Prioritization is one of the hardest parts of everyone’s day. In the marketing world, you spend a large part of your day prioritizing keywords, tactics, outreach, metrics, clients and meetings. It’s exhausting just to get through your eight hours, and you can’t help but wonder how some people are actually successful with SEO. There are people who bring in plenty of links and traffic, and don’t get slowed down by algorithm updates.
It’s important to find a rhythm that works for you, your business and your schedule, but there are simple steps you can take to prioritize your SEO efforts and ease some burden from your work life.
Define Your Business Goals
First thing is first: define your business goals. It’s a common mistake for marketers to focus on SEO goals, and they end up paying too much attention to things like keywords with the highest search volume. Instead, think about what you want to accomplish and put your attention there, such as on a best selling product or service. Each goal should be specific and able to be measured and reported on. Here’s an example.
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Bad Goal: Increase ranking and organic traffic for ‘rain boots.’
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Good Goal: See a 20 percent increase in sales for ‘women’s red rain boots.’
Audit Your Site
When you have your business goals in place, think about what you’re doing to make them happen. Have you done optimization already? What areas need improvement? What are your competitors doing? Moz has a great read on doing an audit on your site. Some of the questions to ask yourself are:
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How much time will the change take?
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What kind of impact will the change have on SEO?
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When will you see that impact?
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Who will be implementing the change?
Don’t be afraid to do an audit on your site. It can seem difficult at first, but prioritization will naturally happen through the process.
Implement Changes Slowly
What makes SEO difficult at times is that you can prioritize all you want, but you don’t know if your effort will be worth it. The search engines are always changing, and no one’s really sure what they pay attention to. So, instead of making big changes, make small changes over time. If something doesn’t work, it will be easier to diagnose the problem, determine what went wrong and test again.
