30-second summary:
- From my experience, every SEO has struggled to get buy-in on a recommendation at some point
- An SEO’s job has changed a lot in a decade. Now, prioritization is mandatory for success
- To have proper prioritization in your roadmap, you need a framework that builds in opportunity analysis, discovery, and measurement
- It can be challenging to win-over stakeholders because there is skepticism against advertisers—and SEOs can have competing interests if we don’t get early buy-in and speak in terms of business KPIs rather than SEO KPIs
- The SEO Strategy Flywheel outlined below is your ticket to unlocking SEO roadmaps that get implemented
In today’s SEO industry, human challenges far exceed technical challenges. Our job as SEOs has evolved dramatically in the last 10 years. To show value a decade ago, SEOs manually audited sites and created a laundry list of SEO action items to fix. Prioritization wasn’t imperative to success because marketing teams were limited, websites were smaller, and SEO didn’t have an obvious home…should SEO live with development, content, creative, or marketing? As we love to say, “it depends.”
In the decade since we’ve learned that SEO does require meaningful prioritization to get buy-in from all stakeholders. Prioritization is now mandatory for two reasons:
- Resources are finite—as SKUs and sites grow, the SEO resources usually don’t
- Tools have replaced the need for manual audits but cannot replace human expertise in prioritizing against business needs and objectives
John Mueller, Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, even says this on Reddit[1]:
As an SEO, a part of your role is to take all of the possible optimizations and figure out which ones are worth spending time on. Any SEO tool will spit out 10s or 100s of “recommendations”,