Last year I wrote how to write an SEO plan and mentioned the SEO Strategy Document without going into very much detail. Shimon Sandler actually shared an example of an SEO Strategy Document in late 2007.

His document is structured as a client campaign proposal, serving multiple purposes. A simpler SEO Strategy Document would serve many people’s interests better, in my opinion. So here is an alternative format that you may find helpful.

1. Needs Assessment
2. Strategy Goals
3. Strategic Resources
4. Strategic Tasks
5. Dependencies
6. Order of Execution
7. Metrics

I disagree with the inclusion of timelines in strategic documents. You use timelines in project management, not in search engine strategies. A good strategist can guestimate — based on historical performance — what lag times may be expected, but you cannot hold a strategy to timelines because the search engines don’t care about your timelines.

Aside:When pressed for timelines I look at what is happening in the search indexes and what I think will happen in the search indexes over the next 3 to 6 weeks. Based on historical trends (and/or other information I have acquired) I estimate how much lag time may be required for results to take place. There are certain times of the year when people just want to shoot me because I won’t commit to 2 week timelines. But I’ve never regretted factoring lag times into my estimates. The bottom line is: You cannot plot search engine strategies against timelines. That just doesn’t work.

Now let’s get down to brass tacks. First, let me state that an SEO strategy should NOT attempt to be comprehensive. It’s a strategy, not a campaign plan. The difference between a campaign plan and a strategy is that the campaign plan DOES have to meet a timeline. You can implement multiple strategies and change strategies in the midst of a campaign but if you try to run two or more campaigns for the same sites you’re just competing against yourself. In the military that’s called a CLUSTERF***. The “cluster” part means some officer who didn’t know what he was doing overrode what the trained/experienced NCOs knew had to be done — in the business world we call this “Executive Fiat” — aka “formula for disaster” and “guaranteed failure”.

You cannot successfully execute an efficient SEO campaign through Executive Fiat, and you tend to burn out people when you draw upon it. That was a hard lesson I learned from both sides in the IT industry, but it applies just as well in the SEO industry.

Needs Assessment – You have to explain what the strategy is addressing. What need is being handled? What problem is being resolved? For example, “The site example.com has lost rankings in 15 keywords and search traffic has declined by 15%. We need to recover that 15% traffic.” BANG! That’s it! That’s your needs assessment. You can expand with details but you cannot add need upon need upon need. If you have multiple needs you need multiple strategies.

Strategy Goals (Objectives) – What will executing the strategy (hopefully) accomplish toward meeting the need? Will it rebuild 5 of the 15 lost rankings? All of them? Will it simply reposition the site to do something else (to offset the lost search traffic)? If you include any dates or time references in this part of your document, you’re doing it wrong. If someone wants a timeline, write it separately from the strategy document. In most cases, people really want to know when the magic will be complete. They could care less about what day and hour you execute any part of the strategy.

Strategic Resources – This can include money if you’re going to pay for resources but it needs to include intangible resources as well. Do you have other Web sites you’re going to incorporate in the strategy? How many man-hours can you commit to the strategy? What tools will you use? What expertise or special elements will be incorporated? It’s best to know up front what tools you intend to work with rather than wait until you get into the thick of the strategy execution to figure out all that stuff.

Strategic Tasks – Here are a few examples of strategic tasks:

• Redesign meta tags
• Write new copy that emphasizes (topic)
• Place links on (specific list of Web sites)

Strategic task lists don’t include specifications for anchor text, link placement, font sizes, keywords, etc. If a task requires that kind of detailed planning, write a detailed plan for the task. This part of your strategy document is just a TASK LIST.

Dependencies – No SEO strategy completely survives contact with the search engines. In the military they say, “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy”. Knowing what your dependencies are helps you build a flexible strategy. What do you do if one of your dependencies fails? This list of dependencies is where you include annotations suggesting plan B options and (if you need that much redundancy) plan C options. Don’t flesh out the plan B and C options — just mention them. Later on you can give them more thought if you need to. Otherwise, don’t waste your time figuring out solutions you don’t need.

Order of Execution – What needs to be done first? What can wait until last? This is as close as you get to actual project management. Again, DO NOT INCLUDE A TIMELINE. If you need a timeline, that is a SEPARATE DOCUMENT. The order of execution has to take into consideration when resources will be available, lag times (such as build-to-crawl, crawl-to-index, index-to-confirmed-value, etc.), communication requirements, etc. Just organize your task list in such a way that you can annotate it with comments like “This needs to be done AFTER such-and-such” or “This should be completed before so-and-so” or “Can be implemented on an ongoing basis”, etc. Think of the Order of Execution section as that part of the strategy that describes the nature of each strategic task and how it relates to other tasks. It is NOT a timeline. You can create a timeline after you have the Order of Execution laid out.

Metrics – How do you measure stages of completion, success, and failure? You should easily be able to list or describe what you’ll do to gauge the strategy’s progress. At some point you may have to conclude that this strategy won’t work (it won’t accomplish the stated goals). The sooner you can figure that out, the better. Ideally, you want to only choose a strategy that has a high probability of working, but no strategy works every time.

And you’re done….

Search engine optimization can be executed as a mechanical process. Spammers do that every day. But real search engine optimization has to look at so many different parts of the picture that you need to break it down into manageable functions and tasks. An SEO strategy is not a campaign plan. You can write a campaign plan but you probably will find yourself diverging from it a hundred different ways.

The simpler the goals, the less competitive the queries, the easier the tasks, the more predictable and mechanical everything becomes. Some people do this stuff off the top of their heads. They have basic routines they fall into and they only change what they are doing when it doesn’t work. That’s a very pragmatic approach to any job. It gets easier with experience.

If you’re not yet in that position then you would probably benefit from writing down your strategies. You can analyze their effectiveness much, much better by holding each strategy accountable for its results. Organizing your thoughts this way will help you learn some of the more advanced aspects of SEO much, much faster than trying to do it all in your head.

Written by Michael Martinez

via [best-seo-blog]