tl;dr: This first of a two-part series on defining what your SEO strategy should focus on looks at the art of discovery. It provides a suggested framework for defining all the different projects that you could consider becoming your rocks. It also talks more about understanding the dependencies of different challenges - more than I typically have seen when others talk prioritisation. Part 2 looks at how you turn your long list into a focused list of wildly important rocks.
One thing I'm massively keen on is taking on board of new ways of doing things - new ways of looking at the world - especially in a business context. It's vitally important that SEOs take the successes of others into our domain. One of the greatest books I've ever read was The Disciplines of Execution by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey and Jim Huling.
It provides a framework to approach the identification of what an organisation's (read SEO department's) objectives should be and how to set yourselves up to win against those objectives.
One problem that I see over and over again when you search for content around how to create "SEO strategies" that typically you're only ever met with vague, almost-meaningless lists of activities. They offer lists of audit items, talk about rich snippets, schema, keyword gaps. What use are these if you don't know where you are and where you need to get to. How can anyone provide an SEO strategy template if they don't know what organisation you're in or what your organisation wants to achieve? They can't.
This was raised by Tom in his SEOMBA on Executive Presence (well work undertaking).
I'll do a post on bringing all four of the 4 Disciplines of Execution together and how it sits within a wider SEO strategy, but here I'll focus on the specific element of prioritisation.
Don't Oversimplify Prioritisation - It's Too Nuanced
There are many blog posts about prioritisation in the SEO-realm. Having worked in Product Management for SEO for a good number of years, I know that approach can get you only so far. And if you're working in complex organisations then you really need to break down problems as far as you can and then build them back up again.
Assuming that you've clearly got your organisational objectives and have the thoroughly comprehensive audits / root & branch assessments of your current benchmark against the competition for your Serviceable Obtainable Market, your list of all possible activates (your kitchen sink) you should then revisit your SWOT that you would have collectively worked on with your team to validate all the "insight" gained from undertaking the audits.
The purpose of this stage is to really get a collective view of prioritisation by understanding the root causes of your issues. Examples would be that most of our issues stem from an over-reliance on brand traffic due to a historic under-investment in Organic. Then you would consider how this is manifested. Would it be that your technical platform is weak, would it be that your don't have sufficient content effectively mapped to the user-journey, is that you don't have sufficient insight as to who your customers are (or has that never gotten to the SEO team), could it be that you're under/incorrectly-resourced from a team point of view, could it be that you've never invested in leveraging in Outreach, is it that the culture of the team is wrong, or ways of working with other departments result in the SEO team focusing too much of their time on fire-fighting than moving forward or is it that they don't have the CMS capabilities to make changes in real-time? Do they not have the data close to the problems to identify what the possibilities are and where they should focus on?
The above should give you a view of how I prioritise. I suggest you should break down the discovery of your SEO strategy in this process. The way I write it is in the inverse order of how I present it, but I can't screenshot our SEO strategy, as obviously that's confidential. But I suggest you look at getting a good view of what's holding you back in this way. But what I do is present this as a pyramid, with the first item as the base and gradually work my way up to the tip of the pyramid - colour-coding and annotating as I go.
Culture
Many will think "why the heck is he starting here?" For me culture underpins everything in a team. You simply cannot perform and meet your objectives, whether they're personal, department or organisational without a good team culture.
The reason for this is fairly nuanced. For starters, you're not going to get your team to ask the right questions if you don't have a fully engaged team. They're not going to talk to each other with the emotional safety to ask "daft" questions if they don't work well as a team.
Another obvious reason is that you want your team to bring their best self to their work. You want them to feel enthused, energised and have the passion for your mission.
The third reason is that you're a human, they're human and humans should just help each other - regardless. But especially if you're their leader.
So you need do your RAG status on culture. Is culture in your team Red, Amber or Green? Benchmark the culture and identify, with your team, how it can be improved, or if you don't actually need to anything extra here. Without a good culture, you won't be able to excel at the next stage.
Ways of Working
Without a solid culture you won't be able to have a way of working that allows you to deliver your objectives. Where as culture was more insular to the team, ways of working leans more externally.
It assess how well the SEO team works with other organisations and 3rd parties.
If the SEO team doesn't integrate well with other teams and move forward on shared objectives then SEO objectives will not be met, or met with excessive amounts of effort and the resulting reduction in morale and effectiveness.
With the right questions being raised within the team you'll be able to ask the right questions of those teams around you. It'll help get your agencies working on the right problems and feel engaged to solve them correctly and quickly.
You'll foster the perception of clarity within the team "that team knows what they want to achieve", "they're willing to work with us on these issues". You'll earn "social capital" for those big projects that no other person in your role could achieve. And you'll then be part of business-changing progress.
You'll also have greater clarity on which 3rd parties, whether they're agencies or tech/tooling providers that will best help you reach your objectives.
Data / Insight
SEOs are drowning in data. But have typically have a lack of meaningful insight that is aligned to the big problems you need to solve.
The reason I put data/insight at this point is that only by having a great culture and effective ways of working with internal teams/agencies/tooling partners can you have a much wider and comprehensive view of the problems to be solved and then will be able to start to focus on your wildly important goals.
Firstly you should conduct your RAG assessment as to how close the data/insight function is the problems to be solved. This distance will allow you to get a measure of a few things: how long will it take from identifying a need for data/insight to actually getting it. It'll also give you a view of how invested those that provide the data/insight are in your problems. If they're in a distant team that has multiple stakeholders all asking for insight yesterday, it probably won't be the most effective way to set yourselves up for success.
I'd often suggest having talented data/insight resource within the SEO team (or at the very least within a digital marketing function) to innovate and deliver the right answers at the right time.
Only if this is in place at a Green status can you hope to excel the next stage.
Platform
This is beyond the bland, magnolia, cut and paste approach to tech SEO audits that are typically shared online. Again, ask yourselves: "how well do our platforms allow us to deliver the right information, in the right way, at the right time, by the right people".
Break down the platform into the outward manifestation to customers and search engines. This is where the typical audit comes into play.
Then break it down into how it works for stakeholders. How can teams manage the content and configuration? Do they have to go off to another team to make the changes they should own? Does it happen instantaneously or do they have to wait a day for the changes to be replicated on the front-end? What safeguards and user-access levels are there?
Effectively, if we need to make a change for customers and search engines; all the stages to this point will identify will our team care, will they know, can they work with others to identify what changes should be made, can they make them?
Without that you cannot hope to excel at the next stage.
Configurations
Assuming you're Green for the previous levels of the pyramid then you should work out, how well those site configurations are against your objectives? Do you have the classic configurations made of title tags, internal linking, variable noindex levels, facet (read tag pages) made. How well are you using the configurations available to you to reach your objectives? There's no good having a fantastic platform if its not being effectively used.
Likewise, if you're seeing configurations you would like, but can't then this need to feed into the RAG status of the platforms element and then feed into the next level of the strategy.
This is where I'm sure it'll be contentious, but hear me out.
Content
Without good culture your content will be of poor quality. If you don't have great ways of working, likewise the content will be poor, it'll be late and look like a pile of whatever. Without the right data and insight about your customers and even keyword research then you'll be providing content-answers to the wrong questions and for the wrong customers. Futhermore, without the right configurations it either won't be seen in seach (noindex, robots etc.) or won't be in the right part of the user journey (internal linking and signposting)
And without content you won't be able to excel at the next stage.
You'll need an effective content audit. You'll need to map how content can really help users at the various stages of their journey and align it to the platform capabilities and a RACI for internal ownership.
Links
Of course you can get a bucket load of links to sites with minimal content. But they won't work as well as sites with content that meets the needs of users and is helpful to them. That's why I put it here.
You're likely to need a link audit to identify your strengths, comparitive resources and what you need to do about it. That would then feed into the Ways of Working (RACI), platform, content and even culture.
RAG this and you're ready for the next stage which is getting to the most important issues ... the Wildly Important. You need to focus throughout the process, what 'rocks' do I need to move. You can see them all clear as day now. But focus on just the ones that can be moved furthest fastest now.
Some will be so huge you need extra help on. That help will be the rock for now. It'll be the wildly important goal until you're mustered all the resource, insight and desire to solve it. But more about that soon.
Now onto part 2 and how we turn that long-list of opportunties into a short list of clearly achievable projects that will help you make great strides forward on your SEO performance.