Results-Driven SEO Project Management: From Chaos to Cash

c) Update content with low-hanging fruit opportunities

For an established website with a decent amount of existing content, you can also look for opportunities to quickly update existing content and boost performance with little effort. 

Find pages with many keywords in this range and try to close topic gaps on those pages. For example, let’s take our post on affiliate marketing and look at its low-hanging fruit opportunities. 

We could isolate similar keywords that don’t already have a dedicated section in our article, like the following about becoming an affiliate. 

These are already hovering around the middle of page one on Google. With a small, dedicated section about this topic, we can likely improve rankings for these keywords with minimal effort. 

Most tasks aren’t a one-time thing. For example, you’ll probably create or update multiple pieces of content during an SEO project. 

So, the next step is to create a library of repeatable task templates that you can duplicate in your project. 

If you don’t do this and just assume your team knows what to do, it can cause chaos, and there’s a high chance your project won’t succeed. 

Here’s what you should add to each task template: 

• Who → assignees, reviewers, watchers, key stakeholders
• What → what’s the goal of the task + what exactly needs to be done
• When → dates to start and finish a task, estimated hours to complete
• Where → what tools should be used, where should deliverables be added, where can templates/relevant info be found
• Why → connect the task to a strategic objective
• How → SOP or process outlined in a clear and detailed brief

Obviously, the exact details for some of these will need to be filled in on a task-by-task basis as you duplicate them into your project. For example, instead of assigning the template tasks to a specific person, indicate the role that is responsible for the task until you’re ready to assign it to someone. 

Likewise, with the due dates. In the template, instead of adding exact due dates, indicate an estimated length of time each task should take and a general rule for when the task is due after it’s been assigned. 

Not every project will need every task, so the idea is to pull in what’s required as needed and have the bulk of the info pre-filled to reduce the time it takes to brief the task. 

With your tasks set and templates created, it’s now time to start doing.

This is where things can often fall apart unless you distribute responsibility and ownership of tasks and processes throughout your team. 

SEO project management doesn’t fail because there aren’t SOPs and processes in place. It fails because the people executing the processes aren’t given ownership of them.

Here are 3 reasons why this can happen: 

1. Without clear ownership, all team members rely on you for approvals before they can complete a task or start another. It slows everything down, and very little gets done efficiently.
2. A “not my job” mentality can take root in your team. Unless team members take ownership of their tasks, you will be responsible for micromanaging everything to ensure your team is doing what it’s supposed to be.
3. The people best placed to decide upon and update processes aren’t the ones doing so. They’re just doing whatever “management” tells them to do even if they see a better way.

You can solve the first two problems by clearly identifying who is responsible for specific tasks and processes and allowing them to get on with those tasks without having to run every tiny thing through you. 

You can solve the third problem by letting the people on the ground decide how their tasks are done and giving them responsibility for updating SOPs and relevant task templates. This again frees up your time and attention to focus on strategy, not micromanaging. 

PRO TIP

It also helps to break up bigger tasks into sub-components when multiple people are involved, like: 

• Briefing → SEO Strategist or Account Manager
• Implementation → often, a non-SEO professional like a writer, developer, or designer 
• Review → Senior SEO
• Final approval → Client

For the **** of all things good, please don’t manage SEO projects via email. It’s horrible. 

Invest in setting up a proper project management tool to scale with you. Consider your needs before you start planning all your tasks and projects. 

There’s no tool that’s best for everyone, but I recommend you check out Asana, ClickUp, or Monday to get you started. 

In any of these tools, you can easily set up separate projects and task templates. For example, here’s a basic setup of the first month’s tasks you can consider in Clickup: 

Within each task, you can pre-fill certain fields and add a description, like so: 

This is where you can add your brief, relevant links, and the essential details needed to turn the task into a template. Of course, there are nuances of how this works between different project management tools, but the basic idea remains the same. 

It’s worth spending time setting up your tasks and templates correctly so you can save time down the track as your project or team grows. 

The easiest way to track resources is to create custom fields in your project management tool that measure specific resources allocated for each task. Some tools also let you build out reports to see how your resource allocation is going across different time frames, teams, or projects. 

The types of resources you might consider tracking include: 

• Cost of the task
• Planned time allocated
• Actual time spent
• Cost of tools required to do the task
• Credits the task is worth (if you use a credit system)
• Sprint points (if you work in sprints)

For more in-depth insights on where your resources are going, consider tagging tasks according to whether they’re strategic, implementation, or administrative. This way, you can quickly and easily spot imbalances like investing too much in tasks that don’t contribute to results. 

Measuring your results requires going beyond your project management tool and using a combination of your analytics software and an SEO tool like Ahrefs. 

When you start working on a new campaign, make sure you record a benchmark of the existing performance of the website. Then, keep regular tabs on the metrics that matter for the project and performance milestones you’ve achieved along the way. 

The dashboard allows you to quickly see how performance is trending for key SEO metrics across all projects you’ve added: 

Results-driven SEO project management starts with the end in mind and works backward. It doesn’t assume you’ll see performance improvements just because you’re doing lots of stuff. 

Instead, it is very intentional about figuring out exactly what needs to be done and linking those actions to realistic and achievable outcomes. 

In the words of Mads Singers: 

The starting point is figuring out how to deliver a return on investment. This is the most important thing. Then it’s about giving your team ownership and control over the tasks related to their roles. 

Once these foundations are in place, only then is it about documenting processes. But it shouldn’t be a business owner or manager who does the documentation. Processes should be owned by the people doing the work and who can keep SOPs current.