How to manage SEO projects? A complete step-by step guide

SEO Project Management indulges juggling more moving parts. At certain times, this job is made all the more difficult, since this is being performed on all the tasks over different clients at varying complexity levels and stages.

The more clients, the more people are involved in it. Things may become disorganized very rapidly. This is why you go for a precise and solid framework that is systemized.

Any SEO project may involve several stages such as

• On-Page Site audit
• Ongoing Outreach for link-building
• Keyword research
• Existing Content Optimization
• Backlink analysis
• Competitor analysis
• Technical SEO essentials
• Content creation
• PR outreach/Blogger
• Fixing On-page issues like
• broken links, site speed, and so on.

These are all the regular or traditional methods. But the problem is, that it happens with no proper objectives, communication, or results, and almost all the things are scattered in different places and the data is completely fragmented.

A good SEO project management framework facilitates easier scaling and maintenance, ensuring higher precision even when handling multiple clients.

The approach I have explained here is robust enough for your SEO journey, to organize all your stuff even though you induct new members or interchange members, or are stuck with a deadline. This approach must bring out successful outcomes without a large burden or need for upskilling.

Let’s be ready to break out of the traditional approach to learn how to manage SEO projects.

How to manage SEO projects with new methodologies

Although the traditional method can support you in streamlining and managing your work, you still need to commence with a well-defined and solid framework for onboarding, executing, and maintaining your brand..!

Everybody wishes to rank their site higher in search engine results, however, securing this coveted spot not only demands strategy and skills but also the system that prioritizes and oversees SEO.

That’s where the new generation framework arrives into play…!

Much like many works, having a defined and structured approach makes juggling all the aspects easier. Strategies for SEO mean that you shall:

• Prioritize efficiently
• Work more efficiently
• Communicate better
• Deliver more successful outcomes.

You wish to bring more structure and outcomes, and you are aware that the right framework would help a lot. However, now you’re wondering how you can determine the ways to manage it, and find the suitable framework that’s best for you…?

This is the perfect place to land.

In the following blog, I’ve pulled together some aspects of a new approach you should have a look at while assessing the effective ways to manage all your SEO projects.

The features and demands in management approach, the importance of choosing the prominent scrum approach, and how far it benefits your SEO and your entire team as well.

The competition to win Google Heart is fierce.

More and more firms were investing in search engine optimization. And there is also a good reason to do this. Different research states that in 93% of cases, people commence their online experiences with search engines only.

If the companies manage to please this search engine Google, they boost their online presence and maximize their profits.

If you’re searching for supporting tips to maintain and adopt a successful campaign, most probably your very first question will be “How do I manage all my SEO projects so that I can beat all my competitors more conveniently and easily?”

The answer is straightforward. You should incorporate the best framework into your campaign execution in managing your work. By doing so, you complete your flow faster and achieve the best results with high efficiency and precision.

This new framework is divided into the following roots.

1. To Evolve in OKR(Objective Key Results) flow
2. Defining tasks for each objective
3. Grouping the tasks into Objectives
4. Executing as a sprint
5. Regular Quick Update Meetings
6. Organizing Retrospective or Feedback Systems
7. Concluding Sprint success or failure
8. Repeating the Process.

Step 1: Defining OKRs/Objectives

Any project must have objectives or goals and the SEO must work towards the objectives of the vision.

These same objects must be mapped with the outcomes. So there must be a single place wherein you could manage all the data altogether to ensure what has been worked out and what has been not worked out.

A new method OKR stands for “Objectives and Key results”. This is defined as a framework to set out the goals that virtually everyone could employ or use – SEO analysts, digital marketers, content marketers .. you could even use it in your personal life.

To have a better understanding of this OKR, you ought to understand the major components

Objectives: An Objective is denoted as a goal. It’s best to make the goals as clearly defined. Some people utilize the SMART framework to make sure that the goals are measurable, relevant, attainable, specific, and time-bound.

Key Results: Key results are the metrics that track the work progress against your objectives. They must directly measure if your objective has been met.

Setting OKR without laying out the tasks to attain the key results makes your SEO more challenging to organize your day-to-day operations.

Similarly, if you set the list without defining the guiding objectives, you shall ultimately determine yourself wandering in the wrong direction.

Projects are temporary campaigns that you could break into a series of particular tasks. It must fit your long-term objectives and thrive as part of achieving the key results.

Generally, managing these works deals more with the daily management of resources and time allocation while the OKR was utilized to set out the large strategies and measure the performance.

For example,

Sales OKRs

Objective: Meet the monthly company sales goals by the march end.

Key Results

• Utilize SEO to attract 50,000 more users or visitors to your site.
• Improvise social media traffic by 50 percent.
• Use online ads to generate 5000 clicks.

Splitting into objectives

Once you’ve decided on all your details, it’s essential to split up your projects into clearly defined objectives with the key results.

This may benefit you to move on to easy task completion and concentrate on the enhancement areas. Key results are the outcomes and targets used in measuring the success of your quality objectives.

The better key results offer indisputable evidence that you and your peers have turned progress on a particular initiative.

To create qualitative, strong key results for your objectives, ask yourself the below questions so that you can gain the highest-quality key results for your quarter.

A precise checklist to write quality key results for your OKRs

• Are the Key Results aligned properly?
• Are your Key Results Measurable in terms of traffic, search volume, impressions, ranking, and so on?
• Do the Key Results reflect the same as your day-to-day work?
• Is there pairing data between Key Results?
• Are the Key results controllable?
• Is there any accountability system for the Key Results?

While you choose the quality objectives, it’s significant to stay aligned always and be in sync with the departmental and company priorities.

This also applies while selecting the key results. If all your key results were not aligned with the objectives, – then it would confuse your team about which and what to concentrate on. This also impacts the priorities. It would also lessen the chances of achieving your objectives.

Example:

• Site Audit & Site Architecture Fixes
• Domain Authority Improvements
• Improving content for ranked keywords
• Finding new keyword opportunities
• Planning more content
• Keep on optimizing content
• Continuous link building
• Social Media Engagement..etc

Step 2: Planning tasks for each objective

The task must be crafted for each objective. Commence in creating this in line with your objectives. Once you decide on a specific plan for it, it is crucial to determine the specific tasks and delegate them to suitable resources. Determine it and assign ownership.

This is the most essential step in managing your SEO team efficiently, ensuring accountability, tracking the work performance, and then completing on perfect time.

To delegate it efficiently, first of all, break it down into smaller chunks. Then assign to the individual members, setting realistic deadlines.

Assign ownership based on the strengths and expertise of every member and make sure everyone understands the responsibilities and roles.

Utilize the perfect framework to keep track and its progress at every stage.

Those methods can enable you to assign works based on past data, ensuring it has been lined up on track and all works were completed on time.

Differentiate the tasks so that the outcomes can be tracked efficiently.

Alignment of Objectives

The Tasks must be created based on the objectives. OKR and Scrum could work together by aligning the high-level organization objectives with the sprint goals in Scrum.

The Scrum team could utilize OKRs to set ambitious and clear objectives for each and every sprint. After this, define the precise key results for measuring the progress of each sprint to achieve the objectives.

Step 3: Grouping tasks and creating sprint

List out all the partition works required to meet your objectives. It must align with your aims. Create a sprint after all the tasks have been grouped successfully.

To keep your sprints more focused, you would typically select one, or two objectives and set out SMART goals. This could be tricky, as you’ll often find yourself with more than the single business goal you wish to accomplish.

A better SEO would help you to determine and prioritize which objectives were helping the most impactful.

First of all, let’s say it has the below goal

“We want to increase the monthly site users/visitors”

It’s not an uncommon directive, this is for sure.

The SEO would need the Site audit, first of all, that is standard.
Once they have finished, you’ll likely have a report showing the issues that range from on-page, to technical and more.

But how do you prioritize fixing all those issues? Where do you start as a professional?

That is where the sprints arrive. Below are certain objectives that can be transformed into sprints, offering you a defined pathway to achieve your desired outcomes.

Enhance On-Page SEO: Optimization of essential On-page elements.

Your audit report determined 200 pages that have broken links, missing H1s, duplicate H1s, and missing descriptions.

A wise Sprint will be for working and possibly the developer to acquire the issues rectified in the first 15 days sprint, before moving to create new content.

So to strengthen your blog post before it is moved to publishing, follow the easy steps in the first sprint itself. This may enhance your outcomes.

Resolve Technical Conflicts: Enhance the website.

There might be technical problems in your website, which ought to be addressed to maximize the site performance in the first sprint.

For example, you may have a site page having large content that ranks for many optimized keywords. But also, the keyword rankings were sub-par.

Your crew decided to raise the page load speed and then do code optimization for search engines. Might even add on some schema markup language.

You can identify the number of web pages and scope that would receive this treatment to turn out into a SMART objective in your Sprint.

This can range from on-page optimization to backlink-building actions.

Backlinks Generation: Links to your website from different authoritative publishers determine this. You’ve identified that your website content is excellent and then generated the backlink on its own.

However, with a few more well-researched backlinks from various authoritative websites, you were pretty sure that you could yield in the top three positions.

Within this single sprint, you may test different link-building strategies such as broken link outreach, guest blogging, and Email outreach etc.,

To turn out this SMART goal, you could work to pick the count of links with X domain Authority Score. With such an objective to have them, linking the web page to your page within 90 days eases this.

Creation of content: Publish new authoritative content to your site.

Your audit might pick out some on-page issues in the first sprint here and there. But as a whole, you’ve got a great foundation for building it on. What you might determine is that your website lacks authoritative content in comparison to the other competitors. In this case, you’ve followed this step to overcome this.

As a result, the sprint for the next 15 days might be “publish three expert-level blogs for over 1500 words on Y topic”.

Or you can publish a single “definitive guide” webpage covering multiple parts of an issue.

There are also other ways to set out this sprint objective in alignment with your task. This may accomplish a goal like maximizing the monthly website traffic.

If you have top-notch development assistance, you must collaborate heavily with them. Acquire their support making an impact on the rankings.

Or, if your content outcomes are entirely full of rock stars, determine a way to leverage the creativity to craft content that sets you apart from competitors. Play to their strengths.

Sprint planning

After the decision on the objectives and framing the key results, start the sprint process.

Moreover, before commencing the sprint process, you must have a planning meeting for the smaller chunks (sprints) to define the scope and the expected deliverables of every sprint.

The Sprint planning stage indulges in specifying the time that a single sprint must take and then distributes individual works that must be completed.

While planning the sprint, it’s more important to assume different factors that might influence the effectiveness, quality, and pace of workflow.

To name a few, a Scrum master or a manager must consider the strengths and weaknesses of certain members, their past experience developing similar kinds of products, the present specifics, and so on.

Hence assigning work to the perfect resource in every sprint must be decided in the sprint planning, based on the criteria and experience of them.

Those elements of Scrum could be highly combined with OKRs. You may wish to turn it around, begin with OKRs, and map your Scrum implementation to them.

Step 4: Executing with sprint creation and prioritizing works

Once the tasks are ordered or sorted by date and priority, the priority works can be efficiently moved to sprint. Then these were coordinated with the work group in real time.

There are two ways to move your projects between the backlog and sprint, say it can either be dragged directly or “move to board” functionality. This is done by clicking on the three dots to the right of priority as illustrated below.

If you utilize Sprint methodology or do not use this, this functionality would allow you to make clear and remain focussed which are the priority that deserve your entire attention.

Invite the team members while in allocation

Based on the expertise, allocate the members for each sprint, and inside each define and align with the objectives.

Set the deadlines

Short deadlines could enhance the progress monitoring of each sprint effectively and make outcomes tracking easier. Set the deadline as short as possible but with quality work(for instance with a minimum of a week or a maximum of two weeks for each sprint)

Step 5: Follow-Ups and daily meetings

Finally, you could incorporate OKR with your sprints 1:1 and the meetings and performance reviews.

This will build a culture of development and continuous feedback from all that boosts the firm’s productivity and drives growth.

In this way, you can set your company up for long-term growth, success, and sustainable positive outcomes.

Daily Scrum meetings stand out as an integral part of any agile SEO method in sprint.

With this help, the team will travel in constant torch, report the achieved outcomes, do activities planning, assist each other, and share the latest changes in your work, which can moreover solve all the issues..

Such meetings shouldn’t take a long time.

This shouldn’t distract more attention from your SEO workflow.

It eases to remain in a single environment and direct in a common direction.

The Daily meetings were conducted by a scrum master, and responsible for motivation, support, and overall management. Also, this specialist offers timely reports about the progress of your sprint to the client.

In collaborative SEO, it’s important to regularly collaborate and share progress updates. Make sure to keep everyone informed after each sprint completion and take timely actions to ensure smooth workflow in your SEO projects.

Usually, I recommend weekly check-ins to make sure everyone is on the same page.

You can perform this by updating every person at your meetings or for the corporate objectives.

You could also employ OKR methodology to offer visibility to all the stakeholders.

Periodic check-ins and accountability also aid in making the necessary corrections if you travel far off from your current goal or heading in the wrong direction.

By making sure that your key results are high quality, for a beautiful success in the upcoming quarter and can measure the objective’s progress with more focus and clarity.

Creating quality OKRs is the foremost step to achieving your ambitious goals and commencing a new quarter strong with more clarity, alignment, and full-fledged focus.

Communicate every week.

Seamless internal communication thrives as a key to your SEO project management. Be cooperative and open. Your team members must have open channels to pose questions, request any information, and then share feedback.

You’re never guaranteed from unexpected problems.

You could, therefore set up a ten-minute daily meeting to consolidate all your progress to improve if needed.

You can discuss your status and ensure everyone is on track.

Good communication is the better approach to understanding all your stakeholders wants.

If you’re performing for your client, you must have the work processed to check it out, fix the issues in every sprint, or revise something at the request of the client.

It’s helpful to ask what their own communication preferences are. The more specific the communication process, the smoother it will run.

Step 6: Effective reporting

Ensure the reports of your data at every OKR sprint are collected on every task.

Map the data along with objectives efficiently. Keep collecting the reports for every sprint such as partition of backlink monitoring, onsite optimization, off-page SEO, and so on. Map all the data report to your objectives.

Measure the results and report the outcomes

Does your strategy work off? To answer this query, you ought to gather information that’s valuable, easier to understand, and accurate.

Some of the things you must have an eye are tracking indexed pages, checking conversions, ranking assessment on SERP, monitoring organic traffic, and reviewing ROI

The report data of each sprint will pinpoint the improvement areas. Once you’ve assessed the right workflow and SEO project management plan performance, you’ll be capable of making adjustments to improve your processes and results.

In this way, it’s not alone in discovering what are the things that went wrong, some things could perform better than what is expected!

That’s also something you must take into account and you can explore new things further in your sprints.

Experts with years of experience in SEO agencies using the best SEO Agency Software have found that thorough reporting at each phase not only ensures accountability but also encourages rewarding and recognizing achievements as and when they occur.

Step 7: Gather constant feedback

Even after you complete, you’re not done, SEO simply never stops. It is evolving, thus urging you to refine constantly and revise all your strategies.

To make matters worse, Google will be constantly busy launching new changes and updating new tactics to rank your content.

Business owners and Marketers have no other choice however they need to adapt.

To stay on top of those revisions, ensure to have the latest information on the fundamentals of technical updates, content creation, strategies to acquire backlinks, and much more for all your sprints.

Step 8: Retrospective monitoring

Use Leapsome to set OKR and keep track of your plan in handling stuff.

OKR are the goal setting and framework breaking down the ambitions and objectives into manageable chunks to showcase the individuals the steps they require to take your work towards their own targets.

If these are all paired with better-managing practices and a perfect result-oriented methodology, it could assist in creating a robust strategy to manage your work, drive transparency and alignment, and boost engagement.

However, converting your objectives to tangible steps could be tricky sometimes.

Keep monitoring all your objectives

This better framework will make you visualize all your information and all the real-time data as well.

With its help, members could instantly access the required SEO metrics and other KPIs enabling monitoring of the efficiency of key sprint aspects.

• How many tasks have been executed
• How many members were indulged in objectives
• How many keywords or backlinks were worked
• Results comparison

Track all the metrics monthly or weekly basis of your sprints. Locate the improvement areas and have a discussion of all the pitfalls and appreciation sectors with expertise and members at each sprint at your daily meetings collaboration.

Managing work doesn’t end when the proposed client work is finished…. It’s just as significant to measure the results each time and report them periodically.

Maximize your productivity, for the benefit of managing, in just a single platform. There is no need to share information or need to use multiple services.

Do a comparison with the outcomes of different sprints and rectify the pitfalls left out in any bug.

Step 9: Find the successful sprints and repeat them

After the comparison, find out the successful sprints and repeat the process of those sprints.

We can determine the backlog while in sprint analysis. Backlog management is a vital part of sprint planning. This lists the key expectations and requirements regarding the upcoming sprint.

The backlog is created by the product owner and will be approved by the entire team.

For finalizing the backlog list, it’s quite worth it to focus on the previous sprint.

Use the positive experience of the sprints and learn from your mistakes to come out with a result-driven backlog.

Also, certain works, from the completed sprint, may require to be repeated or polished, so they might be included in the list.

Finally, make sure to pay attention to the feedback received from different clients, stakeholders, and other members.

During this sprint, arrange backlog grooming to check out if the defined objectives were actual and if the workflow stays on the right track.

Certain more and long thorough meetings might also occur, however, they must be scheduled individually and only conducted if necessary.

The key idea of the sprint in this approach is that all the working members make the necessary leap in the perfect direction without wasting any time on any of the distractions.

Sprint review

Reviewing sprint is the finalized consolidated meeting, focussed on overviewing and predicting the outcomes of the completed sprint.

The crew who follow the agile approach and the stakeholders discuss the successes and pitfalls of the processes performed.

They do compare the achievements to the objectives they set at the beginning stage, and receive the final feedback from the product owner.

Later, the sprint cycle would likely repeat until the entire product development is accomplished.

Sprint retrospective

Another meeting finalizing the sprint cycle is the sprint retrospective.

It’s set to make some conclusions based on the completed sprints, determine mistakes, and decide how to fix those issues while moving to the next sprint.

These meetings benefit you by enhancing their collaboration, improvising performance, and taking care of the pros of the sprint process and the demerits of the sprint process as well, to gain better outcomes in the future.

Bottom line

Managing SEO is not a small deal, wherein it’s not about capturing cheap traffic.

It’s your commitment to create an online presence appealing to the audience and forcing them to visit again and again.

Eventually, it’s about propelling brand awareness, benefiting strategic advantage in the market, and protecting your brand reputation.

All the paths from the start to the end process must be handled with more concerns indulging in tracking the progress as well.

The chance to auto-correct the plans, based on the previous sprint analysis will be provoked better through an agile methodology..

Moreover, the approach delves as a part of your marketing and business strategy, the more substantiated and visionary your strategy is, the better your chances to make Google fall in likelihood with you …!

By defining this workflow, utilizing templates, leveraging better-managing framework, and prioritizing communication, you optimize better project management and elevate your reputation as a trusted SEO brand.

Acquire this positive change to manage all your SEO works, comfortably in a single click with SEOScrum – an SEO Project Management Software …right now…!

You’ll tackle all in an orderly and highly focused manner.

What final result do you gain? yes, less stress with more successful outcomes with a better ranking with search engines.

I hope that our blog has provided a better awareness of how you can manage your stuff to lead a much-needed structure and organization to day-to-day SEO activities.

Similarly, it finetunes your processes enabling you to work within a set access resources and scope in a systematized way.

By the way, You’ll gain a perfect management approach for your Search engine optimization efforts and raise the results.