How to Build an SEO Roadmap That Drives Performance

An SEO roadmap is where high-level objectives trickle down to project-level prioritization. Complete with all the context, tactics, and timelines to bring your strategy to life.

Because having a solid SEO strategy is great. But without a plan to put things into action, it’s just a vision board.

Below, I’ll break down why an SEO roadmap is such an important tool and how it can benefit your business at large. Then, I’ll walk through how to build, prioritize, and plot your own roadmap.

What Is an SEO Roadmap?

An SEO roadmap is the place to plan, schedule, and prioritize the work your SEO strategy requires. More than a simple to-do list, it’s a detailed picture painted with tactics, tasks, and timelines.

Your SEO roadmap illustrates how your team will balance and work on key SEO opportunities. It might look something like this:

Why Every Domain Needs an SEO Roadmap

Every business has unique priorities. And an SEO roadmap helps you stick to them by:

Connecting SEO work to broader business goals
Empowering informed, cross-functional collaboration
Streamlining SEO in the best way to maximize ROI

An SEO roadmap benefits stakeholders across teams by making it clear why each item matters. In addition to showing how the team will complete each task.

For team and business leaders, it shows the rationale behind decisions. At the same time, it streamlines communication and execution for contributors.

Basically, any team member with a vested interest in (or connection to) SEO should have access to your roadmap.

Linking the Marketing and Engineering Teams

One big thing to call out is that it’s generally the main documentation informing collaboration between the Marketing and Product & Engineering teams.

It helps translate SEO work into the larger development roadmap by making it easy to understand the level of effort (LOE), value, and ideal timelines associated with each task.

SEO Strategy vs. SEO Roadmap

There’s no roadmap without a solid SEO strategy. Nor does strategy come to fruition without a roadmap.

Here’s how the two are related:

SEO strategy: Sets the core objectives and their value at a high level (the what and the why) along with timelines, budget, and resources
SEO roadmap: Adds the how and the when, linking them to action items, urgency, and prioritization

A primary goal of your roadmap is to determine which work will make the most progress toward your objectives and prioritizing them accordingly. Taking the nuances of the business into account.

How to Build an SEO Roadmap

Building your SEO roadmap is a matter of:

Including all of the work
Adding the right level of project-specific context
Using a digestible format for different stakeholders on the team

Here’s how to start:

What to Include in Your SEO Roadmap

Larger, more meaningful SEO tasks will always take priority. But they don’t operate in a vacuum. Your SEO roadmap is a methodology for managing the many moving parts together, so everyone can see how each piece fits into the whole.

That means ALL of the initiatives go in before anything else happens.

Example SEO Initiatives for Your Roadmap

The list below is non-exhaustive, but it can serve as a helpful jumping-off point that covers most bases.

What Details Should You Include?

Whether your roadmap lives in a spreadsheet or you build it on a project management platform, giving the right level of context is key. Start with these fields/columns:

Action item: What is the work the team needs to execute?
Opportunity: What will this drive for the business in terms of KPIs?
Priority: How urgent is this opportunity? (High, Med, Low)
Level of effort (LOE): In terms of team resources, what’s required to get there?
Goal alignment: Which of the primary business goals does this tie to?
Status: How much progress has there been so far?
SEO impact: Will the impact on website performance be high, medium, or low?
Target timeline: Bearing in mind other work and priorities, when should the work begin?

How to Organize Your Roadmap

The best way to organize your SEO roadmap is to organize it in multiple different ways.

What do I mean by that?

Your SEO roadmap is a tool to communicate with different levels and areas of the business. And creating different ways of looking at the roadmap gives different stakeholders the views they need.

Here are a few of the most common:

List

This is the view in which you’ll probably build your roadmap. It’s the classic spreadsheet view that displays all the key information on one screen.

Stakeholder use case: Helpful for SEOs, product managers, and team leaders translating SEO work into development and/or marketing roadmaps.

Kanban

The Kanban view is a helpful view organized by the progress of work, making it easy to see what’s moving and what’s coming up. It’s typically more simplified than the default list view in terms of the information you display.

Stakeholder use case: Looking at work this way lets SEOs, product managers, devs, and anyone responsible for a given task to quickly and easily monitor its progress.

Timeline

This view is a calendar with all of the initiatives plotted next to one another. The level of detail on this can vary. But like the Kanban view, it puts a focus on the when aspect.

Stakeholder use case: Useful for SEOs, product managers, and business leaders who want to see how work aligns with company goals and timelines.

How to Prioritize Your SEO Roadmap

At this point, you’ve created an SEO to-do list, which is only so useful. The prioritization, timelines, and rationale make up the secret sauce that drives progress.

Here’s how to master this critical step:

Assess the Value AND Cost of the Work

Plenty of ideas could have a meaningful impact. But only so many are viable given your business goals, realities, and resources.

Generally, you’ll assess the viability of initiatives when creating your business case for each. Then the candidates make their way into your roadmap, which weighs value versus level of effort through a scoring method often called weighted-value delivery.

You can use any numerical scale (like 1-5 or the Fibonacci sequence). The important thing is that you score all of the following individually:

What’s the level of effort (LOE) in terms of work from the team?
How much will this impact SEO KPIs like rankings, clicks, and conversions?
What does the business risk by not doing the work? What opportunities are you giving up or creating for competitors?
How urgent is it to address the work given factors like competition, current performance, and business objectives?

You can use these individual scores to create a calculation that gives each initiative an overall score.

This makes it possible to compare work quickly, apples to apples. The calculation will typically divide a task’s impact, risk, and importance by the level of effort required. Like this:

Start With the Quick, Easy Wins

A best practice for prioritization is to look for instances of high impact with low LOE. These are your “quick wins.” Knocking out the quick wins builds buy-in and garners resources for other, more resource-intensive work with high impact.

For example, adjusting a single HTML template could potentially boost the performance of thousands of pages relatively quickly.

While updating the meta descriptions across 5K pages will likely take time for not a huge amount of SEO value.

An easy way to visualize this is to use a prioritization matrix. Matching up a task’s potential value with the level of effort required.

Like this:

This can help your team avoid spending time on low-value tasks that soak up resources.

Or, alternatively, map task value/importance against urgency:

This can work well if getting things done as soon as possible is the focus. Such as if your roadmap is only in place for the next 3-6 months.

Make Mountains Into Molehills

It would be nice if every SEO initiative were an easy win, wouldn’t it?

But the reality is that impactful SEO work often has a high LOE and many moving parts.

These tasks often receive the most pushback from stakeholders. Making it tough to get approval early on. The best way to mitigate the risk of deprioritization is to break things up into smaller, more approachable chunks of work.

That might mean focusing on a selection of URLs where the business stands to learn the most or see the largest impact (while mitigating risk).

For example, if you know the site needs on-page copy updates for a majority of its services pages, you could start with a five-URL test.

This will likely be easier to get stakeholders to sign off. And you can iterate and roll it out further once you start seeing results.

Keep Your Competition in Mind

What’s happening on your site isn’t the only context that informs what you need to work on. The competitive landscape helps illustrate the relative value of the proposed work in your roadmap.

Could something give you an edge over competitors? Could another project help close a crucial competitive gap?

These questions are important when assessing and communicating the risk of not pursuing a project.

Some of the key areas to gauge across competitors include:

Backlinks and referring domains
Keyword rankings and gaps
Content quality and differentiation
User experience and information architecture
E-E-A-T signals
Site performance and functionality
Schema markup

Understanding where your competitors are outperforming you can help you prioritize tasks accordingly.

Plot Your Timeline

Your roadmap should segment your timeline into shorter phases that simplify managing resources and progress.

For a roadmap charting the year, those phases are likely quarters. If you’re going for a 6-month road map, it’ll probably make sense to segment things on a monthly basis.

Once you’ve sorted a broad timeline, you need to:

Identify when resources are available for the work and plot accordingly
Schedule projects in order of weighted-value delivery
Include a good mix of work in each phase, where possible, to balance resources and support for the company’s goals
Don’t forget space for new opportunities and always-on SEO work (like content updates and technical optimization)

Execute and Evolve Your Own SEO Roadmap

As with everything in the world of SEO, your roadmap is going to continuously evolve.

As you execute your SEO roadmap, new opportunities will emerge, things will change, and competitors will pitch you curveballs. The need to shuffle tasks and introduce new work is inevitable.

Your roadmap is the place to make sense and order out of the flux so that there’s at least one constant: progress towards your business’s goals.

Still not quite sure what to include in your roadmap?

Check out this SEO checklist to pinpoint which areas of your business’s website you should focus on.

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