You know, when it comes to taking ownership of one’s SEO, the typical approach is to create a strategy to work from.
This is one approach. It’s an approach that works well, sometimes.
Sometimes, however, tackling your SEO, top-down, is not ideal.
Indeed, sometimes, creating an SEO strategy is simply the act of creating a lengthy piece of documentation that ends up gathering digital dust.
Allow me to explain.
Receiving a 50, 60, 70 page strategy document makes for an interesting read.
Will you have gotten your money’s worth with the documentation – sure.
Will it have you better informed about your SEO – most likely.
But will you be able to implement the strategy within 3 months…?
Ah, this is where it gets tricky, isn’t it? The implementation of the strategy documentation.
What usually happens with an SEO strategy document is, well, plainly and simply, it gets shelved.
It’s interesting. The documentation itself is highly-valued.
There is such a need for an SEO strategy document but once received, the follow-through tends not to be committed on.
It’s almost as though business leaders expect SEO to happen once a documentation is produced.
This is far from the case, and might shed some light as to why your SEO is taking a long time to work – if you have this regard of SEO.
Strategy is great. Without the drive, without the commitment to follow-through on the strategy, you really don’t have much of a chance in the SERPs.
Unless you’re able to act on the SEO strategy, receiving a lengthy documentation is useless to you.
How soon should you be able to act on your strategy?
Within 3 months but ideally within a month. Here’s why…
Timeliness is important in SEO. Your strategy may be time-dependent.
Even if it isn’t, the benefit you’ll receive upon implementing your strategy means your strategy is time-dependent.
What do I mean by this…?
SEO is a game of who wins in the SERPs.
Sometimes, a lot of the time, who wins in the SERPs comes down to who’s able to implement their strategy the quickest.
If you have your strategy gathering digital dust over months, and your closest competitors implement theirs right away, they will see their search visibility increase, whilst your remain flat, or perhaps…something worse.
I’ll tell you something you won’t normally hear from an SEO.
Marketing with the SEO channel, means implementing changes on your site.
The value of SEO is not in the length of your strategy document, it’s not in how pretty the document is, it’s in your ability to make changes on your website.
It’s in your ability to op-ti-mise your website.
This is what SEO is, isn’t it?
It’s making improvements. Whether big or small, SEO is making improvements.
If SEO is making improvements, no matter how small the increments, why do you think you need a 60, 70, 80 page document to tell you the improvements you need to make?
Why do you place so much value on a strategy document and very little on the commitment to implement the strategy?
The value of SEO in your ability to make changes on your website. And here’s the thing –
Sometimes, in order to make changes on your website, you need to commit to making changes, improvements, on your infrastructure.
It amazes me that in 2022, there are still some brands with CMSs that are unable to auto-generate an XML sitemap.
It’s something so basic, so fundamental, yet there are businesses that have to rely on a manual update of their XMLs every so often.
An infrastructural need as such doesn’t lead to a very streamlined approach to your website optimisation.
An issue like this leads to a more pressing need that distracts you from driving your SEO strategy forward.
You know what else distracts you from your strategy? Firefighting.
SEO firefighting.
How do you expect your SEOs to drive the channel’s strategy forward when they’re maxed out addressing issues that could be detrimental to your organic traffic?
If your SEOs are too busy firefighting, are they able to make progress with a strategy?
Heck, when they’re firefighting, the strategy isn’t the task at hand, the task at hand is simple and evident: prevent shit from going wrong.
That’s it! That’s the only thing that matters.
By the time the emergency is over, how much valuable would your strategy be at that point…?
It would be kind of outdated, wouldn’t it?
What most brands would do at this point is update the strategy.
They’d spend another couple of days or even weeks working on the SEO strategy, only to face the same blockages as before – if not uncover new ones.
This constant value on documentation isn’t improving your search visibility. It’s stalling it. It’s weakening it. It’s damn-right worsening it.
You see, this is why business leaders complain that SEO takes too long to work.
It’s not that it takes too long to work but rather it takes too long to commit to making improvements.
It takes too long before optimisation on the site, and for the site, begins.
It takes too long because the value in SEO is placed on strategy documents, of which, cannot be implemented for months, quarters and years.
You wanna know a better approach? An approach that’ll have you working directly on improvements for your website?
Work on SEO projects. Pick 1-3 of the most impactful improvements you need to make on your website, for your website, that’ll see your search visibility increase.
This will have you aligned with the agenda to implement changes, as opposed to being aligned with the agenda of continuous document creation.