Businesses should consider their overall SEO health and how it fits into their overall marketing funnel. This is most commonly done by completing an SEO audit, which will give marketing and product teams an understanding of where the company is from an SEO perspective and provide next steps to building momentum towards organic search traffic gains. However, these changes and recommendations can easily be overlooked or disregarded without priorities being set, no action plan, and actionable feedback to keep moving things forward. That’s where building an SEO Strategy can provide additional benefit, guiding your organization to higher levels of success past the initial SEO Audit phase.
What should you do after your SEO audit?
The ultimate goal for every business is to get the most amount of benefit possible after their initial SEO audit. That said, SEO isn’t just done by a simple audit being created, especially with how holistic your SEO strategy should be. That said, by investing in that SEO Audit, you are investing in the start of a journey towards growing your revenue/lead generation. Doing so could easily generate very nice returns for your business and bring down your overall CPA metrics and costs for acquiring customers or leads. You just can’t stop there because there are a few steps that need to be taken to take your SEO audit from a simple deliverable to having the return on it come to fruition.
1. Sharing the SEO Audit
After receiving the SEO audit deliverables, it’s time to share it with other teams. Your product teams will have feedback, your dev/engineering teams will need to review the scope, design might have comments, and the rest of your marketing team might need to review for copy, content, and planning purposes. Every team has a different way of sharing this information. Our generally rule is to create deliverables from our SEO services the follow the guidelines h
2. SEO Implementation Meetings
When working with something as in-depth and large-scale as a complete SEO Audit, it can be helpful to get other members of your team involved with evaluation and implementation. Generally, our team is working with a marketing manager or product manager that is driving the SEO initiative and will bring in either other product managers, developers, or marketing & content teams. Bringing in other team members to review the SEO Audit is a great way to get everyones feedback and get everyone on track. Teams can discuss and address requirements from the audits and any roadblocks that are standing in the way of implemented said changes. At your initial implementation meeting, consider doing the following:
- Creating a plan of action: While this step may be obvious, it is a must. We always create a prioritization list of the SEO Audit so teams are aware of the biggest impact items vs. nice to haves. Having this will give the organization a plan of action to truly drive your path to future SEO success. During the implementation meetings, make sure your team is ready to breakdown who is responsible for what and be as specific as possible. This will increase your chance of getting things implemented and avoid potential bottlenecks. Teams can work through details and figure out those bottlenecks up front, facilitate timelines/sprints to get changes implemented in, and also have a way of providing feedback of what can and can’t be done in a timely manner.
- Setting regular marketing meetings: To ensure things are getting done, consider requesting regularly-scheduled meetings to encourage collaboration and active team involvement on getting the priorities implemented. Also, as these roadblocks to implementation do come up, they can be addressed actively vs. deprioritized for months.
- Creating a Roadmap + Establishing deadlines: By the end of the review of the audit and implementation meeting, have the team create a roadmap of when dev items will be handled in various sprints or what dates they will be implemented by. And, you can work with content teams to ensure an editorial calendar is created with a steady flow of the requested content. This will ensure work is consistently being done and everyone is held accountable to get things done.
3. Understanding Technical SEO
Generally, getting an understanding of the tech stack of a company before the initial SEO audit is important, so getting as much of those details before hand will help. That said, after an SEO Audit you can run into things like site speed concerns, caching, image caching, and other various things that will after Google Core Web vitals. Addressing those with the teams during implementation meetings will be important, as mentioned above. Then it is important to keep an eye on the health of those items going forward, whether it’s using Google Search Console or a tool like ahrefs to verify those details. Keeping up with the dynamic pace of SEO can be hard, but using tools like this will provide actionable data insights to assist with it. You can also take advantage of the automation and education that these tools normally provide, helping you be more competitive at SEO.
4. Track KPIs and ROI from SEO
Tracking your resources and investments will help make a case for investing more in SEO and to determine how strong your ROI is on SEO. This allows you to further inform and provide new opportunities for scaling your SEO Strategy. Once you have proven a positive ROI from SEO and you are showing it is working, you can leverage the data and metrics to invest more in SEO and keep the momentum on growth. Also, it will help the overall marketing team understand the effectiveness and how it is driving down costs from paid media, if at all. Again, this will all help make a case for growing and scaling your SEO efforts further and finding new areas of opportunity for the team to invest in.
5. SEO Project Management
Project management can be a big part of how successful you are at getting things implemented. This is why it’s important to create a prioritized list of action items teams can easily start to assign to different members. Within those tasks assigned, there might be subtasks and other prioritizations created and/or timelines, which is why having a roadmap of things to come will allow everyone to track the progress of SEO. And, once things are implemented, it will be important to note when those changes were made to either QA them and make sure they were implemented correctly and have them in Google Analytics to see any lift that can be attributed to said changes.
An SEO Audit isn’t the end of the SEO journey and just completing an audit doesn’t mean you are done with SEO, it is only the beginning of a very long journey that will continue to expand over time. Using the steps above you can ensure your SEO Audit gets the most bang for it’s buck and gives your organization the best shot at being competitive at SEO.
You could also leverage our SEO Consulting Services to get all of this figured out for you. We’ve acted as an extension to teams like Blue Bottle Coffee and Ticketmaster, implementing all of the above and driving ROI from SEO campaigns.
