If your current SEO efforts feel chaotic and unorganized, perhaps evoking the same anxiety as packing for a last-minute trip, you might be missing a key document… an SEO roadmap.
It’s more formal than a Post-it note and helps add structure and direction to your marketing and SEO strategy. You can share your SEO roadmap with your team to improve collaboration, refer back to it when assessing the success of your campaign, and share it with stakeholders to showcase your current and future marketing plan.
If you were planning a road trip, your SEO roadmap document is your detailed itinerary. It details what you need, how to get to your destination, and more.
Continue reading to find out how to plan your own roadmap.
What you will learn
- What an SEO roadmap is and why it’s important
- How to create a roadmap to improve your SEO and marketing efforts
- The importance of strategy, planning, and analysis in SEO
- The benefits of using an SEO roadmap
What is an SEO roadmap?
An SEO roadmap is a workflow that helps you detail and plan various tasks within your SEO campaign to increase visibility in the search engine rankings positions (SERPs).
For example, in your SEO roadmap, key tasks may include keyword research, link building, on-page optimization, and monthly traffic reports.
While the ultimate goal of your roadmap may vary, improved SERPs are usually a popular key performance indicator (KPI) to measure.
Why is an SEO roadmap important?
Creating an SEO roadmap is important because it helps keep all parties on the same page, from web developers to content writers and outreach specialists.
Think of an SEO roadmap as an action plan—it’s what you need to get done and in what order to improve SERPs.
Without an SEO roadmap, tasks are more likely to become cluttered, and communication won’t be as effective.
8 steps to create an SEO roadmap
If it’s your first time creating an SEO roadmap, it can take time to assemble the document. But don’t let that discourage you!
Once you have an SEO roadmap, you can update it as you go and refer back to the document to see what’s working—and what’s not—to gain greater insights into your overall SEO strategy.
You can use this SEO roadmap template for your website.
Below, we detail 8 steps you can begin taking today to create an SEO roadmap.
1. Perform an initial audit
Before you start a new SEO campaign, we encourage you to perform an initial audit.
This includes everything from assessing current keyword rankings to technical SEO and your site’s backlink profile.
Content gaps
Topics, questions, and pain points not covered in your content are known as content gaps. Your existing content is likely missing content that, when published, will complement your current SEO strategy.
Content gaps can also be related to missing content from your competitors that Google deems important for your page.
You can use Surfer to analyze your website and suggest pages with content gaps.
An initial audit aims to identify content gaps, in which you can create content to improve search rankings.
This is for existing and new content.
For example, let’s say your product is a project management tool. You may discover content gaps on increasing productivity, alternatives to an existing product, or a how-to guide.
Filling these content gaps is a little like adding bricks to a wall.
The more gaps you fill, the stronger the wall becomes—the wall being your content strategy.
So how do you find these content gaps?
Enter your page's URL into Surfer, and you'll find missing keywords and topics.
For example, here is a snippet of missing keywords from an article on buying leads. The keywords that need attention are highlighted in red and yellow.
The same article is missing a few key points under a lead generation subtopic in the article. As you can see, it has a 10 out of 15 rating for content coverage and is missing a few green checks.
Surfer can automatically optimize your content for this missing information or you can write the content yourself.
If you prefer to do things yourself, use existing website data from Google Search Console's queries report under Search results to find new keywords, which sometimes can be used to write a new article.
You can also use Surfer to audit content gaps in your website's coverage.
For example, Surfer has acknowledged the two articles below from my website but identified "types of technical writing" as a missing keyword.
On-page optimization opportunities
When performing your initial audit, you will find numerous on-page optimization opportunities. These are quick wins that can boost your SEO with minimal effort.
Often, this will include optimizing key SEO elements such as title tags, meta descriptions, and headers.
This may involve adding keyword variations to the above, re-writing meta descriptions to be more engaging, or making sure your URL slugs are up-to-date.
Technical SEO standing
You can have the best content on the web, but if your technical SEO is not up to the mark, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.
Repeatedly.
Technical SEO plays a big part in your site’s SEO performance.
Technical SEO includes everything from slow loading speeds to broken links, duplicate content, incorrectly formatted title tags, and much more.
Improve your website by fixing your technical SEO before creating new content.
You can use a tool such as Screaming Frog to simplify the process. This popular technical SEO tool crawls your website and identifies issues. You can add these to your SEO roadmap under “technical SEO fixes.”
See the screenshot below for an example of tecnical SEO fixes. It shows suggested fixes in order of priority.
Backlink profile
Your backlink profile includes every web page that links to your website, whether the home page, a blog post, or even a single image file.
Assess your backlink profile at least once every quarter and definitely before creating a new SEO campaign.
When assessing your backlink profile, you want to look for:
- Broken links—reach out to the website that links to your article to fix the link
- Spam links—these can be disavowed if needed
You can use the Ahrefs backlink checker to better understand your backlink profile. The free version shows several backlinks, as well as numerous insights, including:
- Domain rating—the strength of a website backlink profile
- Total number of backlinks—how many websites link to your website
- Linking websites—how many websites link to a given site
- Anchor and target URL—what keyphrase is hyperlinked and to where
For example, the paid version allows you to analyze existing links, check for potential spam links—which may hurt your SEO—and provide other essential insights to help you improve your backlink profile and SEO.
2. Outline SEO goals and KPIs
When creating your SEO roadmap, setting specific, clear, and measurable business goals is essential.
These goals should build on your initial audit performed in step one. When setting goals, using the SMART goal-setting framework can be helpful.
The SMART acronym stands for:
- Specific—the goal should be clear and actionable
- Measurable—how are you going to track your goal?
- Attainable—the goal should be challenging but possible
- Realistic—take into account possible obstacles and be practical with your goal
- Timebound—set a realistic timeframe and stick to it
If you don’t know what type of goals to set, you can use KPIs to track SEO goals.
Popular SEO KPIs include:
- Total website organic traffic
- Conversions (online sales and leads)
- Return on investment (ROI)
- Keyword rankings
- Backlinks
- Bounce rate
- Average session duration
For example, the comparison below shows a couple of SMART goals using popular KPIs to measure the progress of your overall SEO strategy.
Basic goal
- I want to increase web traffic.
- I want to sell more of our product.
SMART goal based on KPIs
- I want to increase web traffic by 100% in the next 12 months, measured using Google Analytics.
- I want to increase conversions (leads and sales) by 20% per month. I will set up goal tracking in Google Analytics to measure results.
3. Develop your SEO strategy
Once you’ve chosen your KPIs and set your goals, you can develop your SEO strategy.
There are a few different SEO methods you can choose, all of which can be successful when done correctly, including:
- Rank for low-difficulty keywords
- Chase long-tail keywords
- Establish topical authority in a niche/sub-niche
- Programmatic pages
We will break these down in more detail below using real examples.
Rank for low-difficulty keywords
This is one of the easier methods to start when performing keyword research. You can rank for low-difficulty keywords much easier than high-difficulty keywords because there is typically less competition.
But that’s not to say low-difficulty keywords are not valuable!
For example, the website, The Spruce wrote a guide on how to grow the Pink Princess Philodendron plant.
The article contains lots of low-difficulty keywords, amassing a significant number of readers a month.
For one article.
Often, low-difficulty to rank for keywords contain less search volume. But don’t let this steer you to more difficult keywords.
Surfer's Keyword Research tool displays keyword metrics like difficulty, search volume, and potential traffic to help you prioritize which articles to target first.
In fact, these search volumes are estimates and are often much larger than stated.
Plus, because you’re targeting lots of smaller target keywords, you can still build high-quality traffic, as stated in our example.
Chase long-tail keywords
Targeting long-tail keywords works really well with the above strategy of low-difficulty keywords. Typically, these are keywords that contain three or more words.
Similarly, long-tail keywords are often easier to rank for.
Also, they are often more query-based because the keyphrases are longer.
For example, a Shotkit article on how big is a 4x6 photo is contains numerous long-tail keywords.
Long-tail keywords can also help you attract readers looking to transact or for an answer to a specific question, which you can solve and then advertise your service as a solution.
Establish topical authority in a niche/sub-niche
Topical authority is when you create enough quality content covering a niche or a sub-niche.
Ideally, you include internal links to relevant content, creating a content cluster that helps rank other pieces of content.
For example, RunRepeat is a topical authority on running shoes, a sub-niche of running. They buy, test, and review running shoes, creating individual shoe reviews and buying guides.
The image below shows Surfer's report on adopting a topical authority approach to running shoes. We've generated 1922 keywords under 125 different topics for a website chasing authority for running shoes.
Programmatic pages
Programmatic SEO involves publishing landing pages on a massive scale, which allows you to rank for many keywords.
For example, Data USA has numerous pages for different American States, showcasing census data such as the median property value, population, average household income, and more.
They have unique pages for states and cities.
This allows Data USA to rank for lots of local SEO keywords. They have pages for Dallas and Houston in Texas.
The real estate marketplace, Zillow too has a programmatic SEO approach and publishes pages for every state they have homes in.
If it applies to you, it can be very powerful when done correctly.
You can use Surfer AI to bulk-generate content for several pages, and then edit them before making them live.
SEO strategies don't stop here. You can do a number of things like optimizing for Google Discover, covering trending content, or implementing an e-commerce SEO strategy.
4. List SEO tasks
After completing an SEO audit, analyzing existing content, and discovering new keyword opportunities, it’s time to list SEO tasks.
This is the nitty gritty—the work that moves the needle in your SEO strategy. Examples of SEO best practices that you may include in your tasks are,
- Building new backlinks
- Improving technical SEO, such as site speed and security
- Refreshing old content
To help you better understand a task in more depth, we explain how you may approach the often daunting task of updating and refreshing old content below.
Refreshing old content
You likely found articles that need to be refreshed during your audit and analysis.
The process of updating content depends on the current state of the article—how up-to-date it is and its current ranking position.
Surfer's Content Audit analyzed your website to find articles that are out of date and missing critical information that can help improve their ranking.
The Best opportunities tab shows you all these pages that can then be refreshed.
To manually find content that needs updating and update it to boost organic traffic, follow these steps.
- Find pages that dropped rankings in a comparative period (e.g., last 30 days vs. previous 30 days—you can do this in GSC)
- Analyze competitors and SERPs to see if search intent has changed or the topic has new information you are missing
- Improve the article—add information and missing and relevant keywords
- Publish with a new date if you made significant changes
- Track over the next 30 days
Add tracking to your SEO roadmap to measure progress. If you don’t see notable changes over a comparative period, it’s time to reassess.
Furthermore, you may find it helpful to organize tasks into categories, such as technical SEO, on-page optimization, and content writing.
This makes your roadmap more clear and makes task management easier.
5. Prioritize SEO steps
By now, you likely have a roadmap longer than Los Angeles traffic at 5 pm. It can quickly become overwhelming.
So, you need to add a little prioritization—decide what important tasks to do first.
Naturally, some tasks take importance over others.
For example, if your technical SEO is responsible for increased bounce rates and people cannot read your articles, this takes priority over writing new content.
Place high-impact, low-effort tasks at the top of your list to provide quick wins and early successes in your strategy.
How to prioritize tasks
You can use the Eisenhower matrix to categorize tasks. This process includes assigning each task to a category of the following:
- Urgent and important
- Important but not urgent
- Not important and distractions
- Not important and a waste of time
For example, if you have a technical SEO issue, such as web pages not being crawled, this would be urgent and important.
Updating an article that dropped in rankings is important but not urgent.
Changing brand colors and style is not important and is a distraction (in this example).
And obsessing over keyword research and keyword density while the article already ranks number 1 is a waste of time.
This is how you prioritize tasks efficiently in your SEO roadmap.
6. Assign and schedule SEO responsibilities
Once you know what tasks take priority, it’s time to assign and schedule SEO roadmap strategy responsibilities.
We recommend using a project management software such as Asana or Monday. com to create and assign all the tasks to relevant SEO team members.
You can assign deadlines or tag co-workers to ask for estimated time required for each task.
When assigning tasks, it’s important to understand task dependencies and potential obstacles that could affect the deadline.
For example, if one task is to update your article on accounting for small businesses, there are likely lots of moving components:
- You need to update the content
- You need keyword data
- A team member needs to upload the revised article version
- You might need to create a new infographic or other visuals
- You might want to add expert opinions to establish E-A-T
If one of these tasks encounters a delay, say you’re waiting on replies from experts, this might set back the overall project deadline.
Keep these in mind when creating tasks to allow for realistic deadlines to prevent disappointment.
You can also use Gantt charts, which are included in most project management software.
A Gantt chart is a method of categorizing tasks into phases, ordering what tasks need to be completed first before the next phase of the project.
Using these charts can help improve team planning.
7. Track organic competitors
Tracking competing websites will improve keyword and topic discovery. This will reveal new keywords that may not have appeared in previous SEO research.
When tracking organic competitors, it’s best to track websites with authority and coverage similar to your site instead of bigger sites that can rank for more competitive, and often broader terms, more easily across several niches.
For example, if you have a B2B accounting SaaS product, you don’t want to track competitors such as Forbes or The New York Times, even if they post on accountancy from time to time.
Instead, you’d choose smaller and similar businesses to compete with.
Surfer Audit allows you to perform a competitive analysis.
This includes your URL and your competitors. It will also recommend organic competitors for you. You can then see what topics and keyword opportunities you are missing.
You can also use Surfer to find new keywords, topics, popular words and phrases, and queries you should answer in your content.
8. Track your search performance
Peter Drucker once said, “What gets measured gets managed.” And that couldn’t be more true for SEO.
Your SEO efforts require ongoing evaluation and refinement.
The algorithms are constantly changing, and the nature of SEO means you must update articles and create the best content possible for both search engines and humans.
Setting milestones and communicating with key stakeholders can help keep your SEO on track. You'll be able to manage your online reputation by analyzing search engine sentiment, and staying on top of what your audience wants.
There are numerous methods of tracking SEO efforts, but we refer you back to the KPIs you defined earlier.
Again, this means producing reports using Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and other independent SEO tools such as Ahrefs and Surfer.
If you notice little to no improvements or below-par results when tracking your search performance. This simply means you need to correct processes that hinder SEO progress.
3 benefits of using an SEO roadmap
An SEO roadmap has many other benefits, from easier task prioritization to future-proofing your SEO strategy.
I'll cover these in more detail below.
Easier task prioritization
You can do SEO without a roadmap, but you’ll quickly realize how overwhelming it can be.
Project management becomes non-existent, and you’ll struggle to measure meaningful progress over time.
When you create an SEO roadmap, you’ll find task prioritization easier. This is because you will have identified exactly what you need to do in what order.
Moreover, you can discover and prioritize high-impact actions that create big results for minimal effort.
For instance, that might include refreshing old high-traffic content before publishing new pieces.
Breaking down complex SEO tactics
An SEO roadmap breaks down complex strategies into smaller, more digestible, and manageable tasks.
It’s the difference between saying we should rewrite existing content to generate more organic traffic and knowing exactly how to achieve it… (e.g., identifying keyword opportunities, adding new content to existing articles, optimizing for NLP, and so on.)
This also increases the overall efficiency of your SEO strategy.
Future-proofing your SEO strategy
When new team members get involved in your SEO strategy, whether technical SEO or content writing, they can refer to your SEO roadmap to quickly familiarize themselves with your overarching strategy.
This ensures smooth organizational changes.
Furthermore, you future-proof your SEO strategy by having a historical database of what updates you made, what worked, and what didn’t work so you can do more of the good and less of the bad.
Your SEO roadmap is a living document that adapts to search algorithm changes.
Key takeaways:
- An SEO roadmap is a detailed and strategic plan for your SEO campaign
- It helps improve collaboration, goal-setting, and task management
- Perform an initial SEO audit before starting a new campaign
- Outline SEO goals and KPIs (this is what you want to get out of your SEO efforts)
- Choose an SEO method (low-difficulty or long-tail keywords, topical authority, programmatic pages)
- List all necessary tasks and SEO initiatives, from technical SEO to refreshing old content
- Prioritize quick wins for early success
- Assign and schedule SEO responsibilities using project management software
- Track organic competitors to discover new keywords and topics
- Measure and track search performance to help refine your strategy
- Update your SEO roadmap regularly for valuable insights
