This Twitter poll from Kevin made me think about how it seems that SEOs typically start within SEO for their strategy and not outside of it.
At the most simplest of levels SEO is just one marketing channel, along with paid search, PR, CRM, Social et al, to deliver business goals. Of course Kevin knows that.
The primary question that should be asked before you fire-up your strategy deck, should be: What is the business trying to achieve? You should begin at the corporate strategy. What is the mission of the business and what are the three to five problems/challenges the collective departments are being asked to pull together and solve?
When you have those, you should explore the depth, breadth and true meaning of the goals. When you have atomised the problems, as an SEO strategist you should be able to identify which you have in your gift to solve.
A classic example would be to better attract more of a certain type of customer to a specific product range. The business may label this as "Win with XYZ audience" - there's no do definitive meaning here. On a superficial level, It's vague almost to the point of being utterly useless, but it does give departments the flexibility and freedom to solve the challenge in a manner that means something to them.
Seeing as a strategy is the communication of where we are against an objective, what "winning means", and how you get there, a leader of an SEO team should be able to research what that audience looks like in their domain (search), how they operate (which keywords they use) and how they use those outputs (searches) to solve their needs (intent). When you have completed that work, then you have your benchmark: "we are here".
This "here" could be a mess given you know where you want to be and what resources you have. But the destination should lead you towards a very clear set of priorities. The most opportunistic of challenges should jump out. You should clearly be able to identify we need to solve problem A and problem B. Problem A is that we have historically underinvested in Organic so the balance of brand to non-brand terms is about-face. Problem B could be that historically, what investment we made, "won" but is now inconsistent with our corporate objectives.
In that paragraph its should be clear: We want to be "here". Because of past SEO plans we are "over there". The next step is to work out what route you need to take.
This is the true essence of an SEO strategy that I will cover in later posts.