So you're at the stage of your SEO strategy formulation when you start to bring it all together. You certainly would have done all your discovery, defined what your priorities are. You would have looked at tooling and talent mapping, now its time plan out and communicate the order that you're going to approach it in.
You've probably got an order of things in our head. Trust me, this will change before you actually get to present it to anyone outside of the team. This is because the organisation you're in, and the challenges it faces will change over the time it has taken you to get this far, and certainly will change some more before it gets present. You could also 'bet your bottom Dollar' it'll change again between you give a 1/4, half year and end of year review. This is what you want to show: that you've got a plan, have you ears close to the ground, fingers on the pulse and are willing to modify your plans to achieve as an optimal an outcome that is reasonable.
First of establish the number of rocks you have, the number and nature of the team members you have and who should be accountable for the delivery of each rock. Pick the right people to see each project though.
Talk through the plans you have for each Rock with them, get their sense of timescales, dependencies and stakeholders. Identify those critical paths. Talk through the kind of issues I covered in the previous post about tech & tooling.
Then you can start bringing the plans together. I recommend depicting them over quarters by rock swim lane. Monthly is too granular and too restrictive - that will come in the more detailed plan per rock.
Highlight the each deliverable for that quarter. For Outreach it may be something like (I'm presenting it in a different way here for ease:) - its not a real one:
FY23 Q1 Deliver Outreach Competitive Analysis
Define Initial Plan to Insource
Present Business Case & Budget Sign-Off
Present & modify plan internally
FY23 Q2
Onboard tech (ex: PitchBox)
Define detailed campaign plan
Team Training
Test campaign (dependency on sign off)
FY23 Q3
Confirm internal integrations
Brand A - Campaign 1 (dependency on sign off & content resource)
Brand B - Campaign 1 (dependency on sign off & content resource)
Reporting, review & iteration (dependency on data & insight resource)
Update SEO strategy
FY23 Q4
Brand A - Campaign 2
Brand B - Campaign 2
Reporting, review & iteration (dependency on data & insight resource)
This is all the information senior leaders will need at this stage. In that first 1/4 you're building on the detail of how the plan will be executed. From your initial discovery you would have established that your link profile requires attention as a result of some initial discovery. You may have found a 'smoking gun' such as you don't have any quality links from relevant sites and you've only had links from dodgy directories or guest posting activities - so its a no-brainer that you need to solve it.
There may actually be a more nuanced problem where you've got a relatively strong profile but you can see that you are weak on certain types of links to your products so you're not getting clicks on your links. Or it may be that you've got trending products that just aren't getting attention in Search so you want to explore how Digital PR could solve this (I'll do a post about insourcing v. outsourcing at some other time). You may also see that a good set of your competitors have links from the same manufacturers that you stock, but they don't link to you.
You would have highlighted these sort of factors in your RAG for each pillar and you would have given an indication of the noteworthy chunks of activity to solve it. But the real power of changing those metrics and outcomes will come from the more detailed pillar strategies.
When you write your department-level SEO strategy you may think you have all the answers and think 'get out of my way, we've got this'. You won't. As you try and deliver on the plan, it'll change noticeably. When you communicate your roadmap be clear that this is how you see it at that stage with all the information you have, but you'll keep always keep the plan current and review it with the leadership as required. When you do that, give a RAG of the current quarter and articulate how much of the previous quarter's plans were delivered, deferred or declined.
To summarise my recommendations:
Depict the plan as swim lanes by quarter
Annotate with dependencies
Prioritise the rocks and enablers
Don't give too much detail - you should say you'll deliver detailed plans by pillar
Be realistic about what can be achieved - tailor it to resource, budget, capability
Show progress against the plan
Be willing to amend your plans
Be focused on what really need to be achieved to deliver the goals set out at the start of the Strategy.