Planning your SEO journey is essential to ensure you don’t get lost along the way. There are so many tasks to do, and so many pieces of advice online as to what you should do “right now” to better your longer-term SEO results that it’s easy to end up getting distracted by things that have little value to the SEO for your website or for your business. Worse still you can suffer from “paralysis by analysis”, due to overthinking all of the variables in your website or SEO journey, and therefore simply end up doing nothing.
Each website SEO agency, digital marketing or SEO company have their own set of rules, techniques or a set plan they stick to for its SEO work, but we found very quickly as the SEO rules change, and for each website or business, one set of rules or tasks simply does not work, and the planning of SEO work has to be a lot more flexible, adaptable and therefore agile planning quickly became the best route to decide which SEO tasks should be done first, as well as being able to adapt to customer, market or search engine algorithm changes at a moments notice.
Why Plan Your SEO?
Planning your SEO journey is crucial for several reasons. Firstly, it allows you to set clear goals and objectives for your online presence, ensuring that your SEO efforts align with your overall business objectives.
- Fail to plan and plan to fail: Without a plan, you risk implementing random tactics that may not deliver the desired results.
- Prioritise: planning helps you identify and prioritise the most relevant keywords and topics to target, ensuring that your content is optimised for maximum visibility in search engine results. It allows you to conduct thorough keyword research, analyse competitor strategies, and identify gaps and opportunities in the market.
- Simplicity: Agile enforces maximising the amount of work NOT done, in other words by prioritising our tasks, there may be some at the bottom of the list that simply have no value to them being done, and so we won’t do them!
- Resource allocation: Having a plan for your SEO enables you to allocate resources effectively, whether it’s time, budget, or personnel, ensuring that you invest in the areas that will yield the highest returns.
- Measure success: planning allows you to track and measure your progress over time, providing valuable insights into the effectiveness of your SEO strategies and allowing you to make data-driven adjustments and improvements. Ultimately, a well-thought-out SEO plan is essential for maximising your online visibility, driving organic traffic, and achieving long-term success in the digital landscape.
What is Agile Planning?
The most common agile project management style is agile backlog prioritisation, also known as Scrum. Often the role of the traditional project manager is replaced by a combination of a Scrum Master and a Product Owner who helps to manage, prioritise and break down large tasks into smaller ones based on the value to the end-user or business.
Agile planning is a dynamic and iterative approach to project management that originated in the software development industry but has since been applied to various domains, including SEO. Unlike traditional long-term planning, agile planning embraces flexibility, collaboration, and adaptability
In an agile project, the product owner focuses more on the deliverables, their value and cost/effort rather than the activities, and the project is more focused on flowing in the direction of the needs of the business rather than following a strict succinct set of rules. This ensures that continuous delivery of high-value items flows from the self-managing team back to the business, often making a development team cost-neutral to a business in this way since the value is achieved very quickly by completing the high-value, less complex or costly tasks first.
The agile style of project management is also good for projects where the priorities and direction of the project can change frequently and lends itself particularly well to software development and equally to SEO for this reason.
Benefits of Agile Planning for SEO
Parts of Agile planning work very well for SEO, and by its very nature, Agile is not a rigid framework, and is very flexible, and it encourages us to take and use the pieces of this form of planning as we see fit. Hence the concept of backlog planning, cutting a mammoth task into smaller more manageable pieces is perfect for SEO planning!
As well as the fact that you have a plan to work from, the benefits of this being an Agile plan quickly speak for themselves, as opposed to a traditional top-down or waterfall plan which is very rigid, and lends itself to failure if a task is missed, overruns, or costs spiral out of control, Agile plans, as the name suggests can remain flexible and welcoming to change as the project progresses. Pieces of work tend to be smaller and more manageable and hence no single one should take too long or cost too much as a result.
Some other key benefits include:
A Consistent Starting Point
Since most SEO projects will have elements of some of the same tasks, the Agile plan can start from a relatively simple template and then can be quickly adapted to the business website for which the SEO is being performed to make the plan unique.
Improved Adaptability
Agile planning allows businesses to quickly respond to algorithm updates, emerging trends, competitor changes and shifting market dynamics. By adapting SEO strategies in real-time, companies can maintain their competitive edge and avoid being penalised by search engines for outdated or irrelevant practices.
Enhanced Collaboration
Agile planning encourages cross-functional collaboration both inside organisations as well as using outsourced freelancers.SEO agencies, or offshore resources. SEO teams can work closely with content creators, web developers, and marketing departments to align efforts, share insights, and drive cohesive strategies. This collaborative approach leads to a more holistic and effective SEO implementation, it also teaches other areas of the team about SEO such that this can be baked into any future work.
Faster Results
Agile planning focuses on delivering value incrementally, ensuring that smaller SEO tasks are completed efficiently. This iterative approach often leads to faster results compared to long-term planning, as businesses can continuously optimize and refine their strategies based on immediate feedback and data.
Iterative Process
Agile encourages continuous improvement and SEO is very much an iterative process, for example, content that was created 6 months ago may need to be revisited to update it, as would other areas of the website, local SEO citations, and other backlinks as the business changes, grows, or other SEO keywords are identified to target.
Example Agile SEO Plan
Below is an example of an Agile plan for SEO, this only has a few tasks just to demonstrate how the combination of Value, Cost and Effort combines to quickly tell us which tasks to prioritise.
If a task will give great value to the business, will take very little time and the cost is low then it’s a no-brainer that this should be at the top of the list. And similarly, if something offers very little value, is expensive and will take a long time then the total value of this would be very low, and it should be towards the bottom of the list of tasks to complete, and in some instances such low-value tasks we would not bother doing at all, to maximise our time allocated to the higher value work.
Feel free to experiment with different values to see the results. For larger plans, we often use Fibonacci sequence numbers to make the differences between the values more distinct, but for this sample, we’ve kept it very simple just to explain the concept.
Obviously, this is a tiny snapshot example Agile SEO plan, a full one can run into tens or even hundreds of tasks over a longer period of time. If you would like to see a full Agile SEO plan for your business website then let’s have a chat and get started working together to increase your website SEO in an agile but methodical way with clear goals and an agreed action plan.
NEED SOME HELP WITH YOUR SEO PLANNING?
Looking to improve the SEO of your company website? Then we can perform an extensive SEO review of your site, showing you all the key areas that need to be worked on, from there we can create an Agile plan to attack the issues from the most critical to the less so, and once the issues are resolved we can work with on an iterative process of tasks to get your website ranking on Google and Bing, and improve the rankings for your business keywords and target audience over time
Wiser IT is an SEO company based in Thrapston UK, we perform SEO tasks and audits for companies across the UK. We specialise in technical SEO, SEO analysis, Agole SEO planning, link building, and helping internal web and marketing teams to understand how to weave SEO into their everyday online marketing to help businesses grow by making their websites found easier on Google and Bing.
If you are looking for an SEO consultant to help your business call Wiser IT today on 07941 783434 or fill in the contact form
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