Every campaign is always a bit different depending on the partner, but here’s a broad overview of how we generally approach new projects so that you can understand the process and timeline better:
month 1
1) Information Intake
We have a couple of forms we ask new partners to complete to provide background information, history, and context around things like audience, ideal customers, competitors, roadmaps, assets, and business goals.
2) Competitive Research
We research your market, your direct competitors (product/service competitors), and indirect competitors (folks you may not consider a like for like product competitor, but who compete against you in search engines). We take a look at who is trending up, down, and flat, and look to understand why. We’ll look at sites like G2 and Capterra to understand reviews and capabilities as well.
3) Content Asset Cataloguing
We complete an intake of all the content you have which is relevant on the website to help inform our content mapping process. Do you have 100 blogs? 25 landing pages? An endless help or resource center? Or not much at all? It’s important that we understand what we’re working with and if there’s overlap or gaps.
4) Keyword & Topical Research
For keyword and topical research we rely on several tools and approaches to collect and group ideas for content that will be relevant, resonate with your audience, lead to conversions, and boost your overall SEO visibility. From competition, keyword research tools, natural user journey mapping activities, and performing searches… we try and ensure this is a comprehensive process.
5) Content Mapping
We map as many content topics into each stage of the user journey as we can within reason (this process can be expanded if a partner wishes, generally we aim for ~100 topics). The three stages we focus on are Awareness (top of funnel), Research/Consideration (mid funnel) and Purchase (bottom of funnel). This leads into the second phase of the project.
month 2
6) Assessment of Links
We explore the quantity and quality of links you’re getting currently, as well as take a broad look at your competition’s backlink profiles as well to ensure this pillar of SEO is appropriately taken into account when crafting your SEO strategy.
7) Assessment of Technical SEO
To complete the assessment, the third pillar of SEO, technical, is assessed with page performance metrics measured and benchmarked – as well as internal linking assessments and general structure/SEO best practices covered. If a site needs more time and attention on this aspect it will be given, or at a minimum understood for further exploration.
8) Project Roadmap
The project outline begins to wrap up with a project roadmap. This roadmap is built taking all three pillars of SEO into account (content, links, technical) and understanding what’s working and not working within your market. Your outcome is a strategically and thoughtfully crafted program customized for you and your market — not a one-size fits all “throw the kitchen sink at it” approach. We’ll assess your strengths and weaknesses and give an estimated resource allocation to each pillar of SEO.
9) Partner Review & Feedback
We don’t want to work in a vacuum so as the project is moving along and certainly as it’s getting close to coming together we like to sync up with our partners (you) and ensure things are on the right track. In most cases there’s very minimal adjustment through the process, but sometimes your plans have changed, or new information comes to light which we can bake in.
month 3
10) Projected ROI & Timeline
We’ll run calculations based on potential traffic gains, and your conversions rates to help calculate ROI and we’ll bake in projected timelines for planning purposes & budgeting. As we conclude the project strategy and roadmap this is massively helpful in determining what to invest in, and whether there are tradeoffs to be made. This aspect of the project can also be taken as a one-off project over a 30 day period as well.
11) Projects Mapped & Prioritized
The final stage of the project is actually mapping project ideas and timelines to a roadmap, assessing resource needs, timing, dependencies, and stakeholders for each project.
12) Delivery & Review
We’ll schedule time to walk through everything in a PowerPoint presentation via Zoom so that the path forward is clear and questions are answered. The focus is on the project plan and RO — the data leading up to that point will be available upon request or as an addendum in the end of the slides. Generally, we break things up into a couple of options for you to pursue.
So, What Comes Next?
After the presentation, we can get right to work on the plan to begin executing — or you can take time to digest and assess your options.
These programs with this timeline are generally 9-12+ month programs. There are options to condense this or specifically focus it on one aspect of SEO if you already know what your needs are.