Aleyda Solis explains how to move SEO recommendations from tactical fixes to strategic moves tied to measurable goals. She walks through the difference between tactics, strategies, and goals, then shows a Google Sheets template to document each recommendation's expected impact, effort, and scope.
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your SEO recommendations are likely not strategical enough and that is hurting your SEO results. Why am I saying this? Because unfortunately, many times I see people out there talking about their SEO strategy and I realize that these are just tactics. There's a big misunderstanding of what is a tactic and what is a strategy because many, many times again, they just follow an SEO checklist without ensuring that they align to a larger strategy that connects or achieve an SEO goal that is actually meaningful to the business. This is how you can actually fix this. Let's start by clarifying what is a tactic versus strategy versus goals. So your SEO recommendations are likely at the tactical level. They describe how you will be doing something. An example here, optimize the title, meta descriptions, and heading of category pages or facet pages to make them specifically descriptive and relevant to each. So this is a tactic. They describe how you are going to achieve something, and then the what you will achieve are the strategies. So for example, improve the content relevance and quality of categories and facet pages underperforming for their targeted commercial queries. How do you achieve it? With the recommendations that are tactics. One of the ways is by optimizing titles, descriptions, headings, but also by featuring more products per page, by adding FAQs in the listings, etc. All of this will improve the content relevance and the quality of your categories and facet pages, right? But as you can see, these are all just different ways to achieve this what, right? Your SEO goal is the why, why you want to execute that strategy. In this particular case, improving your organic search traffic of categories and facets for commercially focused queries in 20%. Year over year. So here you can see how all of these are tied together, are aligned, support each other at a different level. If your goal is to improve your categories and facets commercial organic search traffic year over year by 20%, then one of the ways will be by improving content relevance. Another way will be by ensuring the indexability and the internal linking of these pages that are targeting very popular queries too. So there is not only a single way to achieve it, right? And there is different activities that will support you to achieve that. What is really, really important that every single time you recommend something, you ensure it's connected to a larger strategy and that this strategy actually supports you to achieve an SEO goal that is meaningful to your process, that is expected by the decision makers, et cetera. By doing this, you will likely eliminate a lot of fluff in your SEO recommendations, stuff that is nice to have, but not meaningful to have to achieve your actual goals in the first hand. And to help you to do this, I have created this Google Sheets template that for every SEO recommendation or action that you specify, it will ask you to add an SEO goal to achieve with it, as well as to specify and describe the SEO strategy the recommendation is part of. It helps you also to communicate these SEO recommendations and to make them easier to execute by describing the SEO issue to solve or opportunity to leverage with it, the type of content needed, the scope of the implementation, the expected impact and effort to prioritize accordingly, and then of course the coordination so you can manage it more easily with other team members, stakeholders. That are helping you to implement all of this. You have this Google Sheets here linked from this article that I have just updated with a renewed version. You have here the graphic too, so you can take a look and bookmark it to always remember whenever you're recommending something to ensure that SEO recommendation tactic is connected to strategy that is again connected to a meaningful goal. And this is how you are going to ensure to not waste your resources, to not recommend something that is actually not meaningful, and to maximize the chances to win and to make your efforts much more cost-effective. I hope that this helps. And if you have liked the video, remember to like it. Remember to subscribe to Crawling Mondays for more SEO cheat sheets. Until the next one, bye-bye. Bye-bye.
