Prioritizing SEO Tasks

SEO can be a complex, and very involved process. It can also be a very expensive process. When a budget is limited, where do you put the effort first?

Typically, there are things that do a lot, for little effort. Then there are things that do a moderate amount, for moderate effort. And there are things that do very little, but take a great deal of effort to accomplish.

In prioritizing SEO, it only makes sense to do the easy effective things first, and to save the harder stuff that gains less for later. To determine what that is, we figure the initial cost or  time involved, and we figure the likelihood of it coming back to us within a year. If it is likely to do so, then the effort or expense is likely to be justified.

The SEO equation varies some from site to site, and target market to target market. Still, there are some things that we can generalize about. One of those, is which things should be done (assuming nothing has been done) and in what order.

1. Good content. Make sure every page in the site has high quality content that is indexable by search engines.  This is relatively expensive in comparison to other tactics, but it is CRITICAL. If you can do nothing else, do this. If you must pay for one page at a time to be edited, do it. Nothing else will help you nearly as much as good content.
2. Title tag. Pretty much the next most important thing. A good one can help your site, a bad one can hurt it. An indifferent one won’t do either.
3. Good site and link structure. The links from page to page, and their categorization is the next most powerful SEO on-page factor.
4. We then get down to a plethora of elements such as top text, meta tags, alt-tags, formatting, filenames, and other minor factors. These are things that are generally done, not because they are powerful, but because they are easy to do, and they add up to a reasonable amount together.

There are other things far beyond this – but the benefit to cost ratio declines to the point where they are not affordable to many startups or struggling businesses.

You’ll notice that backlinks are not on that list. This is because they are so time and resource intensive that getting them is typically something that a business owner has to either pay for, or do, over the long term. They should be done, consistently, alongside any other SEO work that is being done.

It is impossible to make a complete list of SEO priorities in order. But the above list is designed to help site owners understand what will make the biggest difference, and which elements will give them the best return on investment.