Best Practices on SEO Project Management

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What impact can effective SEO project management have on your business? According to researchers, 68 % of all online experiences start with a search engine. Furthermore, organic search accounts for 53.3 % of all website traffic, and SEO drives 1000% or more traffic than organic social media.

Statistics like these demonstrate that search engine optimization (SEO) is big business, with an increasing number of businesses investing in SEO tools and expertise. SEO jobs grew seven times faster than the overall job market in the United States in 2019.

Everyone wishes to be ranked higher in search engine results. Securing that coveted position, on the other hand, necessitates skill and strategy, as well as the ability to oversee and prioritize SEO projects. This is where SEO project management enters the picture.

What is SEO Project Management?

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Project management for SEO is exactly what it sounds like. It entails supervising and coordinating any SEO-related project. Let's look at an example project to get a better understanding.

Perhaps your company wishes to update its existing blog content and optimize its blog posts with SEO keyword research.

You could begin immediately by refreshing random blog posts and identifying keywords. This thing, on the other hand, is bound to be counterproductive, not to mention stressful. You'll almost certainly miss some blog posts, and you may even optimize multiple posts for the same target, cannibalizing your keywords.

It's a shambles. On the other hand, SEO project management adds much-needed organization and structure to your SEO-related projects, allowing them to be as efficient and effective as possible.

Why Is SEO Project Management Important?

An effective SEO strategy necessitates a significant amount of effort. There are keyword research traffic and analytics reports, competitive analysis, backlink opportunities, and content calendars, all factors that influence search engine rankings.

A structured approach, like any other project, makes juggling all of these aspects much easier. SEO project management necessitates that you and your team be able to:

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1. Effectively prioritize: You have a plethora of keyword targets to choose from. SEO project management assists you in determining which projects to begin with and how to approach them methodically. Some of the project management platforms can be Trello, Asana, or Monday.com. Check out the difference between these three at Trello, Monday.com, and Asana.  

1. Deliver more successful projects: It's easy to get bogged down in the weeds, especially when you're knee-deep in keyword research. Effective project management will always nudge your team back to the overarching goal, preventing you from missing the whole point and wasting energy on tasks that do not contribute to the primary goal. That's why everybody should use SEO keyword research services which is a lifesaver. 

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1. Improve communication: SEO projects rely heavily on the SEO team, but they are not involved. Depending on the project, you may need to involve the marketing team, the web development team, or the legal team. All relevant stakeholders are kept informed by effective project management.

1. Work more effectively: No more chasing down people for keyword reports or sifting through email threads to find a list of backlink opportunities. Project management centralizes project tasks and resources so that everyone can find what they need. 

So, your team will be able to complete projects more quickly. Speed is everything, especially since Google changes or improves the search experience hundreds (if not thousands) of times per year when it comes to SEO keyword research services.

Best Practice SEO Project Management?

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Successful SEO projects do not happen by accident; they necessitate careful planning and management. How do you go about doing that? Here are three best practices to start implementing right away.

1. Set a Clear Project Goal

SEO has the potential to lead you down a rabbit hole. Soon after that, you find a lot of keywords to optimize for or pages on your website that should load faster.

This is why it's critical to begin each SEO project with a specific, measurable goal. For example, suppose you want to increase traffic to a specific blog post by 25%. Alternatively, perhaps you want to secure 100 new backlinks by the end of Q1.

These types of goals provide you with something specific to work toward, preventing you from becoming distracted. Furthermore, it establishes a foundation for success. You now have something to determine whether your efforts are paying off or you have to change your strategy.

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2. Get Comfortable With a Structured Approach

Remember that project management necessitates a deliberate and strategic approach. The days when your team could pick a keyword or target at random and run with it are past!

Like any other change within a company, this new approach to project management will take some getting used to.

You should be patient during this transition and be prepared to remind people about SEO project management's benefits regularly. Yes, it may imply that you cannot begin projects without a plan in place — but this systematic approach will reduce frustration, confusion, and stress in the long run.

3. Use Project Management Software

Don't try to manage your SEO projects using haphazard spreadsheets and lists. Project management software will help you to centralize communication and resources, improve visibility, and streamline your processes.

According to a 2019 survey, despite these apparent benefits, only 22% of businesses use project management software.

Don't let yourself become a statistic. Using the right SEO tools and project management platforms will alleviate a lot of the stress associated with coordinating your SEO projects.

Conclusion

In conclusion, having a strategy is preferable to having none.

An actionable strategy with people to carry it out is preferable to one with no one to carry it out. Also, a plan with the proper tools to implement is preferable to one attempted with ineffective tools. On the other hand, a dynamic and actionable strategy is preferable to a stagnant plan that becomes stale over time; finally, a happy client is preferable to none.

Isabella Humphrey

Update 08 October 2021