Climbing to the top of search engine result pages is not an easy feat, and it’s probably not going to happen all of a sudden. You need to possess a rock-solid strategy and an organized approach to ensure you’re crossing off all those Seo Tasks and hitting your goals.
When it comes to SEO, it is quite natural to think about ranking your website. But one thing that SEO agencies, specifically the ones starting frequently leave out of the equation is the Management of their SEO projects efficiently.
The outcome? SEO projects commence piling up into a hot mess. It’s the sort of chaos you don’t wish to experience in your SEO journey if you have one deadline sequentially with one another.
There’s much more than the technical expertise to turn out a website for performing search results. Before you acquire the result, you ought to think about the journey in managing your projects and addressing the roadblocks for it. This summons for efficient SEO project management and listing out the challenges you face in SEO.
That’s why SEO project management is essential. Rather than centering on random keywords of your website or losing track of backlink opportunities, you’ll be able to tackle all your SEO projects and their tasks in an orderly and focused manner.
The result? More successful projects, less stress, and might be even a better ranking with Search engines.
Managing your Projects
Painlessly manage your SEO projects with SEOScrum, a scrum-based SEO project management Tool.
Just like you have tools for SEO, project management tools are available to organize your tasks, delegate the right people for work, and set deadlines to prevent work bottlenecks
A well-planned SEO campaign has the best chance of getting to the topmost in organic results. This is the importance of proving your worthiness and relevance to your clients. The truth is SEO campaigns consist of a lot of moving parts, hence it’s sometimes tedious to keep on top of it all. Adopting a project management approach for all your SEO tasks not only ensures that SEO efforts and tasks stay on track but also increases your results for your clients as well.
Before diving into the nitty-gritty, let’s start with the necessity and the basics of Project management for SEO and its challenges to overcome in SEO.
Opting Toward SEO Project Management
SEO project management thrives as a framework to handle enterprise-level search visibility projects with high reliability and precision. It’s about guiding and overseeing scope, workflows, time, team members, resources, and money to achieve project goals and KPIs.
The major reason why your company needs SEO project management is to acquire greater productivity and greater efficiency. When you implement structures, protocols, and processes, you’ll achieve more work in less time.
Further to this, When you manage your SEO team well for your company by Agile SEO as well, you’ll unveil deep insights from each project chunk and attain better SEO outcomes that boost team morale!
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. While you properly manage all your efforts in Search engine optimization, you’ll also be able to
- Allocate resources effectively
- Maintain version control
- enhance the quality of deliverables
- Produce deliverables in perfect time and in line with the actual budget.
- Reliably achieve your SEO objectives
- Tracking time
- Increase transparency/visibility of tasks and their growth.
- Automate workflows and repetitive tasks
- Enhance team communication.
- Scale your SEO efforts.
- Enhance morale and efficiency between team members.
- Mitigation of SEO risks
Why SEO Professionals Demand Effective Project Management
If you’re already utilizing a project management platform, you undoubtedly recognize the merits it offers for busy web teams and digital marketers.
If you’re still getting by without one, you must get one as soon as possible. Why do you ask?
Because it could simplify your life and aid you in getting more organized work done in less time. Some of the essential functionalities a better project management platform offers for SEO professionals are
Task management and time management: Whether you’re working as a part of a team or solo, project management tools allow you to assign tasks and get notifications. So that you could more accurately work hours. This will be used to create accurate invoices for the clients.
Accurate planning: From a bird’s eye view of all your campaigns to information (detailed) on how a particular keyword performs, SEO project management tools enable you to create structured plans.
Resource allocation: An SEO project management software would yield glance information about where your resources and budget are going. It is extremely beneficial if you’re running pay-per-click ads.
Reporting: Most Modern project management platforms provide captivating dashboards, and robust reporting features, so you can generate data and analyze data to enhance efficiency. It’s easy to foresee why so many SEO professionals have turned to project management platforms to aid them in staying productive and organized in all their SEO tasks, but there are more options.
Espousing effective project management methods into your SEO campaigns would support them for success in making sure your tasks are planned and accomplished on time.
But before that, just get to know which are the chaos or challenges in the SEO process that paved the professionals to indulge in project management tools for SEO tasks.
Chaos of SEO
You must be ultra-organized with your SEO tasks if you are going to be a successful SEO professional. There are going to be times when you feel you have taken on too much or it isn’t possible to attain everything you have promised on its schedule, with suitable quality control.
To confront this sort of challenge to manage your SEO tasks it’s essential to have proper task management and project management structure. This may permit you to spread the workload over your resources and lessen burnout.
Therefore, to have a Systematized project management approach for your SEO process, get to know all the hurdles that need to be resolved that direct to an organized and aligned SEO approach.
The challenges are deliberated below
Data Fragmentation
Without a centralized tool, SEO teams often face trouble collecting, consolidating, and analyzing data from different sources such as analytics, keyword research, and backlinks. Data fragmentation is the dispersion of the data assets of the organization, caused by the creation of scattering of data and technological silos.
Fragmented links: These are the links consisting of hash in the URL, referred to as fragments. The fragment links could cause problems with SEO as they don’t point directly to the page in question.
Fragmentation of search: Search has fragmented over time, depicting that search plays a role in various contexts and actions that are not necessarily associated with traditional search engines. This makes it challenging for marketers to sustain with the changes and adapt the new strategies accordingly.
Hence this sort of fragmentation is a challenge to handle in all the project tasks of SEO.
Ineffective Communication
Poor communication between the clients and the team members could result in missed deadlines, misunderstandings of project development status, and misaligned goals of SEO tasks.
Effective communication is crucial in SEO specifically when multiple team departments or members are indulged. Without a centralized platform, communication turns out scattered, leading to missed messages or misunderstandings.
Consistent communication must be perpetuated throughout all SEO tasks
SEO is a long-term undertaking and acquiring verifiable outcomes could take a specific amount of consistent effort. However, making your clients engaged during this time process of SEO could be a challenge.
This is specifically true if you are working for any client in a competitive industry, wherein getting an SEO needle could sometimes take many weeks to move on.
Ensuring that your client has the right expectations from your SEO work seems crucial to retaining them.
You should make sure that despite not being an SEO expert, your clients need to understand what you are doing, what is the progress of your work and what you expect to achieve with your work efforts. Hence all your project tasks need to be updated with your client for them to retain with your roadmap.
That’s why, regular and effective communication with your client is highly essential if you wish to drive results for the clients.
The significance of efficient communication within your SEO team is prominently equal and crucial to your work success. This is because an SEO strategy possesses different moving parts and success can be achieved with the contribution of multiple SEO experts and their project tracking.
Regardless of whether you have these professionals in your team or you are all working with freelancers, ensuring communication is made smooth and miscommunication kept to a bare minimum, seems essential to keep on track with a long-term undertaking such as search engine optimization.
Lack of Task Tracking
It is difficult to keep track of the work of the persons who are responsible for particular tasks, their deadlines, and their status leading to missed delays and opportunities.
Without an effective SEO task management tool, it will be challenging to prioritize and organize numerous tasks indulged in SEO such as content creation, optimization, link building, keyword research, performance monitoring, and On-page optimization.
For example, the custom dashboard options of ClickUp and its different views to monitor the task were specifically handy for the project managers.
The thing is, project managers weren’t only monitoring the task’s progress due on a particular day. They also keep an eye on what’s on the horizon and plan for future tasks based on the available bandwidth of the team.
Above is the representation of Task management of your SEO processes with its status., which makes it easier to view the upcoming tasks of the SEO schedule so that we can re-prioritize the items or create more efficient buffers if your team is specifically busy enough.
We can also filter in terms of individual team members to make sure they aren’t overloaded with SEO tasks on a specific week, day, or month. Hence the challenge of task prioritization and tracking its progress can be accomplished through effective project management tools.
Challenges in Keyword Management
Managing keyword research, content optimization for SEO, and tracking the keyword ranking could become time-consuming and disjointed without the presence of dedicated software.
Different SEO solutions are floating around the internet and one of them is an all-in-one SEO tool, allowing you to perform several tasks and retain your website under a single roof. With such SEO software, you could track your keyword ranking and proceed with SEO competitive research, conduct in-depth page audits or website audits, and monitor all your backlinks or the count of other required options.
Managing keyword research, tracking rankings, and optimizing content for SEO can become disjointed and time-consuming without dedicated software.
Hence keyword management challenges can be tackled through SEO tools and efficient project management processes.
Sometimes there may be droppings in ranking, where a cause is technical like a Search Engine algorithm may change. Perhaps it is acquired by a difference in client direction, they may be experiencing budget problems or were in the midst of getting caught.
Have a protocol to examine and rescue the keyword ranking drops. For a client-side issue, determine ways you could assist them through transition and evidence your value.
Bottlenecks in Content Workflow
Coordinating, publishing, and editing the content for SEO outcomes and its workflow could be problematic when there is no streamlined process in hand.
When working without a defined content workflow and clear action plan, there’s a potential for projects to fail or suffer from the earliest stage. Processes and people sit at the heart of content workflows.
When you don’t consider both elements into account while creating your SEO content, things may get messy.
Content could be expensive, and by eradicating the bottlenecks or costly problem areas with content creation, content management, publishing, and workflows you can save money, resources, and time since you minimize inefficiencies and enhance consistency.
Analytics Integration
Integrating SEO data with precise analytics tools like Google Analytics could be cumbersome, making it harder to assess the impact of your SEO efforts.
Do you know that by incorporating the potentials of SEO project management and analytics tools, you would unlock a treasure trove of valuable insights and data for boosting your online presence in SEO?
It’s like a dynamic duo working wonders for your website performance. Imagine having a crystal ball revealing what are the wants of your audience and estimating the next move.
Hence integrating analytics tools along with SEO processes is an essential parameter to keep track of the results of your SEO projects. This challenge needs to be addressed.
With the help of such analytics tools, businesses could track the individual keyword’s performance and its influence on on-site conversions and traffic.
This provokes data-driven decision-making when it comes to optimizing the usage of keywords in marketing and content campaigns
Reporting Hassles
Exploring insightful SEO reports and comprehensive reports without any automated reporting tool for your SEO projects can lead to errors as well as time-intensive ones.
Analytics and reporting seem to be essential to improving and measuring all your SEO results. Analytics and reporting could be challenging for your SEO project management because you should gather, analyze, and interpret data from different sources like the Google Search Console, third-party tools, and Google Analytics.
Reporting data consistently indulges in creating regular reports of your SEO project status or present dashboard to propound the collected data in an organized and clear manner. Those reports must include relevant insights and metrics from both analytics and SEO tools.
Those reports must be created on a predetermined frequency such as monthly, weekly, or quarterly to manage a consistent reporting schedule.
You also ought to create and present a report showcasing your insights and achievements. To resolve this challenge, you can utilize tools and features such as Google Tag Manager, Google Optimize, and Google Data Studio. You can use visualizations and dashboards for simplifying and communicating your data.
Link Building Co-ordination
When it comes to SEO, Coordinating link-building efforts, tracking progress across the teams and outreach will be tedious without the presence of specialized managing tools.
Difficulties in Tracking the SEO Progress
Monitoring the progress of SEO projects and tasks becomes highly challenging when you depend on manual methods like emails or spreadsheets. It is harder to know which SEO tasks have been completed, in overdue, or progress.
Just like how your clients appreciate insights into your performance, you probably wish for an easy view of the entire workflow of your team about your project. It pays to yield immediate answers to questions like
- How are we pacing towards originally planned milestones?
- What have we completed and what are the pending activities that ought to be done?
- Can we pursue additional work from the client for your SEO Completion?
- What tasks fit under every project for the client? What are their deadlines?
Resource Allocation
Allocating resources effectively and efficiently for different SEO tasks could be tricky without a precise overview of project needs.
Effectively allocating team members, different resources, and budgets are essential for the success of SEO. Without a tool for tracking the availability of resources, you might face resource underutilization and conflicts.
Prioritize the SEO tasks based on the potential impacts and do resource allocation accordingly. Assume outsourcing specific tasks in SEO using freelance professionals or do investment for training for your SEO team.
Collaboration of Clients
Articulate SEO efforts with your respective clients. Without a unified platform for efficient client collaboration, receiving feedback for your SEO tasks and sharing the updates of task progress could be cumbersome.
If you’re lucky enough to arrange SEO project managers, you might have a good system to keep all your clients in the loop. But speaking from experience, I’ve found that even if you dedicate some time to these updates, conflicting time zones, and busy schedules make it tedious to manage consistent communication with the clients.
Project management software could assist this sort of work for you. By lending your clients sufficient access to the specific task views, and the project timelines, they could take a peek at the ongoing progress and efforts at any time.
Be confident in your services and abilities, however, don’t be full of yourself that you miss if there is dissatisfaction on the client side.
Lack of responsiveness to have access to SEO project tracking, delays in invoice payment, or uncharacteristic push-back are the prominent signs that they might be discontent. Avoid those with managing an effective SEO tool.
Technical SEO Management
Tackling technical SEO issues and tracking fixes over the website will be disorganized without dedicated SEO work managing tools.
Technical SEO defines the optimization of your website’s security, performance, speed, and structure for search engines and users.
Technical SEO evolves as challenging as you need to handle different issues such as sitemaps, crawl errors, mobile-friendliness, slow loading, and broken links.
To solve this kind of issue, you can use resources like Google PageSpeed Insights, WordPress Plugins, Google Search Console, and Google Mobile-Friendliness. We can also follow the best practices and web development standards to make sure your website is accessible and compatible.
Competitor Analysis
Collecting and assessing competitors’ data and their strategies might be time-consuming and manual work without the usage of proper tools for those works.
As online competition intensifies, keeping an eye on all your competitors becomes indispensable. The competitive analysis unveils insight into their strategies, content focus, and keyword targeting.
Leverage advanced SEO tools to pick out the keywords your competitors are ranking for and assess the backlink profiles.
Learn from their gaps and successes to devise strategies to differentiate your website from them and provide enhanced value to your target audience.
Monitor the SEO strategies of your competitors and their performance. Determine the opportunities and gains from their pitfalls and successes for refining your approach.
Project Documentation
Maintaining the centralized repository of all your project-related documents, insights and notes could be difficult to maintain.
From SEO strategy plans to fresh content, SEO teams spend plenty of time on documents. Your outsource teams or clients can be more familiar with the shared documents, enabling it an obvious candidate for collaboration.
If you’re using a separate software such as Google Docs or a tool for your project management process like native Docs, you would most certainly be depending on such a helpful tool.
Project documentation software is a solution or a tool aiding the users to create, collaborate, manage, and distribute the essential project documents both internal documents and external documents.
Using a project documental tool, your SEO conflicts make the project process much easier and better, offering a repository for easy referencing. This paves the way for easy collaboration between team members.
This cuts down on the time spent searching email inboxes or folders and enhances efficiency. Make use of delegating a proficient project management tool to do all these tasks.
Deadline Management
Meeting deadlines is critical in SEO and especially without a project management tool, it will be easy to lose track of important dates and outcomes.
This led to several delays in SEO data and opportunities in different SEO campaigns.
Some of the SEO tasks as illustrated above and their deadline management are made convenient with the project management interface.
Once you’ve identified the SEO activities that must be performed and gathered a team that will implement them, it’s the perfect time to segregate the tasks. To ensure that nothing skips your mind and that all expectations and deadlines are met, take advantage of any project management tools best in the industry that do the below tasks.
- Setting milestones for SEO activities and other detailed tasks.
- Creation of charts and slideshows
- List of SEO activities segregated into detailed tasks and projects
- Internal communicators, the possibility to comment on SEO tasks, chats, or forums.
- 24-hour technical support of the SEO tool designer.
Scalability Conflicts
Since SEO projects increase in complexity, maintaining multiple campaigns and multiple clients seems to rise as challenging without proper project management tools.
Time management: Ensure that all the SEO tasks are perfectly completed on time and track the time spent on each task. So that you can solve the issues of task prioritization and allocating resources if needed.
Assigning tasks: Assigning tasks and tracking their progress since it remains a conflict while you are starting the SEO process, project management tools ease the process to coordinate the SEO efforts between team members and make sure the tasks are completed on deadline time.
Tracking SEO progress: tracking the progress of SEO tasks and measuring the SEO effort’s success, can be enabled by better SEO project management tools. This could assist in making sure to focus on the improvement areas and adjusting the SEO strategies accordingly.
Collaboration: Project management tools permit the pursuit of effective team collaboration among the team members, which could support coordinating all the SEO efforts and sharing the SEO ideas.
To resolve the issues of scalability in SEO projects, SEO professionals can opt to utilize project management tools, offering features such as progress tracking, collaboration, time management, task assignment, and centralized information storage.
Additionally, they could invest in the best SEO tools helping with keyword research analysis and tracking.
When your SEO campaign is well run and well managed, it will deliberate the desired outcomes, minimizing the bounce rate and raising the count of User visits. This would lead to your business outreach expansion on a larger scale.
Limited Visibility
Without a centralized platform, SEO team members might not have much visibility of the overall status of projects, leading to a lack of alignment and accountability.
Effective project management for SEO results in overall visibility of SEO assignments, overall progress of tasks, assignments, and more openness.
Training and Onboarding
Introducing new team members for all your SEO processes requires training and onboarding. The training and Onboarding could be problematic without centralized training resources for the SEO-specified tasks.
Data Security
Ensuring confidentiality and security of client data and project details could be a major concern without dedicated security features in a project management tool.
Budget Management
Keeping track of all the SEO expenses, ROI and project budgets could be challenging when the financial data is not integrated.
SEO projects may vary in scope and size, but regardless of the SEO project. It’s important to maintain your client expectations and SEO budget. A good SEO project manager will always make sure that cost is utilized properly, and efficiently following your SEO plan.
Before developing your SEO budget, you must understand first of all how much time the SEO project will take and how much money it will cost.
Do you have resources or would you have to subcontract part of the project? The sooner you know, the better will be your outcomes. If you are unsure about the cost of a particular project or the duration for it, it is best to do planning for this.
Adaptation to the Industry Changes
SEO is an ever-evolving field, being updated with algorithm trends and changes, and staying competitive could be difficult without a presence tool to track this, Search Engines like Google often update the algorithm to offer better search outcomes. Those changes could impact the website’s ranking.
SEO professionals need to get to know about the changes in algorithmic updates at every phase and adjust the strategies accordingly.
This could be a difficult one since it requires quick adaptation to industry-changing trends and constant monitoring to ensure that the ranking of the website doesn’t drop.
What could be done to overcome these algorithmic changes utilized in content?
Stay updated with the latest news from Search engines like Google and check the updates regularly with the use of integrating tools with such news sources. Utilize SEO news sources and forums to stay informed.
To address the industry changes and algorithmic changes for all your SEO processes, assume the following strategies.
Quality content: Prioritize User-centric and quality content for your SEO processes.
User experience: Enhance Website speed, user navigation, and mobile friendliness.
Stay informed: Keep up with the algorithm updates and other industry news.
Adaptability: Be ready to adjust the SEO strategies and content as algorithms evolve.
Data analytics: Do consistent performance monitoring and metrics to make informed adjustments.
Diversify SEO: Integrate different SEO strategies beyond keyword Optimization and research.
Embrace agility to adapt to these shifts, through each algorithm update thriving as a unique opportunity for optimizing your content, improvising user experience, and strengthening the credibility of your website.
Talk to your SEO team and ask them what resources can make their days better and easier, more effective, and more productive.
Task Prioritization
Without a precise system to prioritize your SEO projects and tasks, SEO teams might struggle to concentrate on highly influential activities.
An SEO campaign is built with intention and efficient execution necessitates someone who understands the essential steps.
From research and analytics to website content planning and content creation to technical SEO, there’s more to a game than compiling and posting.
That’s where SEO task management comes in. A project manager ought to be capable of delegating tasks in pursuit of project goals.
Organization and Planning
The project plan isn’t going to get developed by itself. An SEO project manager must not only organize different SEO tasks however he also make sure that the plans made adhere to the overarching marketing strategy.
There are a lot of moving parts to your SEO grind, keyword research, outreach for link building, competitive analysis, copywriting, Google analytics, initial content audits, developing messaging etc.,
The capability to plan and organize all of that seems vital.
Workflow Automation and Task Planning
Manual and repetitive tasks could consume a significant amount of resources and time without the automation capabilities within the project management tool.
With an AI-driven project manager, you could automatically discover, track, and delegate new projects However a separate tool to inhibit all these features is necessary.
- Select pre-made and relevant project plans to get your team starting on new clients.
- Make custom tasks for AI-driven project managers to delegate tasks.
- Add your project teammates, assign the SEO tasks to each of them, and set deadlines for those tasks.
- Automatically acquire auto-generated tasks and updates for newly discovered issues and errors.
SEO responsibilities are diverse, however, there are other repetitive actions made easier by triggering a recurring task. This prevents duplicates, saves your time, and enhances accountability.
- Some of the recurring SEO tasks that must be included in the project management tool are
- Reporting and Data Review
- Team Meetings
- Private 1:1 tasks.
- Industry Resource allocation.
- New and Lost Link audits.
- Technical Audit Check-Ins.
By automating projects through task management software, suitable for your team, you can craft good deliverables, stay in line with the demands of your client, and prevent different problems existing in each project, like not having a clear perception of what ought to be done in every SEO phase.
For this reason, it is significant to use task automation and project management tools such as SEOScrum, Trello, Zapier, Asana, and others.
Increased Risk of Errors
Manually managing all the SEO tasks, and SEO data maximizes the risk of errors happening in every phase of SEO such as broken links, incorrect keyword targeting, and duplicate content.
Targeting the wrong audience is a primary issue with your research and a basic understanding of your users. This messes to cascade an effect on everything commencing from the content you create to the keywords you target. You might still attract the target audience, however, the chances are your conversions would suffer due to the mismatch.
In terms of keywords, the issues go beyond potentially targeting the wrong ones. If you’re targeting only the highly competitive keywords that you have very little chance of ranking on, your outcomes will be in the suffering range. Long tail keywords and keyword variations ought to be incorporated.
So this issue of targeting wrong keywords and SEO progress must be taken over by some SEO tool or it can be integrated with a management tool.
The Merits of Having an Effective SEO Project Management Plan
In your SEO workflow and managing tasks with enhanced work efficiency, streamlined workflow, improved productivity in your SEO journey, and more confidence in your quality content, hit success to your project goals and KPIs.
Effective project management for your SEO efforts is huge. Ranking high in SERPs is achieved rarely by chance, for it takes coordinated and converted plans.
Having a strategic plan, deliberated indirectly that all your SEO team members are working towards a general goal. Everyone knows their responsibilities and role in the SEO optimization process.
SEO planning aids in defining your SEO goals, maximizing conversions, boosting backlinks, generating more traffic, etc., and the scope of work you’ll need to get there.
It permits you to pick your key stakeholders and the project budget to accomplish things.
A proper SEO project management plan means breaking things down to day-to-day. Who’s doing keyword research and what is its progress? What are the deliverables?
Do you need to bring on freelancers to handle individual project tasks? You couldn’t build a website without a proper SEO project plan, treat your SEO strategy as the same.
Bottom Line
The crucial point to walk away with is that SEO is one of the directed processes, not the one occurring by chance. Just like the gym, gains come from consistently compounding effort.
Working once won’t get you outcomes, similarly writing a one-keyword stuffed page won’t boost your SEO ranking, rather manage all your SEO tasks effectively through a convenient power-packed SEO project management software. Keep track of all your SEO efforts and their performance, to foresee what are the prominent ways to enhance your SEO project journey
To see real improvement, it’s wise to assume bringing in an SEO project management that brings out the ins and outs of search, explores the methods to enhance the current strategy, and assists in explicating well-developed leadership qualities by managing the tasks in every phase.
By understanding what might lie on the road ahead, you can get prepared to face the challenges in a better way or rectify the issues prior not with apprehension or fear but with composure and poise. This takes control to move your SEO journey on a smooth track and gain positive results for all your SEO efforts and organizing approach.
Empower your SEO tasks and indulge a qualified internal team member to craft and manage all your SEO projects to overcome all the challenges protruding from the SEO process.
This post first appeared on Introducing SEOScrum: Redefining SEO Team Management Tool Excellence!, please read the originial post: here
