SEO Action Items

What are some typical examples of SEO action items?

The number in parenthesis represents the number of action items it would take.

Content Creation Action Items:

(1) Plan a piece of authority content
(1) ~150 words of writing (includes revisions)
(1) Create a quick banner/graphic for a piece of content (revisions included)
(1) Publish a piece of content to the site

Link Building Action Items:

(1) Research and develop a list of ~5 link creation targets
(1) Evaluate a competitor’s backlink profile for reverse-engineering purposes
(1) Find ~2 broken link building opportunities

Architecture and User Experience Action Items

(1) Implement conversion goal tracking
(1) Develop, optimize, and implement homepage title tag & description for one page
(1) Warm up our inbound link creation targets
(1) Create a client e-mail address and connect it to our email system
(1) Study link creation target content and linking trends
(1) Keyword research
(1) Develop a better title tag infrastructure for the subpages
(1) Optimize ~5 images
(1) Remove organic search spam from Google Analytics
(1) Set up segmenting in Google Analytics to drill down search analytics
(1) Set up client with a phone call tracking service (client typically pays for this service directly)

What if a task is bigger than an action item?

Bigger tasks will need to be broken into a couple of action items. Here are some potentially bigger tasks and their respective number of action items. Anything a little more complex than the single action items above will consist of multiple action items. Here are a few examples:

(4) Set up a split testing service and a test (client typically pays for this service directly)
(4) Move standalone blog to the main domain
(2) Create and send an outreach/followup campaign
(5) On-page optimization of one page including keyword research and ~450 words of content creation
(5) Guaranteed DA30+ in-content backlink
(4) Guaranteed DA20+ in-content backlink
(3) Guaranteed DA10+ in-content backlink
(30) Higher-quality inbound link campaign, yielding 5 or more links

What could a realistic first month look like on a 14 action item plan?

The first month is usually spent getting the site’s on-page SEO ducks in a row and start planning our first “power page”. Typically it looks something like this:

(1) Keyword research to determine initial list of main and secondary keywords to focus on first (homepage)
(1) Develop, optimize, and implement homepage title tag & description for home page
(1) Implement basic conversion goal tracking
(1) Remove organic search spam from Google Analytics
(1) Optimize ~5 images
(2) Research and develop a list of ~10 link creation targets
(1) Study link creation target content and linking trends
(1) Create power page topic
(1) Power page content framework planning
(4) Start creating a power page (these four action items cover the first 600 words of an eventual 1500+ word piece of content)

What could a realistic second month look like on a 14 action item plan?

Bigger tasks will need to be broken into a couple of action items. Here are some potentially bigger tasks and their respective number of action items. The number in parenthesis represents the number of action items it would take.

(6) Continue creating the power page we started last month (these six action items cover the next 900 words of the piece of content)
(1) Create a quick banner/graphic for a piece of content (revisions included)
(1) Publish a piece of content to the site and optimize the page
(2) Add 10 more link creation targets to our list
(2) Send out a round of e-mails to ~20 link creation targets
(1) Study link creation target content and linking trends
(1) Create our next power page topic