The Secret SEO Skill is Project Management

Search Engine Optimization can be pretty complex, and requires technical expertise. But I think the secret SEO skill that many people overlook is project management.

In order to be effective in SEO efforts, it’s really important to be able to focus on a lot of different tasks – SEO audits and analysis, keyword research, content strategy, social media, on page SEO of every page on the site, site structure, page load speed, inbound links focused tasks, SEO marketing campaigns, and more.

Identifying, organizing, and tracking of all of these tasks can be pretty challenging.  This is where project management, and a project and task management tool, becomes really important.

The Need for Project Management

Consider on page SEO. Developing a checklist for on page SEO can be really helpful.  Turning that checklist into trackable tasks that can be assigned to team members with due dates improves productivity and helps to ensure thoroughness.  Using a tool that allows the SEO team to collaborate on and across tasks is really important as it can serve as a way to also document common issues and build a knowledge base.

At a simple level, part of good SEO is just being thorough – making sure the low hanging fruit have been taken care of. After all, this sends clear trust signals to the search engines that the website is being attended to – an important consideration for relevancy and for accuracy.

Developing a project plan, with tasks that can be assigned, prioritized and tracked to completion is often overlooked in the execution of SEO.  The importance of project management increases based on the size and complexity of the effort, as well as the competitive situation that SEO effort is focused on.

But I think website SEO efforts can benefit from project management and using a project management system.  Even small websites in a moderately competitive environment still has several tasks that should be managed and tracked.  This is where project management comes into play.

Project Management Tools for SEO

There are some great solutions for SEO projects.  You can use project management tools like Asana, Basecamp, or Microsoft Project. All of these tools will allow you to create templates of the common SEO tasks so that you can reuse them across projects.

Using a project management tool is a great way to pull together the tasks that need to be performed from the audit / analysis from all the SEO tools that might be used for the project. It’s not uncommon to use 5 or more SEO tools on any give SEO project.  There needs to be one central place that pulls together the tasks that are identified from each of these tools. Building a project plan can be essential.

Better yet, using a tool like UpCity can be a real benefit.  It already prescribes a set of tasks and a knowledge based to drive SEO efforts, and it pulls together these tasks from a variety of sources for you. UpCity is great for beginning and expert SEOs alike.  Full disclosure – Changescape Web (the St. Louis SEO for Growth certified partner) is an UpCity Top Local Agency for St. Louis.

The secret SEO skill – Project Management

SEO Project management helps you keep track of the variety of tasks that need to be accomplished in any SEO project – including tasks that are identified using other SEO tools. Accountability, timeliness, thoroughness, and communication will all be improved, which typically translates to better results. Of course you need to be working on the right set of tasks, and this is where the technical aspects of search engine optimization comes in.

But using a project management template for SEO projects, or better yet a tool that has already defined several key tasks based on SEO best practices, can make a huge difference in the success of your project. Project management might just become your secret SEO skill.