What does the Workflow look like when you’re getting an SEO Roadmap?

When getting an SEO Roadmap, what should I expect from the timeline and workflow perspective?

An SEO Roadmap is probably the single most important thing you can get from a Digital Marketing Agency as a Small Business if you’re looking to partially handle some of your own Search Engine Optimization. 

What does the process look like though – what do you have to plan for and how will you be able to ensure you get exactly what you need when you are soliciting a SMB Digital Agency for an SEO Roadmap? This article is about that concept – what you can expect and how you can optimize the process to ensure that you get real value from your time, and have a World Beating Website.

What is an SEO Roadmap? And what can you expect from one?

An SEO Roadmap is a document made bespoke for your website and your digital footprint, that explains the importance of the different facets of SEO, and prioritizes each goal while providing actionable steps to help you meet them. In the end, the result is a better digital footprint, because the systematic approach to the SEO work enables quantifiable success.

You can read more about What an SEO Audit is in this article.

Here’s what you can expect from a properly constructed SEO Roadmap:

• A list of items that need to be completed to ensure best practices are met
• A list of sub-items that will help to accomplish each of the bigger listed SEO goals
• Tooling and recommendations to make sure the items can be implemented
• Coaching to help you move along the roadmap’s different points
• The relative value of each task laid out and a list of priorities
• Examples of how to do each task
• An approximate timeline of the parts of the list – so you know what an agency partner would have to do from a labor perspective to implement each goal, and so that you can understand what is reasonable to expect on time needed to accomplish each task
• An overview of all the multiple facets of SEO and how they work hand-in-hand
• Some specific keywords and blog or other content examples to help you optimize properly

We aren’t the only agency that can perform a proper audit on your SEO and write up a great SEO Roadmap – plenty of good agencies exist. We WOULD love to work with you if your small business needs marketing, though. We do make really good SEO roadmaps. No two roadmaps are the same – your business needs a custom built roadmap.

How long does it take to get an SEO Roadmap

An SEO roadmap usually takes about 10 hours of work – mostly research and asking questions. We are very good at what we do, but we still don’t know as much about your individual business and its specific needs as you do. Even if we work with bigger companies in your space and feel confident about our prowess in your industry, we don’t know enough about you to just start advising the moment we engage. We need to find out what your specific goals are, and how you want to meet them. 

So there are at least 6 hours of keyword and audit research work that has to be done. 

We charge a flat fee for our SEO Roadmaps and we have hours of coaching or training attached to those roadmaps that can be purchased at a statutory billing rate. This can include oversight for contractors, training you or an employee how to do the work, or as implementation specialists that can do the work as needed. 

We also offer full-service SEO for small businesses, if you want a road map done for free and want us to implement the planning. The FREE offer includes the roadmap after the first 10 hour retainer block is funded, and we do not apply any hours to the cost of the roadmap – those hours will be applied to implementation work for SEO. Even our FREE offer requires ten hours of work though – so you will need to give us a bit of time to piece together all the intelligence we are gathering on your digital footprint and your website and competitors. 

We need to do all of the following (plus more) to finish an audit:

Intake questions

Usually we need to have an intake meeting with you so we can understand your business, ask specific questions and get as much as we need to give you an actionable document and understand our role in support going forward. Usualy this is 1-2 hours of meeting, and can be done on separate occasions to split it up, if need be. 

Some companies want our expertise in charting a map, but want to implement the strategy on their own.

Some companies want to implement on their own, and have us support them along the way with coaching.

Some companies want our oversight and guidance for contractors and employees to ensure that implementation does not become too costly on bigger projects.

Some companies want us to do some implementation.

If your small business wants full-service SEO work Click HERE.

We can strategize with you based on your needs.

The audit process

Auditing takes a while. We perform multiple audits and only a couple of them are automated or using 3rd party tooling.

When we do use automated 3rd party tooling, they have exceptional ratings and track records (SEO tracking and auditing software like SEMRush, AHREFS and SERanking, among others). But this only gets us a status on current positioning and helps us recognize places we can leverage. So, as good as they are, there is still a lot of interpretation and experience needed for producing an SEO Roadmap.

We also audit your site from a conversion perspective, and as a consumer. We identify areas that may need improvement to increase throughput and buy-through. 

We look at the technical capacity and structure of your web footprint and even audit ancillary spaces like web 2.0 properties and integrations, as well as social media profiles. If it affects SEO, even if only slightly, it’s included in our findings. 

We do a bunch of keyword research to help you connect with the right audience and intent. This helps you to get started right away on high ROI tasks. 

We also set you up for success by looking at content and auditing the past content marketing, and strategizing a more robust and focused content marketing plan. 

Delivery of the SEO Roadmap Document

We produce a document (usually a ‘living’ document that can change as needed), that shows you the best tasks for total ROI; it also stages the low hanging fruit for you; and it tells you the approximate timelines that each task will likely take, so you can have your own people or contractors take care of it. 

If this document helps you to realize that you want us to do the implementation work, then we apply the costs of the SEO Roadmap to your future retainer.

A meeting to set expectations

Once a document is complete and delivered to you, we meet to see how we can help you be successful with this strategy. We figure out if there is a need for oversight, or if you need to get some help in putting these tasks into play. We include 1-2 hours of FREE coaching and Q&A to help you navigate whatever tasks you need to learn.

An SEO roadmap is an important document, particularly if you need to avoid the higher cost of working with an agency. While we believe we are fairly priced, and offer an extreme advantage over our agency peers on a per task or hourly a la carte basis for SEO work for small businesses, we also recognize we aren’t a great fit for every company. 

Sometimes you just need our technical expertise in a fixed priced way – which is why we offer standalone SEO Roadmap creation. Reach out today if you want to get on the road to better SERPs right now!