tl;dr - The first part on this SEO Strategy prioritisation talked about creating your long-list of different challenges to solve. This post looks at how to take that long-list and turn it into your list of "rocks", or as Franklin Covey calls them (and I prefer) "Wildly Important Goals".
In the strategies I've presented I've gone through the process of identifying what the one or two main goals are. This is the manifestation of the problem: "we're not performing well because of XYZ", or "to help support the organisational objectives we need to solve this problem". I then broke down SEO into the 7 pillars (culture, ways of working, data/insight, platform, configurations, content and links) and indicated a RAG status for each - giving the reasons why a pillar has that RAG. I then identified what it would take to improve the RAG to the next level by the year end.
At this stage you may have 10 to 30 different opportunities to improve - which obviously is a number that no team will be able to prioritise against. I explicitly state that resolving all these issues isn't realistic - even with added resource - an SEO leader just cannot give enough attention to do all the leading they need to against so many challenges. The next step, therefore, is to prioritise.
If you're working on just technical SEO, or even any one pillar of SEO then you may be able to get away with just t-shirt sizing your list and then doing nothing else. But, this is more of a near-term process when you're sprint planning. It's not sufficient when you have to prioritise a multitude of high-profile projects that have a wide range of stakeholders and dependencies.
The process I use is to ignore effort. I'm not here to do easy stuff and nor should you. Initially prioritise your list by reward. Look at the big, hairy challenges that will give your business and department the largest goals and then identify how you can break them down, who the stakeholders are and what dependencies you have.
You'll eventually end up with a blend of near-and-long term rocks, but don't be prejudiced from the outset. Understand what can be achieved within the initial time period covered by your strategy and how that plays out over the next two to three years.
Here's an example. If you have the belief that the use, or lack, of content is massively holding Organic performance back. Your rock for this initial period may be "Establish a content strategy which clearly calls out RACI, resource and implements and tested proof of concept". This acknowledges that going from zero to hero with content within the limits of a financial year is unrealistic - but you can state that we want to better know the opportunities, risks and challenges of meeting the needs of customers and search engines with content.
You can clearly state that currently your RAG for content is red. By undertaking this rock then you should be able to move to amber by the end of the year and have the view of moving to green by the end of the following year, but until you do this first stage you never will get to green.
It's perfectly acceptable to state that you don't have all the answers at the moment, but you've engaged with a third party supplier to benchmark your content and based on their assessment your score is X and your peers are Y and Z. If you could move to their position you estimate that it will move the revenue generated from the project somewhere between £5m to £8 due to increased conversion rates, improvements in average rankings of current search terms, ranking for Xk new terms and an increase in AoV.
The next stage would be to look at the dependencies. Who do you need to support you on this? What do you need to make it happen. Not least it could be a new agency partner to write the content, could you make the case for additional resource? Who should own the project? It may be you initially, but the business may need to change to support this project - who would you need to engage with to explore that?
The following stage would be to look at the critical path? Your CMS, for example, may not scale to the level you estimate it would need to. The Product team may say they are blocked out for the next two years on a board-level programme of works and cannot deliver a new CMS. So at this stage the value of this rock may diminish and it may change to "revisit the user journey and assess how content can be improved to aid CvR and Organic performance" - which would be more of an E-A-T tickling exercise.
A simple, quick t-shirting exercise won't give you the fidelity you need.
Go through this process for all of your opportunities: establishing the value, the effort, the dependencies and then look at the final part: ownership.
I'll talk to team make-up later and how having a diverse team is critical to delivering SEO excellence. But on the most simplest level you would need to identify whom in your team will own the rock and what skills you have. For example, resolving link-profile issues may be a candidate rock as you've measured (or been told) that your metrics are poor relative to your peers, but you have no expertise in the team to own the project and it may fall on you as an SEO leader - but you also have 3 other rocks assigned to you. Then it comes down to that relative prioritisation as capacity and critical paths is a vital consideration for SEO prioritisation.
Depending on the size of your team and their levels of experience and capacity, you may have moved from those 10 to 30 opportunities to 3 to 5 rocks - all with owners assigned.
The next stage would be to map out when you're going to approach each rock and the different phases of each rock. I doubt you'll be starting with those 3 to 5 rocks simultaneously but you may phase them in. There are many reasons for this: as a leader some of the rocks may require significant stakeholder engagement before you begin - you will have to clear the way for the team to begin their discovery.
Other rocks may a lengthy legal and procurement process, or HR-type consultations.
Or you may be required to support organisation-level programmes.
Phase in when you, and the team, can give the rock due attention. This isn't a tick-box project. You're here to make business-level change. Give the rock the level of attention needed to turn it from red to amber or amber to green by year-end.
It then comes to presenting your plans. Here I would present that RAG by pillar - stating what it would take to move to the next RAG status and who in the team owns it and then a matrix of which stages of the project you will focus on each quarter and which pillar that activity is aligned to.
When you update the strategy in your quarterly view RAG each stage and give an overall RAG for each quarter for your collective rocks - and what you're going to do to bring it back on track, or if you've simply decided to not continue with the rock as you've now determined that the cost or risk now exceeds the estimated gains. Or that the dependencies have blocked progress and you've got to wait for something to happen first before you proceed.
Summary: This post covers how you take all the potential opportunities to help the business meet its objectives and have prioritised them based on reward, cost, risk, dependencies and capacity. You've understood your critical path and these are the projects you're going to bet on. Later on in the strategy deck you'll call out the support you need to make it happen - in terms of budget, resource, political leverage and influence of the backlogs of other teams.
The aim is to get to a place where you can say "we know that solving all these 30 opportunities will put us in a tremendous place, but there is no way any team could accomplish that - its impossible. We're going to do a great job on these three to five things and we may even drop one or two if we decide that'll give us the greatest return for our efforts and budget. We're fully committed to making great strides forward, but we can only do that if we only focus on the wildly important"
The next post reflects on how the rocks you have chosen sit with other organisational priorities, organisation-wide challenges you'll need to support and that along with all this "big stuff" you've also got your eye on incremental gains.