How to Explain Your SEO Strategy to Your Boss

Jessica Bowman of  SEOinhouse.com, formerly Search Engine Land, presents her foolproof model for communicating SEO objectives and priorities. This plan bridges the gap between what you are doing with SEO and what management thinks you are doing, so that when the question “What happened?” is asked, you can:

1. Have a plan in place to provide a concrete answer
2. Show where the gaps are in SEO efforts
3. Explain why they are there in the first place

Along the way to compiling the foolproof model, you’ll discover if you are completing all 10 pillars of SEO, and if not, you’ll learn how to complete all of them and improve your rankings.

Really looking forward to this — gap analysis to answer the question “Why aren’t we where we should be?” with @jessicabowman #smx #12a2

— Doug R. Thomas, Esq. (@ferkungamaboobo) June 2, 2015

The 10 Pillars of SEO

Jessica shared the 10 pillars of search engine optimization that she has determined are essential. If you approach each one efficiently and completely, she believes you will be successful in your SEO efforts. These steps should be presented to management, along with what is outlined in the rest of this post.

SEO Tactics and Strategies

• Crawl Indexing
• Content
• Internal Links
• External Links and Mentions
• Social Activity
• User Experience

SEO Operations

• SEO Team
• Non-SEO Teams
• Processes
• Metrics

Jessica didn’t go into a lot of detail when it came to each SEO pillar. If you aren’t sure what the pillar is referencing, I’d recommend evaluating each based on your existing knowledge and complete additional industry research.

SEO Audit & Strategy Gap Analysis

First, perform an SEO audit to determine a benchmark of existing SEO and show management what you are doing and why. Within this audit, you should indicate which SEO pillars are already being implemented, need to be improved or not being done at all. From there, prioritize each pillar and road map the value of each to your business. This will show management the company’s current status, why previous SEO strategies are likely not working, and, at the very least, what needs to be done moving forward.

SEO Strategy Scorecard

Go through each pillar and determine what should be done for each. List out each to-do item and then forecast how you think rankings will change based on what should be implemented. This gives management and your team a clear idea of what needs to be done and shows that you have a plan in place to make improvements.

• Example for Indexing & Crawling Pillar: Loads within 1.5 seconds on desktop and 1 second on mobile
• Bonus Tip from Jessica: Searchmetrics has a page forecasting tool that could help you forecast

Put all three of these points together to present to management. In addition to this foolproof way to explain your SEO objectives and priorities, you’ll have a plan outlined for the best way to actually move forward with your SEO objectives.

Many companies have issues formally documenting their SEO process #12A2 #smx

— Jake McCormick (@Jake_BrewHoop) June 2, 2015

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