchmark, engineering teams may resist prioritizing your requests, unsure of when they’ve done “enough.”
Setting clear goals and benchmarks should always be the first step in your SEO prioritization process. Once these are in place, you can take that huge list of technical fixes from your audit and start assigning them the right priority.
Dig deeper: How to get faster SEO results
Create your prioritization matrix
There are many different approaches to setting a priority for your tasks. Some of the famous ones are:
- Eisenhower matrix: A simple two-by-two grid with “importance” on the X-axis and “urgency” on the Y-axis. This approach categorizes tasks into four priorities, ranging from low urgency/low importance to high urgency/high importance.
- ICE scoring model: This one assigns scores from 1 to 10 for three key factors: impact, confidence and ease. Higher scores indicate higher priority tasks.
- PIF framework: Similar to ICE, but evaluates tasks based on potential, importance and ease, offering a slight variation in prioritization criteria.
- RICE scoring model: This is another, more detailed approach. RICE stands for reach, impact, confidence and effort, providing a more granular analysis of task value.
- Cost-benefit analysis matrix: This one weighs the cost (in terms of time, resources and effort) against the potential benefits, ensuring that the most efficient tasks are prioritized.
The specific method you start with doesn’t matter as much. Ultimately, you’ll likely blend elements from different frameworks, creating a customized approach tailored to your unique needs and circumstances.
In my day-to-day work, I use the following template – created with Google Sheets or Excel – which includes the following columns:
Not a system issue
If the answer is no, brace yourself for a long battle. System issues typically need to be addressed at the product or business leadership level, which means securing prioritization from higher-ups.
Example: One website I worked on used a CMS that served images from a CDN. While this seemed fine, the CDN also delivered other elements the provider’s team didn’t want bots to find. So, they restricted all bots via robots.txt. As a result, search engine bots could see the content but not the images.
Unfortunately, this means either the CMS provider must prioritize fixing this, or we should migrate to another CMS. For me, as an SEO, this can be considered a lost battle.
Can I do it by myself?
Having the ability to fix things on your own is invaluable. Many times, technical SEO tasks aren’t prioritized by other teams, or even if they are, there might not be enough resources to address them on time.
Examples: These tasks might include fixing redirects or broken links, updating meta titles and descriptions or optimizing image alt tags. While some of these can be automated with scripts, it’s sometimes faster to manually address them rather than waiting on an automated solution that may take much longer to implement.
Or you can think of a mixed approach. For example, my team has updated 9,000 alt tags, writing first manually everything in English, translating them with AI and implementing them in bulk with a script.
Is it a site-wide issue?
Fixing one element that resolves multiple issues is a dream scenario. Often, this can serve as a powerful filter to help you prioritize which tasks to tackle first.
Example: This category includes issues like a broken link in the footer, unnecessary heavy JavaScript loading on every page or programmatic meta tag templates that apply to hundreds of pages. Essentially, anything that affects the website or page template level falls here.
Is it on revenue-generating pages or will the fix drive revenue?
Technical SEO fixes don’t always directly and immediately impact revenue, making it harder to connect the fix with a tangible result in the short term.
Example: Consider a broken “Contact Us” or demo page versus a broken blog post. Similarly, optimizing meta tags for product pages typically has a more direct link to revenue than optimizing the meta tags for an ebook page.
The key here is to clearly understand your website’s segments – know which pages drive conversions and which focus on awareness. At least in the beginning, it is always a good practice to consult with Google Search Console, Google Analytics or your company’s analytics tool before deciding on whether a fix has revenue potential.
Will it have a high impact?
This one and the next two are self-explanatory. You will often rely on your best knowledge and gut feeling.
But usually, if you fix a side-wide issue or an issue related to revenue, you can say with greater confidence that the impact will also be high.
Is the effort low?
I usually break this one down by time:
- Anything up to two hours can be considered low effort.
- Between three and five hours is a medium one.
- Everything above will require more effort and resources.
The logic behind this is that we work on a weekly sprint basis, meaning 40 working hours.
In reality, after spending some time in meetings, answering emails or messages, you can consider yourself lucky if you have 25-30 working hours. A 7-hour project is – more than 20% of your time in the week. Usually, these projects are prolonged in a couple of weeks.
The hours should be adjusted based on your situation. If, for example, you are a contractor and have limited time for communication, you can increase the limits.
If the task will require external help from other teams, try to understand the amount of effort they will need to invest and consider.
For example, detecting the issue and collecting all related information may take three hours, but for the engineering team, it could easily mean five working days, especially during the QA phase.
Is it urgent?
I love this one, as it is so tricky to evaluate correctly. People often mix it with impact, but not everything that will have a big impact is urgent.
Example: If you notice a sudden spike in 404 errors, it’s likely an urgent issue. However, if your site has had the same 500 broken pages for months without new developments, urgency might not apply.
Multi-column prioritization matrix: Template
As a result, my multi-column prioritization matrix is structured with drop-down options for each column.
Each drop-down includes three options:
- Yes
- No
- Don’t know (for cases where the answer is unclear or not strictly yes/no).
In all cells with a drop-down, there is also conditional formatting, which, in my case, adjusts the cell color based on the selected value.
This step is needed as, thanks to the cell color, I can automatically count the cells with concrete value. Unfortunately, the “Countif” formula doesn’t work with dropdowns.
To count the cells with concrete color, you will need to use the following script:
function countByColor(range, color) {
var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet();
var range = sheet.getRange(range);
var values = range.getBackgrounds();
var count = 0;
for (var i = 0; i < values.length; i++) {
for (var j = 0; j < values[i].length; j++) {
if (values[i][j] == color) {
count++;
}
}
}
return count;
}Just place it in Extensions > Apps Script. And the newly created formula, =countByColor("A:A", "#ff0000"), where you just need to adjust the color code.
To calculate the priority, I assign one point to every Yes and 0.5 for every Don’t know.
This custom prioritization matrix may initially feel complex, but it becomes second nature with practice. Eventually, you might not even need Google Sheets to manage it.
If you’re working with a smaller site or don’t have the time for a thorough evaluation, focus on these three key areas:
- Site-wide issues you can resolve independently.
- High-impact, low-effort tasks.
- Revenue-related tasks.
But remember, assigning priority to your tasks is just the first step of the process.
Put your project management hat on
Technical issues are often not simple to resolve, and fixing them requires a lot of effort and resources from other teams. However, there are three simple techniques you can use if you want to succeed.
Break down large technical tasks into manageable smaller ones
The first step is to embrace an agile approach by breaking large technical tasks into smaller, manageable pieces.
For instance, if you’re dealing with a rendering issue across multiple website widgets, sending the entire project to the engineering team simultaneously may lead to a lengthy timeline – potentially months – since each widget will require individual attention.
Chances are, this project won’t be prioritized anytime soon because it demands too many resources at once.
Instead, present the project as a whole (especially if the issue is consistent across all widgets), but propose a phased approach.
For example, out of the 10 widgets, start with the highest-priority widget, “X,” allowing the team to address the most critical issue first while easing the overall workload.
Get everyone on board
Let me share a real-life example to illustrate this. Before my maternity leave, I was leading a project to migrate our website from HTTP to HTTPS.
Unfortunately, the project wasn’t completed before I left, and shortly afterward, the entire SEO team exited the company. When I came back from a long maternity leave, the project was still unfinished.
The mistake was that only our team knew all the details and why this was so important. It will hurt our organic rankings and if we stayed on HTTP, users would see the “This website is unsafe” message, negatively impacting our organic traffic and conventions.
The lesson?
Get everyone on board from the start.
Share all relevant information, provide clear examples and link to external resources that explain the issue.
The better informed other teams are, the more support you’ll gain to drive the project forward.
Balance with other SEO tasks
Prioritizing technical SEO gives you a solid foundation, but without direction, it’s pointless – like having an airplane without a pilot. It may be well-built, but it won’t take you anywhere.
Don’t neglect the other critical aspects of SEO to make a real impact.
On-page optimization, competitive analysis, topic research and more must work together.
Your SEO strategy requires attention to all these areas to truly succeed.
Dig deeper: Agile for SEOs: How in-house teams get projects prioritized
Monitor and adapt
Prioritizing technical SEO tasks is just the beginning of your journey.
To maintain and grow your SEO success, you must continuously monitor your efforts and be ready to adapt.
Review your KPIs regularly and evaluate the impact of your technical changes. This will help you identify what’s working and where further adjustments are needed.
SEO is an ongoing process – algorithms change, your company and the competition evolve, and new technical challenges arise. Keep monitoring and adapting because SEO success is not a one-time achievement but a never-ending journey.