How to document your SEO strategy
Have you ever felt like your brilliant SEO ideas are trapped in your head, struggling to gain traction with your team or clients?
You aren’t alone.
Many SEO professionals overlook a crucial step that could make or break their success: documenting their strategy.
This isn’t just about jotting down a to-do list or setting vague goals.
A well-documented SEO strategy is your roadmap to success, aligning your efforts with business objectives and getting stakeholders on board.
Let’s explore why it is worthwhile to write down your strategy, what elements to include and how to communicate your plan effectively to different audiences.
What is an SEO strategy?
This might seem obvious, but give me a moment to clarify it with you. I’ve made these mistakes myself, and I think it will help to restate the (not necessarily) obvious.
An SEO strategy is not:
- A list of activities to be carried out.
- A pipeline of work with timelines.
- A list of vague goals with no measures.
It should:
- Be a focused, achievable set of goals that are directly relevant to the overarching objectives of the wider business.
- Give context to the business’s challenges and opportunities in the organic market.
- Consider what will be done to maximize those selected opportunities and limit the risks.
An SEO strategy should:
- Identify the company’s current position.
- Detail what needs to be done and when to help support the business’s goals.
- Consider what will be used to measure the strategy’s success.
Why document your SEO strategy
Sometimes, it can feel like taking the time to write out the SEO strategy developing in your head is a bit of a waste of time.
Perhaps you’re the only SEO at your company. Maybe you work for an agency, and your client just wants to know the results, not what you’re doing.
It will be worth it regardless of the time it may take to lay out your thoughts.
Take the definition of an SEO strategy I’ve given above. That’s a lot to keep in your head. It’s a lot to try to communicate to stakeholders on demand.
The document becomes a central reference point that any stakeholder can refer to to remind themselves of the strategy’s key activities and reasoning.
To get buy-in
To begin with, having a fully documented SEO strategy will help get buy-in from key stakeholders.
Your leadership team or your client may fully trust you to get the right work done. But most of us aren’t working in isolation. Due to that, we need to get other teams, managers and stakeholders on board.
Documenting your SEO strategy takes it from a concept in your head to a business plan that can be easily communicated and referred back to.
Dig deeper: How communication issues prevent you from getting buy-in for SEO
To set expectations
SEO is hard to guarantee. We have all faced the uncertainty of an algorithm update or a competitor making an unexpected move.
Yet, to get buy-in for our plan, we have to show some guaranteed return on investment.
Documenting your SEO strategy allows you to set out the goals of your work, what you are expecting to achieve through them, and when.
SEO seems like a mystery to people outside of the industry, yet if we expect them to invest in it, they need to know what to expect.
Setting out your SEO strategy will help to reassure them of the activity that will be carried out and what will be achieved through it.
This will likely not guarantee “X number 1 rankings” or “X% increase in organic traffic.” It will likely be a realistic assessment of what your proposed activity will achieve.
With this information, stakeholders will know exactly what to expect. There will be no awkward conversations at the end of the year where they are disappointed because they thought you would deliver the impossible.
It is a document you can keep referring to as the agreed course of action. Once the stakeholders have agreed to it, you will have a common reference point for what, when and why SEO activity will be carried out.
Dig deeper: What stakeholders should expect from SEO
To communicate requirements
Documenting an SEO strategy will enable you to set out in advance the resources, input and support you may need throughout its duration.
If you will need access to tools or subscriptions, you can detail it in the strategy. This ensures everyone understands the business investment needed for the strategy.
Setting out your SEO strategy will also help you work with stakeholders to determine what is realistically achievable, given your current team. It can be tempting to plan for far more than is possible.
An SEO working in isolation or on a limited budget or time for a client will not be able to achieve as much as a full team dedicated to one website only.
Your SEO strategy will also help to communicate the input required from other teams and stakeholders.
Setting this out in advance and getting agreement from those involved can save a lot of time and energy down the line.
If your engineering team leader agrees to carry out the output of the upcoming SEO audit, then you won’t have to fight for that resource when needed.
Where should you document it?
If you’re taking all this time to write up your strategy, you don’t want to keep it hidden in a folder on your desktop.
Anyone in the company should be able to see it. SEO impacts many teams, so the more people understand it, the better they can support your strategy.
If you are working as a consultant or at an agency, I suggest you make your document available to your internal team as well as the client.
If you’re unexpectedly away, a colleague can easily continue your work. Giving your clients access helps them understand what to expect and when.
Consider your audience
When writing out your strategy, consider who will be reading it. Different stakeholders will want different information from it.
The leadership
The company’s leadership, those that will give the final sign-off to your strategy, will want to know overarching goals, timelines and measures.
They may not be as interested in how you will be achieving your strategy, but why.
This audience is likely time-starved and will want to be able to quickly identify what you suggest, your reasoning for it and the expected results.
Dig deeper: How to make better SEO reports for the C-suite
The implementers
Your SEO colleagues, teams like developers, content writers and product managers, are essentially the people who will be working with you to carry out your strategy.
These stakeholders will want to understand the why but, more importantly, the what and how.
They will want to see what projects they may be involved in and when. This will help them to plan the rest of their work around your requirements.
The curious
As previously mentioned, communicating your strategy beyond direct stakeholders is a good way to get buy-in for SEO in general.
Education is a large part of making SEO successful in a business. Making your strategy available can help people understand the reach and impact SEO can have.
Don’t forget this audience when you are documenting your strategy.
This audience may have little understanding of SEO terminology or reasoning. Make sure you explain concepts and acronyms.
At the end of the day, especially for those working in agencies, you never know who might pick up this document and read it – your client’s manager, CEO or CFO.
Expertly documenting your strategy could be the difference between getting more budget or a canceled contract.
How to communicate your strategy
The key to documenting your SEO strategy in a way that makes it easily digested and understood is considering the above audiences.
When writing it, you will likely want to prioritize your leadership and implementation teams to ensure you get the support you need.
Throughout your document, ask yourself, “What are the key takeaways I want my leadership stakeholders to get?”
Make sure these are clearly included near the beginning of your documentation.
For the implementation audience, consider, “If I were to give this to my colleague, would they know enough about the strategy to run it for me?”
Keeping those two questions in mind means you should convey enough strategic insight upfront for your leadership while going into specifics for your implementers.
What to include
You may have a standard style for documenting strategies in your company or agency. If so, hopefully, there will be examples from other teams you can use.
However, if not, or if you want to make sure you are covering everything that is necessary, here’s a guide to what to include.
Context
Ideally, it should be detailed near the beginning of the document, so make sure you include the context of the strategy. That is, what is happening in this business’s market?
You may want to include details about types of competitors, products and services. Perhaps an overview of market forces like politics, technology or suppliers would be beneficial – essentially, any forces that might affect the company’s SEO success.
There are several well-known marketing frameworks you can adapt to help you analyze your market and business context. Look at PESTLE, SWOT and the Ansoff Matrix for some easy-to-follow ones.
Essentially, it should communicate the key opportunities and challenges faced by the business in a way that organic visitors may find and relate to.
Objectives
At some point in your strategy document, you will need to state what you are hoping to achieve through SEO. To prevent your objectives from being so vague as to be meaningless, consider using a format like “SMART.”
Make sure your objectives are clear and specific, so everyone can easily see if the strategy was successful at the end.
Tactics
How you implement your SEO strategy is key to documenting it. The detail and format will depend on your business practices.
For example, consider providing a general guide on how you will approach each of the objectives you have stated. Note the types of activities and what they will do to help achieve the goals.
Describe the work in far more detail, perhaps in the form of specific activities with their completion dates and teams assigned to them.
The key here is going into enough detail that whoever is reading the document gets a clear understanding of what activity the SEO team needs to complete, without overcomplicating this strategic-level document.
Remember your leadership stakeholder audience – they need to be able to get the “gist” of the strategy quickly.
The task-level detail is probably too much for this document and is better detailed within your project management platform or processes.
Measurements
Communicating how the success of your SEO strategy will be measured is critical for setting expectations.
If you have managed to design your objectives to be “SMART” then there will be an easy way to measure them. That is, your objective should have an obvious point of “passed” or “failed.”
For example:
- “We aim to increase organic traffic to the blog section of the website by 20% over the next six months.”
The measure of this objective is organic traffic, the “pass” mark will be a 20% increase in that traffic.
To show an increase, you will need to know the starting point. Include that within your strategy so that anyone following along with your work can see how close to target you are.
For example:
- “Increase organic traffic to the blog section of the website by 20%, from 10,000 organic visits per month to 12,000 visits per month over the next six months.”
It can also help to specify what data set you are measuring against. For instance, you may suggest measuring traffic using a specific report you have created in Google Analytics or a reporting tool.
The idea is to align everyone against the same set of data, using the same filters and segments, to ensure that results are clear.
Resources
Make sure you include the resources, teams and tools you may need. You are documenting your SEO strategy so there is a single plan that everyone agrees to and can be referenced.
Including your resource requirements and what you need from other teams means you have stated what your predicted results are contingent on.
If you do not get the tools or people that have been agreed upon, then there is a good case to be had as to why those results could not be achieved.
The art of SEO strategy documentation
Documenting your SEO strategy is crucial for aligning stakeholders and clarifying your approach. While it may seem like extra work, it supports buy-in, resource planning and effective communication, providing a clear reference throughout your strategy’s duration.