SEO factor prioritization: +75% revenue and organic users

One of the main differences between a professional SEO consultant and an amateur or a beginner is none other than the ability to know how to prioritize a task list (backlog). We need to achieve the highest impact on the project objectives at the lowest cost. To do this, we need to focus on those that can generate the greatest impact short term.

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What is knowing how to prioritize in SEO?

For me it is nothing more than knowing how to manage and plan in the short, medium and long term a series of tasks to achieve the success of a business. We must not confuse the most urgent, with the most important or what has to be done at a specific date, with what can wait.

When to prioritize? Whenever we do not have unlimited resources, that is to say always. Also, this is a clear reason to start understanding why to prioritize tasks in SEO.

Where do we learn to prioritize tasks?

For me, this task has become key for 100% of the projects in which I participate or start. But … where do we learn this?

The SEO Pyramid

I saw this concept some time ago on Moz’s blog (I think I remember that it was presented by Rand Fishkin) and it details the hierarchy of SEO needs. They currently show an adaptation of the initial pyramid. These are the two of them.

We can clearly see how they organize priorities:

1. Tracking: the first thing we should take into account is those tasks that guarantee the accessibility of tracking our content. We need search engines to be able to access them without problems. If we do not have this properly implemented it is difficult for the following to be of high importance.
2. The content must be complete enough and respond to the search intention of our users.
3. Keyword optimization: All of our content must be correctly optimized for the keywords we have analyzed that are appropriate for that user response.
4. The user experience is fundamental nowadays. We need fast websites, easy to use in any device that pleases our users.
5. Links: If we can also get our content shared and generate quotes and links, so much better.
6. Optimization of titles and meta descriptions to improve the CTR of our URLs.
7. Semantic markup to highlight much more in the SERPs

This is the proposal they make but I assure you that many times I don’t follow it, except for the accessibility problems, which are basic. The rest, I assure you, can be prioritized in different ways depending on the actual state of the project, its competence, the team and the resources the client has…

The professional experience

The years of specialization dedicated with passion to the same profession and the luck of having started and participated in projects in practically all sectors helps me a lot to understand each new project. I have learned a lot by analyzing the implementation of all kinds of tasks, which has allowed me to reach clear conclusions about the future impact that their implementation may have.

If you work in an agency, on your own project or as a direct consultant to a client, you will have often felt that there comes a time when it seems that you have tried everything and do not know what to do. That’s when the analysis of a third party with a fresh look at a business will allow you to detect and solve problems, that, without that experience would be impossible to find.

That’s why on many occasions I collaborate with other professionals sharing the value of their experience in their projects and mine, or they hire me directly to provide that vision and help them to prioritize when they cannot see the woods for the trees.

Ongoing training

Those who know me know this well. Approximately 10-15% of the company’s entire turnover is directly reserved for investment in SEO training that I consider interesting. And if something else comes up, I don’t skimp and it’s usually worth it. Good training brings great things. One of the most important things is the experience of the professionals who provide it. One of the most fruitful things I do is the direct contact with the professional. Pure value. This is, for example, the type of training that I personally do the most for both SEO professionals and corporate marketing teams.

In addition, we must be up to date with everything the community shares. Although there is a lot of irrelevant information, very interesting things are published such as studies, experiments, etc. that I believe provide points of view and results worth analyzing.

Over the years, I have come to largely equate my effort to train myself and the training of others, as one of my greatest passions.

Experience and training together allow you to develop a kind of “intuition” as well as the ability to make decisions with less risk. You need a certain subjective part because even if two projects seem to be the same, believe me the probability is high that applying the same thing will not work or look the same.

My intention with this article is, at least, to provide some basic guidelines to try to make good SEO decisions.

Factors that determine the priority of a task

They are generally the following:

• the impact we can expect from the implementation of such task
• the complexity of carrying it out
• the complexity of a client’s structure and its bureaucracy
• the formation of the development team and its capabilities
• the human and economic resources allocated by the client for the project
• the importance of the area that proposes the solution of the task within the general organization chart
• the benefits generated by the area that the task proposes
• the motivation of the team
• the size of the problem the task solves
• the purpose of performing the task (helps to achieve my goals, helps clients…)
• the distance to the imposed completion date, if any
• the time available

In short: we may have something extremely critical and it may not be done in weeks or even months for  thousands of reasons. Are we worse SEOs for this reason? I don’t think so.

SEO impact factors: critical tasks, high, medium and low

When we have a list of tasks to perform, the first thing is to weigh and classify them. The first order of classification I make is according to their priority.

It makes more sense to take this classification into account if there is a technical delay. Each task must be given priority, as follows:

• Critical (4) – when an issue needs to be fixed as soon as possible, to ensure continued SEO performance. If a problem is left, a decrease in SEO performance is expected. For example, a noindex tag on the home page or in sections not intended for it, security flaws…
• High (3) – when a task is not 100% urgent for normal SEO performance, but will have a positive effect when implemented For example, solving problems of duplicate content in a section of a site.
• Medium (2) – when an issue is not critical or high. Resolving these issues is likely to bring some benefit to overall performance, but may be difficult to implement, or not bring as much benefit.
• Low (1) – Overall positive impact, but no immediate effect on site SEO performance. For example, updating the alternative text of the image, or resolving internal redirects to non-redirected referral URLs.

Weighing them numerically will then help us sort the tasks by taking all factors into account.

Based on the experience and the state of the project we mark what type of impact will be had if each task is completed.

Not all the teams that we work with will have the knowledge to know and understand the priority of the tasks. For this reason, we always add a column, a document or a specific explanation URL in all recommendation documents. For ease of understanding and control we move the tasks in their order of priority.

Sometimes, we even try to accompany our recommendations with sources for calculating impacts. An example could be using Google’s service https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/feature/testmysite/

Where we can see concrete data to support our recommendations.

Ease of implementation and cost factors

After prioritizing, we re-prioritize each of the tasks into 3 factors: SEO impact, ease of change (technical or temporary) and cost to the company.

Ease of change

We identify how easy it is to complete a task taking into account both the technical part (complexity, training of the developers, etc) and the time the developers estimate they will have it ready based on their priorities external to us and the time/cost of implementing it.

What usually improves the technical performance will be classified as high and what does not have much effect will be classified as low.

• Access problems for bots: anything that prevents bots from properly accessing your site will be marked as critical.
• Various on page optimizations: tasks that help technically clean up the site but don’t provide much impact should be marked as medium or low, depending on the problem and how widespread it is throughout the site.

Examples

“185 duplicate meta title” and “185 URLS without meta descriptions”

Both tasks are quite simple and should be easy to complete.

We would have these as a medium priority task, as the impact is not likely to be as high unless the entire domain has 185 URLs and those 185 accounted for a high percentage of the project’s total URLs.

“Improve the speed of loading the home, doing the following implementations”

Here we may or may not enter the first step of the SEO pyramid that we saw at the beginning of the article. If the page was so slow that it prevented the correct crawling and rendering of the page, the task should be marked as critical. If the page was reasonably fast and no huge traffic or sales losses were observed due to this factor, the speed of the page would probably be a medium or even low priority.

“243 errors 4XX”

In most cases the correction of resources which are not found, for me take a high priority. Sometimes, it can be medium if the remaining high priorities are serious.

How to prioritize tasks in actual projects?

For example, when we perform a SEO audit, we find lots of tasks that after trying to prioritize we see that they have the same priority. This happens. We must analyze each one of them well, determine the main objectives, classify to plan and look for maximum efficiency. Yeah, but what about this… how is it done? Generally I do the following:

• Tasks whose scheduled implementation date has expired should be given higher priority.
• The most important tasks that could be potentially harmful if left behind should be addressed first.
• Less important tasks should be postponed.
• Based on the priority factors and the evolution of the project we can add or subtract points on them.

If after doing this, there is still one in the same position, I consider them indistinct and only my “intuition” places them in order.

Eisenhower Matrix

Another simple way to perform task prioritization is through the Eisenhower matrix, which comes from Dwight D. Eisenhower (general and US president).

The Pareto principle states that 80% of the results can be achieved with 20% of the total effort. We use the Eisenhower matrix to try to prioritize tasks based on their importance and urgency.

Quick wins: these are tasks that require little effort and help us achieve the goal.

Majors Projects: big tasks that will help us get closer to the goal but require a significant effort. They are second on the priority scale.

Fills Ins: small tasks that do not cost much but contribute little to the objective. However, sometimes implementing many of these tasks could add up to some interesting objective.

Thanksless Tasks: tasks that require a lot of time and contribute little to the objective. They are not at all attractive, not worth your time.

SEO Priority Matrix

In both SEO and CRO work we constantly make decisions about the tasks to be performed. This is an example of the SEO prioritization matrix

Tasks that provide a strong impact for a small amount of work. They should be directly marked as critical. For this reason, we always add 4 more points in this case. These are what the Eisenhower matrix calls Quick Wins.

Traffic Increase: We can provide an estimated traffic increase: “high” or “low”. We will know how to estimate it simply by having previous experience or large data sets that based on statistical models allow us to estimate future traffic with what we know as “SEO forecast”. Sometimes traffic is more important for a project and sometimes less (as in the project in the photo).

Would you like to know something I haven’t talked about or do you want me to go deeper into some other aspect?

SEO Prioritization Success Story

Few actions, big impacts.

At the end of January 2020 I received an email from the marketing manager of an Ecommerce that had so far achieved very good results historically but had remained “stagnant”. I was hired only and exclusively for a few hours of SEO collaboration to consult doubts of the marketing team. After only 5 hours of collaboration, they decided to trust me and immediately extended the hours for the current month and the following months by 6 hours to perform an advanced SEO audit (business, competition, content, keyword universe, link building and advanced WPO audit).

Auditing a site in depth gives clients a vision and perspective of the project that they have never had before and we are able to know the business in depth, detect problems, solve them and understand the project so that we can really help achieve the results we want. There is little point in auditing over the top with lots of tools and staying there. No, that should be just one part of a process that goes a lot further. And another thing, the technical audit is just one part of an advanced SEO audit.

Before showing data, make it clear that it has nothing to do with any of the sectors on the rise in the social era in which we live.

Where we came from

We extend a little bit to see how qualified traffic makes the revenue go up at the same time. It doesn’t always have to be that way, but the increase does have to happen in both aspects.

Improvement of positions of the main profitable keywords (both in Adwords and in organic)

Main actions prioritized

Improved internal linking

We detected a major problem in the way the internal pagerank of the page was redistributed to the most interesting URLs at the business level.

We created a parallel project to make the appropriate analysis and changes after a thorough analysis of the site.

We crossed all that information with both the revenue and the traffic of the URLs, so that the proposal for change was based on real data.

WPO actions, improved loading speed

Here I had many improvement options, from the most basic like the weight of the images. I analyzed the performance and resource consumption of each type of URL on the site. We analyzed all the loading metrics of the site to see the possible degree of optimization.

Would you like to know something I haven’t talked about or do you want me to go deeper into any other aspect?