🥞 The SEO Strategy Stack

A framework to help debug your SEO strategy

A key problem with SEO strategy work is that it can be messy and formless.

If you create SEO strategies within a business (even with all the literature and books on creating strategies), you can often be left asking these questions:

• What exactly makes up an SEO strategy?

• How do I know my SEO strategy is good or bad?

• How do we connect our prioritised SEO plans to delivery teams’ backlogs?

It wasn’t until I learned how to put a product strategy and roadmap together, that I learned the components that help connect strategy work to delivery work.

As a consultant working with clients over the last few years, I’ve improved upon these components and created a framework that helps me quickly debug strategies.

I call this framework: The SEO Strategy Stack.

In this newsletter, we are going to cover the following:

1. ⛔ The Problem with SEO Strategies

2. 🥞 What is the SEO Strategy Stack?

3. 💽 The SEO Strategy Stack Components

4. 🤷 Why is the SEO Strategy Stack Useful?

5. ⏯️ Good vs Bad vs Misaligned Strategies

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⛔ The Problem with SEO Strategies

In today’s ever-changing world, a company's SEO campaign succeeds based on the quality of its website.

This isn’t just about SEO tactics but also about combining business and customer data points to drive results for the business. This puts pressure on us as SEOs to deliver strategies that drive a company’s strategy.

Tom Critchlow at the SEOMBA has already written a great newsletter on how strategy work is just about putting our actions into a context wrapper. In Tom's own words:

“Yes, strategy matters. Sure - putting together a strategy is more work than doing an SEO audit and throwing all the recommendations at the product team. But a lack of strategy - a lack of some cohesive wrapper that communicates the project clearly and with a business case - is why SEO recommendations don’t get prioritized and why SEO teams get marginalized.”

How to make an SEO strategy, SEOMBA, Tom Critchlow

In Tom's newsletter, he highlights that the wrapper we use to put our actions into context is based on a kernel of the strategy concept mentioned in the book Good Strategy / Bad Strategy.

“The kernel of a strategy contains three elements: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action.”

This is a great newsletter and concept to apply to your SEO strategies to get teams bought into your work.

Interestingly, the kernel of the strategy aligns with how product teams identify impactful problems, crafting a prioritised plan and roadmap to change user behaviour that drives business results.

In short, SEO strategies are starting to look a lot like product strategies.

However, if SEOs are going to be using the kernel of the strategy and focus on solving problems, then we need to talk about a major problem product teams face.

Strategy work can be unstructured and challenging to connect to delivery work.

When constructing an SEO strategy, the “vision”, “goals”, “strategies”, and “roadmaps” can often get confusing and messy. Especially when working with product and engineering teams.

This means that strategy work can be frustrating for SEO professionals, especially when companies and teams jump from problem to problem.

It can feel like strategies are missing context or information that helps keep plans clear, focused and connected to the wider company strategy.

A lack of context of information leads to the same problem: prioritization.

When a company does not have a clear or focused strategy, it can be difficult to prioritise, or sequence execution work ruthlessly, which is crucial in communicating priorities to other teams.

This lack of focus stops other teams from understanding precisely what you are asking them to do, as they are overloaded with different requests. It also makes the SEO team look like we are disconnected from the wider company goal and strategy (which is what other teams are focusing on).

This results in our SEO initiatives being rejected.

Again, this will be frustrating for many SEOs, as it is hard to diagnose exactly what the problem is with a strategy.

The result of being unable to pinpoint the problem is an SEO strategy that lacks clarity, is poorly communicated, and, from other teams’ points of view, doesn’t easily connect to the wider company strategy or execution work.

Instead, we need a framework that allows SEOs to debug our strategies so we can clearly define, communicate and connect the company's strategy to execution work.

I called this framework The SEO Strategy Stack.

🥞 What is the SEO Strategy Stack?

The SEO Strategy stack is a framework to help SEO professionals diagnose and debug their strategies.

Rather than viewing strategies as an unstructured concept, The SEO Strategy Stack helps SEO professionals think about their strategies as a series of components (stacks) that connect together.

Each stack layer builds on the previous layer and helps SEO professionals build a clear, focused, prioritised plan that connects the company strategy to your execution work.

If a strategy lacks one of these components, it can cause the strategy to be unclear, and these gaps can impact the execution work.

Note: The idea of “stacks” isn’t original. There are a lot of great product leaders out there willing to share their ideas, and I built this framework based on The Product Strategy Stack. I’ve linked to the article at the bottom of the newsletter.

💽 The SEO Strategy Stack Components

The SEO Strategy Stack is made up of seven components:

1. 💼 Business Strategy - The strategic initiatives, or a prioritised plan, that the business focuses on to drive value for the business.

2. ⚠️ Problem Statement - The key challenge that aligns with the business strategy, the SEO team must overcome to help drive the business forward.

3. 📄 SEO Strategy - A guiding policy and set of prioritised coherent actions (initiatives and opportunities) that will help overcome the key challenge of the business.

4. 📈 SEO Goals - A set of clear goals that can help measure the success of the SEO strategy, help indicate overcoming the key challenge, and drive value for the business.

5. 🚦 SEO Prioritization - Ruthlessly prioritizing and sequencing coherent actions (initiatives and opportunities) within the SEO strategy.

6. 🛣️ SEO Roadmap - A prioritised plan that outlines how the strategy (initiatives and opportunities) will be implemented over time, usually a 6-12 month period.

7. ✅ SEO Backlog - A prioritised list of tasks for teams to complete that outline how the roadmap will be implemented over time.

All of these components stack together and help an SEO ruthlessly prioritise at each step to make sure that the strategy clearly connects delivery work to the wider company strategy.

These seven components can be grouped into three categories of work:

• 🌀 Discovery - The SEO team focuses on understanding the business, the key problem and potential valid opportunities to overcome the problem to drive results for both users and the business.

• 🚀 Strategy - The SEO team prioritises opportunities, sets measurable goals and creates a plan to overcome the problem to drive business goals. It is the SEO strategy that is presented to other teams.

• 🚚 Delivery - The SEO team creates a sequence for the opportunities and works with teams to implement the strategy.

In a previous newsletter, I discussed SEO Discovery and why good discovery work creates good strategies. In the SEO Strategy Stack, the discovery work is the first part of building a clear and focused strategy.

🤷 Why is the SEO Strategy Stack Useful?

The SEO Strategy stack is a valuable tool for helping SEO teams debug and identify issues with their strategies and plans. This is because each component precedes and connects with the previous component.

I like to imagine a thread that connects each component, and your strategy is only as good as your ability to connect all of these concepts.

If one component is missing or misaligned, it means that an SEO professional can use this framework to analyse:

• ⬇️ Top-down: They can quickly use the top components to identify if:

  • They understand the company's strategy and goals

  • They understand if the problem they’ve identified is aligned with the company strategy

  • They understand if the guiding policy and set of initiatives will help solve the problem.

• ⬆️ Bottom-up: They can quickly use the bottom components to identify if:

  • They have ruthlessly prioritised the initiatives to hit their SEO goals

  • They have created a clear and focused SEO roadmap for the team

  • They have ruthlessly prioritised tasks in the SEO backlog to drive initiatives forward

By analysing our SEO strategies using the SEO Strategy Stack from the bottom-up and top-down, we can better understand and narrow down why our plans aren’t being implemented.

📈 What Problems Does the SEO Strategy Stack Solve?

I’ve found that the SEO Strategy Stack helps me overcome three fundamental problems that many SEO professionals face when creating strategies.

⏫ #1 Framing SEO work into problems to solve

Product and engineering team culture is all about solving problems for the business.

As an SEO transitioning to a Product Manager role, one of the mindset shifts I had to get my head around was being less solution-focused and more problem-focused.

Many SEOs fall into the trap of copying and pasting actions from SEO tool providers with no apparent reason why it needs to be solved.

Instead, we need to do is frame our SEO work into a series of problems that need to be solved.

As SEOs, we must constantly ask: Is this a problem worth solving? If it is, it can help drive results for both the customer and the business.

How can we, as SEO professionals do this? This is why SEO discovery is an integral part of strategy work (especially in product and engineering teams).

The SEO Strategy stack forces any SEO team to review our SEO plans and make sure we’re setting a critical challenge that, if overcome, will help the company drive its strategy forward.

Once we have identified this key challenge, we can then start to focus on the guiding policy, initiatives, and opportunities that are going to help overcome the key SEO challenge.

This is how most strategies are structured, using the kernel of the strategy

⏫ #2 Aligning our SEO work with company strategy

One main issue many SEOs have is that we lack the ability to align our “bottom-up” approach to implementing SEO projects with the wider company strategy.

If you’ve ever worked in any organisation in-house, you know how vague a company's direction or goals can be.

Sometimes, it can simply be, “We want to drive more revenue and traffic to our B2B product”, or it can be as complicated as “, Our business wants to enter 5 international markets and target 10 different languages”.

Detailed or vague, as SEO professionals, we must ensure our work is focused on helping drive the business forward (even when organisations try to jump from problem to problem).

This is why we need to do SEO discovery work to:

• 🗃️ Understand the business - Understand the business by asking key questions and talking to stakeholders to have golden knowledge nuggets.

• 🎯 Define user outcomes - Understand the target audience, their pain points, and what is the exact behaviour we want to change to drive positive business results.

• 🤔 Clarify the problem - Once we deeply understand the business and target audience, we must clarify the problem, ask the right questions and identify potential solutions.

• 🧪 Validate SEO oppurtunities - Finally, we need to ensure the opportunities we've identified to overcome the problem are viable, useable and feasible.

Our ability to do discovery work and clarify a critical problem (usually one of many) allows us to align and focus our SEO work to help contribute to the company strategy.

From this discovery work, we can create a clear and focused plan (strategy) that is the glue that connects the execution work to the business strategy.

Why is this helpful? Because aligning our SEO work with the company strategy helps put execution or delivery work into context.

Allowing us to understand the context will help us ruthlessly prioritise our SEO work with product and engineering teams relative to the wider company strategy.

🥅 #3 Overcoming the SEO goal problem

One key challenge that many SEOs face is that many confuse setting clear goals with strategy.

Although using revenue, traffic, and other key metrics is essential to tracking success in a team, it is vital that we have a clear plan to achieve these goals.

A decline in traffic and eventual traffic drop, BUT what is the plan to win?

As SEO professionals, we need to ensure we have a strategy that tells the organisation how we will win, not obsess over the numbers on the scoreboard.

This can be difficult as many businesses conflate SEO with rankings.

The SEO Strategy Stack framework is designed to help SEOs focus on identifying a business problem and creating a plan to overcome that problem.

Then creating SEO goals can be used to track success and help communicate to the rest of the business that the team is winning or needs to change the plan to meet our goals.

⏯️ Good vs Bad vs Misaligned Strategies

The SEO Strategy stack framework can be used to identify good, bad and misaligned strategies.

When using the framework it helped me identify three main types of strategy:

• ✅ Good SEO Strategy: A good SEO strategy connects the SEO execution work with the wider company strategy, it aligns all the components of the stack to help the team keep focused on the winning plan.

• ❌ Bad SEO Strategy: A bad SEO strategy focuses on “bottom-up” actions and doesn’t help the organisation connect the dots between the SEO work and the company strategy.

• 📏 Misaligned SEO Strategy: A misaligned SEO strategy has all the components in the stack but they don’t connect together well and the result is unfocused work that can’t be easily prioritised.

It takes practice and a lot of mistakes to learn how to build a “good strategy”, but I’ve found that The SEO Strategy Stack framework has been a valuable tool in helping me identify problems.

⚡ SEO Strategy Stack Aligns Teams

The SEO Strategy Stack is great because it can help you connect to other team roadmaps and strategies.

This alignment can allow you to align your SEO initiatives with what marketing and product are also trying to get implemented (or jump on projects that align with SEO).

Again, because we’re aligning with the company strategy and goals, it’s easier to get our SEO initiatives and tasks into the developer backlog (as the backlog is dictated by product, marketing and other business initiatives which are signed off by the business).

📌 Summary

We’ve covered a list in this newsletter, so let’s recap:

• SEO strategy work is formless - A key challenge with SEO strategy work is that it can be unstructured, formless and hard to connect to execution work.

• Strategy work is frustrating - For SEO professionals, this can be frustrating as we need to connect our execution work with the wider company goal.

• SEO strategy work needs debugging - We need a framework to help us debug SEO strategies and help us zoom in to take action quickly.

• The SEO Strategy Stack - The SEO Strategy is a structured framework to help SEO professionals diagnose and debug their strategies/plans/action lists.

• Bottom-up and top-down - The framework is designed to help SEOs analyse their strategies from the top-down or bottom-up.

• Solving strategy problems - The framework has helped me frame SEO work to solve problems, align execution work to the wider company strategy and focus on a winning plan than staring at performance metrics.

• Good, bad and misaligned strategies - The framework can help SEO teams quickly identify if their strategy is good, bad or misaligned.

• Align strategy work with other teams - The structured components of the framework can be used to align with other teams’ roadmaps, goals and strategies.

📚 Resources

• How to make an SEO strategy - Tom Critchlow, SEOMBA

• The Product Strategy Stack - Reforge

• Bad Strategy / Good Strategy - Richard P. Rumelt

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