How to Set Up an SEO Workflow

Search engine optimization takes a significant amount of time to generate tangible results and earn a return on your investment. Especially in competitive markets, where it’s difficult to rank, SEO is tricky and time-consuming. 

However, the impact it has on your business’s credibility, traffic to your site, and sales is undeniable. To be competitive, companies must rank high on SERPs. 

Consequently, businesses must be consistent in their SEO efforts to get the results they want. 

A workflow is the step-by-step process by which people accomplish their goals. It helps establish steady and persistent tasks, making it easier to measure the impact of certain strategies. 

This will help your team identify the most important parts of your process, reduce errors, and boost visibility across your organization. 

By outlining their responsibilities and creating a timeline, they can create consistent and scalable results. Here’s how to set up an SEO workflow for your team.

Steps to Set Up an SEO Workflow

1. Outline your goals
2. Assess your SEO strategies 
3. Identify stakeholders and assign responsibilities
4. Create timelines & track success 
5. Repeat

1. Outline Your Goals

Improving your SEO is a very broad goal. At the end of the day, SEO is a tool that can help you reach your broader business objectives. 

How you tackle your SEO project and how you measure your success depends on what you’re looking to accomplish. Your goals may be to: 

• Increase organic traffic 
• Strengthen your domain authority 
• Improve your search rankings 
• Increase sales 

Once you’ve determined what you want to accomplish, you can move forward with your strategic planning. 

2. Assess Your SEO Strategies 

There are several different ways to improve your SEO rankings, including: 

• Target long-tail keywords 
• Focus on generating high-quality and compelling content 
• Improve UX 
• Address crawl accessibility through technical SEO 

Determining which strategy is right for your business depends on the resources you have, where your weaknesses lie, and what your goals are. 

A well-built website is the foundation of any SEO strategy. You need to have a great site map for crawlers, or bots that search engines use to index sites, to properly assess your page. By ensuring that your site is easy to navigate and loads quickly, you can boost your rankings. 

Source: Moz

Once you’ve created a great website, you can begin to create compelling and SEO-friendly content. 

Performing an SEO audit can help you identify issues on your site and improve its performance. Moz Pro and SEMrush provide SEO audit tools that identify site errors, measure how you perform for certain keywords, and more. 

If you’re unfamiliar with these SEO tools or aren’t sure how to analyze the data you collect, SEO experts can perform the audit and help you identify long-term strategies. Here are a few tips to help you find the perfect partner. 

3. Identify Stakeholders and Assign Responsibilities

A great SEO team looks different in every organization. How your team is structured depends on what you’re looking to accomplish. 

For example, web developers and designers can support your SEO efforts by addressing 404 Errors and other site bugs, while content writers can help you create keyword-rich content that ranks at the top of SERPs. 

Other positions on your SEO team could include: 

• SEO lead
• Web developers
• Content writers 
• Marketers and promoters

To establish a proper workflow, each team member needs to know what they’re responsible for and who they should report to. 

Once you identify what projects you want to focus on, you must outline how each person on your team will contribute to your efforts.

Not only will this make it clear what your employees’ expectations are, but it will also ensure that their efforts align with your long-term goals. 

4. Create Timelines & Track Success 

By creating timelines, you can keep your project on track and ensure that your team does everything they can to improve your site’s rankings. 

While long-term goals are great, you must establish action items that you can execute in the short term and measure their impact. For example, your content team should be conducting keyword research regularly and posting articles on a monthly basis. From there, they can track how your site is performing for those keywords over time. 

Your development team should regularly identify technical issues and create a plan to resolve them. 

At the same time, your marketing team should be reaching out to a certain number of sites to improve your linking profile each month. 

As you go, you should keep track of how successful your efforts are. 

SEO metrics matter because they demonstrate what is and isn’t working. While SEO takes time, you must be able to respond to changes as they come up. Fail to do so, and it will be difficult to determine if the time and money you’re spending on SEO are paying off. 

5. Repeat 

SEO isn’t a set it and forget it task. Google is constantly changing its algorithm, and your competitors are always trying to optimize their sites. 

For your SEO workflow to be effective, you must regularly reflect on how your site performs and adjust your strategy as necessary. 

For example, you may need to target a specific set of keywords one month and new ones another month. 

As you adjust your strategy, make sure to communicate it with the rest of your team. 

Establish an SEO Workflow to Boost Rankings 

SEO is an ongoing process. To ensure that your efforts are effective, you must establish a solid workflow. By consistently trying new strategies, measuring success, and adjusting your efforts, you can improve your rankings. 

However, you need to identify what your weaknesses are and cultivate the team and resources you need to address them. 

Whether you have an internal team, or are looking for an SEO service provider, you must establish timelines for your team. From there, you can analyze your metrics and adjust your strategy accordingly.