SEO Project Management for Successful Processes

#seopm at #theinbounder by @aleyda from @orainti
SEO PROJECT MANAGEMENT  
FOR SUCCESSFUL PROCESSES
(OR HOW TO GET OUT OF THE SEO UPSIDE DOWN)

Successful SEO processes can drive relevant,  
scalable and profitable results over time
#seopm at #theinbounder by @aleyda from @orainti#seopm at #theinbounder by @aleyda from @orainti
SEO processes can be full of delightful surprises

They can drive cost-effective relevant,  
scalable and profitable results over time

You feel cool and your client
or boss thinks that too…

And for really good reasons

But sometimes there might be unexpected  
experiences along the way…

With catastrophic results

It’s like if all of the sudden you’ve entered the upside down

Like this

In many occasions this doesn’t even happen because of  
your SEO analysis or understanding, but execution issues…

Due to lack of resources, flexibility and support

Most of the SEO processes failures are not
even caused by SEO challenges, but  
SEO project management issues

It’s painful and they put
your work at risk

It’s time to look closer at
the causes to understand  
how to avoid them right
from the start and through
the SEO process…

Start by establishing
an SEO qualification
process to only work
on projects where
there’s a real fit, the
critical conditions are
met and agreed from
the beginning

“The developer told
me that the ‘html
was their
responsibility’ and
won’t agree on
doing any changes”
To avoid this…

To avoid this…
“I sent the
recommendations
but there isn’t
budget to develop
content for all of
these category
pages”

To avoid this…
“The client expected
us to get involved in
the outreach for the
content we optimised,
but that’s something
we don’t actually do
and wasn’t included.”

To avoid this…
“We had agreed on
results by this date but
everything was put on
hold until the new
design is released in a
couple of months”

Attract clients and projects requests that are a better fit  
by establishing your specialisation and USP in the industry
Countries + LanguagesSEO Area
Technical SEO, International
SEO, Link Building, Content
Marketing, etc.
English speaking
markets, Latin America,
etc.
SEO Status & Background
ScopeBusiness Size + Type
One-off analysis, on-going,
consulting, Hands-On
implementation, etc.
SMBs, Startups,
Multinational, B2B, B2C,
etc.
Existing SEO knowledge
and experience, past SEO
processes experience

Budget Timing Resources
RestrictionsFlexibility
Set minimum requirements to use as filters in your  
lead qualification process
Minimum
required spent
per project.
Expected schedule to
start the project, to
implement changes,
to see results, etc.
Are there data, technical, content
and promotion resources to
implement potential changes? Are
they internal or external?
Are there any business,
marketing, technical, content
or previously known SEO
related restrictions that might
affect the process?
Is there flexibility in the
existing technical, content and
promotional platforms and
practices to implement
changes?
Goals
Reasonable
goals for the
type of
company and
characteristics

Set reasonable expectations w/ the client and document
conditions in the agreement that should be signed by them
Expectations Team
Coordination AgreementFailure
Set clear expectations of what to
expect and involvement required
through the SEO process stages.
Define the team to be involved from
the client with specific responsibilities
as well as a main contact point who
own the SEO project internally.
Agree on communication,
documentation and
channels to be used to
coordinate and manage the
process.
Specify what will happen
if at some point there’s
a failure to meet any of
the specified conditions.
Include in the contract all what’s
expected to be provided by the
client in order to achieve results
as well as the rest of conditions.

The person signing & approving the project should become  
the internal SEO champion and need to have internal “power”

If these conditions are not met, then is better to say no to  
the project as having success with it will be highly challenging

You can also refer the project to better fitting providers  
or suggest other marketing actions

If you’re in-house you can propose to work along other
marketing areas to fill the gaps to achieve the desired results

If it’s feasible, you can also develop a test or pilot project to  
make a case about requiring different conditions for it

Your SEO projects
will likely have the
required resources
for success now!

Develop your SEO
analysis &
deliverables to be
actionable, solution
oriented and
prioritised based on
the established goals

To avoid this…
“They spent the first 3
months implementing
the less important
changes and we won’t
be able to see results
soon”

To avoid this…
“They implemented
the specified changes
but in the wrong
pages”

v#seopm at #theinbounder by @aleyda from @orainti#seopm at #theinbounder by
@aleyda from @orainti#seopm at #theinbounder by @aleyda from @orainti#seopm at
#theinbounder by @aleyda from @orainti
To avoid this…
“They ended-up
building the links to
pages that are
blocked and non-
indexed”

To avoid this…
“The implementation
has been on hold for
months because it was
not clear they needed
content support for it”

Always start with a complete audit to understand the
business & site status in context vs. competitors
Your Site
Technical Configuration
CRAWLABILITY & INDEXABILITY
Content
RELEVANCE
Links
POPULARITY
Your
Competition
Current Organic Search
Performance
Audience Search
Behavior & Industry
Potential

Take screenshots of every identified issue scenario to
document it, showing how to find and fix it
https://marker.io/

Give also examples of how other sites are already doing it
right, especially competitors ones, as it will incentivise action

Prioritise the different issues and opportunities based on
how critical towards growth and easy to implement they are
Add the new, updated URLs with right name convention
They are meant to be ranked so should be indexable and
differentiated with specifically relevant content
Update links & 301-redirect to only
crawl on the protocol to index & rank
Unblock the new URLs to be crawled & indexed
301s should go to the relevant new URLs &
stop being linked
Start 301-redirecting 4xx errors to
new URL destinations
High
High
Medium
High
MediumLow

Prioritise also those affecting the content and queries w/ the
highest potential growth, profitability and lower competition
Too Granular
Existing Pages
Little Existing
Competition
No Rankings vs.
Competitors

Make sure your SEO recommendations are meaningful, don’t
focus on trivial, low impact, hard to implement changes

As a result, develop solution driven SEO recommendations
showing how to fix every issue, attaching the affected URLs

Create a recommendations summary to introduce the actions,
that will be also used as a reference to coordinate them
WHAT WHY WHERE WHO WHEN
Recommendations Importance Status Area Priority Resource Person Date
Start canonicalizing and index color
facets
High Low
Listings & product
pages
1 Development TBD TBD
Deduplicate & Optimize Titles High Medium Blog category pages 2 Content TBD TBD
Add more content to listings w/ less
than 5 products by featuring related
ones
Medium Medium
2nd level sub-
categories
3
Development &
Content
TBD TBD

Organise & format the SEO recommendations document  
to make it easy to navigate, refer & share

Check out my #KoozaiTV video where I share a step-by-step
to develop actionable SEO recommendations
bit.ly/actionableseo

Use them to give SEO trainings to the relevant teams -that
you can record to reuse- and create “SEO best practices”

Your SEO
recommendations
will be easier to
implement now!

Follow a project
communication,
execution and
validation workflow
that fit with the
business operations
& project’s
characteristics and
goals

To avoid this…
“I was never told that
this change was going to
be launched last week
and that’s why it wasn’t
validated”

To avoid this…
“We’re still waiting
for the approval but
nobody answers and
we don’t know if the
message was
received”

To avoid this…
“They say they weren’t
informed about the risks
and that’s why they did it
anyway”

Present the SEO recommendations to the stakeholders,
including the “SEO champion”, highlighting the critical areas

Assess the recommendations w/ the stakeholders, agreeing
on their execution while aligning w/ the existing workflow
facets
High Low
Listings & product
pages
1 Development Maria 1/9/2016
Deduplicate & Optimize Titles High Medium Blog category pages 2 Content Matt 2/9/2016
ones
Medium Medium
2nd level sub-
categories
3
Development &
Content
Matt &
Maria
3/9/2016

facets
High Low
Listings & product
pages
1 Development Maria 1/9/2016
ones
Medium Medium
2nd level sub-
categories
2
Development &
Content
Matt &
Maria
2/9/2016
Deduplicate & Optimize Titles High Medium Blog category pages 3 Content Matt 3/9/2016
Reprioritise the activities if needed based on their  
confirmed viability and schedule vs. the expected impact

Enable a test environment and allocate time and resources to
validate implementations before and after they are released
PRE-RELEASE
VALIDATION: OK?IMPLEMENTATION
YES
NO
YES
MOVE TO
NEXT ONERELEASE
NO
FIX
POST-RELEASE
VALIDATION:
OK?

#seopm at #theinbounder by @aleyda from @orainti#seopm at #theinbounder by @aleyda from @orainti#seopm at #theinbounder by @aleyda from @orainti
Although aligning w/ existing workflow and development
method, set for frequent SEO releases to see results sooner
https://zapier.com/learn/project-management/project-management-systems/

Agree on the relevant & reasonable SEO KPIs and overall
goals once the SEO roadmap is established, not before
GOALS
X % Conversions Growth in N Months w/ Y% Increase every M Months
KPIS
ConversionsTrafficRankings
IndexabilityCrawlability
X % Traffic Growth in N Months w/ Y% Increase every M Months
X % Ranking Share Growth in N Months w/ Y% Increase every M Months
Links

Give also different potential results scenarios in case the
most fundamental recommendations are not followed
seomonitor.com

The different teams involved in the SEO execution should
also make them part of their own goals to get their support

Agreed on the Project Management tools and channels to be
used to coordinate & report the activities, KPIs & goals

It’s critical to choose one that fits w/ the development  
model & workflow, that is used by the team involved

Which might not only be just one, but a combination of them

#seopm at #theinbounder by @aleyda from @orainti#seopm at #theinbounder by @aleyda from @oraintihttp://zapier.com/
Most of the popular project management tools now  
also offer third-party integration via APIs via Zapier

Including SEO tools like Deepcrawl, allowing us to send the
data to project management tools or get notifications
https://t.co/9MXbtcGu3z

If it’s viable to choose, specify which are your desired project
management functionalities and to be addressed needs
Tasks Management
Team Collaboration
FUNCTIONAL NON-FUNCTIONAL
Usability
Security
Performance
Availability
Accessibility
Cost
Multi-Device
Messaging System
Dashboard
Reports
Alerts
Calendar integration
Time Tracking
… …
Reliability

Use this project management tools cheat sheet to select  
those that fulfil your requirements, to test them
http://bit.ly/2ESpxDP

Once selected, be consistent and share all the updates,
deliverables and communicate w/ the team through them

Set weekly/bi-weekly update calls to clarify doubts soon 
and update the team about any issues and process status

Remember you depend on them to make things happen,  
so be empathic and friendly when giving any input

Your project
communication,
execution and
validation workflow
will likely be more
efficient now!

Establish a
monitoring &
reporting system that
allows you to track &
inform about the
process progress,
implementation
status and goals
results, as well as to
make decisions

To avoid this…
“We have no idea what
caused that  
negative rankings and
traffic impact”

To avoid this…
“The test environment
was open for a few
weeks and got indexed
and ranked”

To avoid this…
“They now have
allocated 90% of digital
marketing budget to
PPC despite SEO being
the one that drives 90%
of conversions”

Start tracking each of the established KPIs before starting  
the SEO related releases, and set for frequent updates
ConversionsTrafficRankings
IndexabilityCrawlability Links
Google Search Console
Deepcrawl/Botify/Ryte/Sistrix
CognitiveSEO/Majestic/Ahrefs/Sistrix
Google Analytics
SEOMonitor
SEOMonitor/AWR/Accuranker

Use a monitoring system that facilitates the correlation
between your actions, rankings, traffic & conversion results
seomonitor.com
RANKINGS SEARCH VOLUME CONVERSIONSVISITS ENGAGEMENT

Create a dashboard to use for day-to-day monitoring,  
aggregating the top KPIs, to share w/ the team for updates
cognitiveseo

Set alerts to be informed of any technical, content or link
related changes that will influence the site SEO status
littlewarden.com + cognitiveseo + seomonitor

As well as notifications when there are drastic rankings  
and organic traffic or conversion changes

Avoid missing them by configuring zaps to send  
them as messages and archive them in your PM system

Share monthly reports during “formal” follow-ups w/
execution, KPIs & Goals status and proposed next steps
Recommendations Importance Status Area Priority Resource Person Status Launch Date Comments
Details in
Basecamp
Start canonicalizing and
index color facets
High Low
Listings &
product
pages
1 Development Maria In Progress 2/5/2018
basecamp.com
/url/here/
Add more content to listings
w/ less than 5 products by
featuring related ones
Medium Medium
2nd level
sub-
categories
2
Development &
Content
Matt & Maria Launched 2/2/2018
basecamp.com
/url/here/
Deduplicate & Optimize
Titles
High Medium
Blog
category
pages
3 Content Matt Pending TBD
Unsolved
platform bug
basecamp.com
/url/here/
SEO Implementation Status
Results vs. Expected Goals Next Actions to Improve Results
KPIS STATUS
1. Overall traffic and conversion growth have increased more than
projected, however the results come from non-priority and lower
competition products categories, still that will hit ceiling soon, for
which further optimisation actions are in process for top ones.
2. Obtain platform vendor support in order to implement pending task No.
3 of high priority towards growth
3. ….

Remember that SEO is iterative/incremental, if you identify
that something is not working, be flexible to pivot

Your monitoring &
reporting system will
effectively inform
about the process
progress as well as
easily allow to make
decisions now!

It’s time to get rid of that demogorgon

With the help of #SEOPM
1. Better Project Qualification
Process that guarantees
support
2. Easy to follow, actionable SEO
Recommendations
3. Efficient communication,
execution & validation workflow
4. Effective monitoring system to
follow progress & make
decisions

And get out from the upside down

Find all the #SEOPM resources here
aleydasolis.com/en/seo-project-management/

Let’s go!

SEO Project Management for Successful Processes

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SEO Project Management for Successful Processes