Your Step-by-Step SEO Roadmap Template
SEO roadmaps include a series of tasks supporting overarching business objectives, typically planned for a full year.
One of the hardest parts of building an annual SEO plan is finding your starting point. Technical audit? Content planning? Meta tags? H1s? Link building? There are endless options for SEO improvement and multiple ways to reach your end goal.
Rest assured, you can breeze through building a roadmap after conducting specific types of audits. No fancy tools are necessary - just some time and attention to detail!
This article walks through a streamlined process for building your roadmap from content inventory to presentation, leveraging just Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Whether you work in eCommerce, SaaS, eLearning, or another space; this simplified roadmapping template can keep you focused on what’s important.
How to build an SEO roadmap
Steps to building a roadmap include:
Content inventory, audit, and analysis
Keyword mapping
Technical SEO auditing
Defining action items
Presenting
You can also work with our spreadsheet that sets you up for the audit: SEO audit spreadsheet (copy/paste or download a copy).
Or, skip to the final roadmapping / presentation step with our template: SEO roadmap presentation (copy/paste or download a copy).
Roadmap Step 1: Content Inventory, audit, and analysis
SEO is a mix of content optimization, content creation, and technical factors. If your roadmap is going to include content strategy elements (typically your blog plan), read my thorough SEO Content Strategy guide. It walks you through the following steps in detail:
Content inventory: Export pages and associated data from Google Analytics. You’ll want to consider organic traffic, leads, and revenue at a minimum.
Content audit: In this phase, create columns for additional manual data to further categorize pages. You could include the page type, stage of the marketing funnel, or topic cluster.
Content analysis: Next, analyze findings from the previous steps. Do you notice any content gaps or trends in top-performing content? Ask yourself:
What does top lead-generating content have in common?
What does top traffic-generating content have in common?
What does top revenue-generating content have in common?
A simple Word document listing your insights is sufficient.
Blog ideation: Leverage your insights to brainstorm content ideas. You want to fill the gaps (in topics, the customer journey, or format types), while considering how to duplicate previous success.
Do listicles perform well? Create listicles where you have topical gaps.
Once validating a long list of ideas with search volume, you can easily slot the content creation into your roadmap. Our content ideation worksheet can help you plan efficiently.
Roadmap Step 2: Keyword map
A keyword map should be the foundation of all your SEO plans. Why would you waste your time on hefty site speed optimizations and restructures when you can make small meta title tweaks?
A keyword map sets the basis for “easy win” work (like on-page optimizations, meta tags, and internal linking). Keyword maps also help you find the best pages and anchor text for link building.
First, crawl your website with Screaming Frog or use a sitemap to build a spreadsheet of SEO pages. Then, note which keywords pages rank for each page (which can be found in Search Console) and which keywords you’d like to target (based on your own keyword research).
Are your SEO pages ranking for ideal keywords? Anywhere there’s a mismatch - begin by revisiting the title tags, internal links, and headings in your annual plan.
Roadmap Step 3: Technical SEO Audit
Next, conduct an SEO Audit to determine technical areas of focus for the next year. A thorough technical audit can be broken into a few buckets:
Indexability (examine sitemaps, robots.txt, no-index tags)
URL structure (examine keyword density, character length, and page depth)
Redirects (examine loops, chains, and 404s)
Site speed (examine scores in site speed tests like GTmetrix and PageSpeed Insights)
Schema markup (examine errors in Search Console, and consider opportunities from Google’s list of supported schema)
Roadmap Step 4: Action Items
At this point, the previous steps you completed created three buckets of (future) tasks:
Content inventory and analysis: tasks surrounding content publishing and refreshing
Keyword map: tasks surrounding on-page optimizations, internal links, and link building
Technical SEO: tasks surrounding site speed optimizations, schema, redirect optimizations, site map improvements, and URL structure
As you tackle issues and opportunities uncovered, what tasks can you plan? Which pages and keywords will you prioritize?
Your action items should include a mix of low-effort high impact work and high-effort, high-impact work.
Roadmap Step 5: Presentation
Finally, it’s time to simplify and present your findings. This step requires some balancing - you want to share your insights and back up your ideas without going too “in the weeds.” Furthermore, pointing out errors can sound negative or even offensive. Make sure you’re carefully wording your findings (think opportunities over issues).
This presentation template gives a high-level overview of your audit, highlights insights and plans of action, and simplifies your roadmap with a quarterly outline (while keeping positive language in mind).
Roadmaps and website phases
Is it year 1 of your SEO program, or year 5? Keep in mind how websites will transition priorities each year.
Usually, the initial phase (or first roadmap you build) is a bit more intensive. It can be immense legwork to build a keyword map and perform 50+ pages worth of keyword research. You might even decide to focus on new website sections each year, or perform intensive keyword maps every 3+ years to give yourself a break.
The initial phases of SEO should include optimizing what you have while producing minimal new content. Once you feel your website is in order, you can shift your focus toward new content creation and backlink acquisition.
The more optimized content and backlinks the better, so you’ll always have endless opportunities ahead!
Why SEO roadmaps are worth the effort
An SEO roadmap serves as a strategic guide, outlining the steps and milestones necessary to enhance a website's visibility in search engine results.
Planning and organizing SEO efforts in advance helps:
Establish a clear connection to business initiatives and SEO
Provide SEO visibility to cross-functional teams and stakeholders
Effectively allocate resources
Improve tracking: with documented, scheduled activities, it’s easier to reflect on past work and results
Prevent “wheel spinning” and wasted time determining what to work on next
Encourage task batching, which improves efficiency (ex. Spending two weeks building internal links sitewide vs. two weeks finding different ways to optimize a single page)
Smooth collaboration between teams - if the SEO roadmap is approved, employees can execute tasks with less friction
For these reasons, SEO roadmaps are indispensable tools for businesses to thrive. Be sure to allocate a few weeks each year to craft your audits, roadmaps, and presentations - it’s well worth the effort!
Thanks for reading! You might also like…
