Better To Do Lists

In SEO, the biggest factor that can impact on success is the amount of time you can spend on your activity.

Whether it is time you want to spend writing content, sourcing links, or performing analysis on your traffic to find new opportunities for gains, the key factor is time.  The more efficiently you can work, the more you can get done, and provided you know what you’re doing, the more effective your activity can be.

Better To Do Lists

A simple to do list for an SEO campaign might look like this:

• keyword research
• rewrite content
• check internal links
• review page footer
• analytics check
• …

This might tell you what needs doing, but beyond giving you information about the actions that need to be completed, it tells you very little.  Most people produce to do lists that contain too little information.  It makes more sense to provide a mini brief for each action, so the “check internal links” item might be like this:

Check Internal Links

Key items:

• Update footer links,
• Check for broken links using AMPC crawler
• Check Out of date product links in blogs

Still not enough though.  The to do list is still missing a couple of things – a time, and a deadline.  Whether you are working agency or client side, there will always be factors that govern when things need to be done by.  Things like product launches, PR activity, development close-outs, and the like are all key factors.  Sometimes these give you more time to do things – if no development work can be carried out for a month, then there is no point in focusing on that type of activity when other things are more pressing.

Do the things that are most urgent first.

Setting a limit on time is also vitally important if you want to be efficient.  The key thing is to be realistic about how long things will take.  If you are not realistic about how long a task will take, the likelihood is that you will over run the first task on your list, and then every other item will be delayed.  Allow for over runs in your schedule, but don’t allow for time wasting.

Don’t plan too long.  Your to do list should be about the things you need to get done.  It should not be a whole month, or even a week.  It should be about getting your priorities straight rather than being a set of long term goals.

Summary!

A to do list should be about doing.  You need to make sure that it does that.  It needs to prompt you about what’s important, and what you need to do.

• Provide detail
• Prioritise actions
• Plan realistically
• Plan effectively