Frequently Asked Questions:

What are some typical examples of action items?

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The number in parenthesis represents the number of action items it would take.

Content Creation Action Items:

• (1) Plan a piece of authority content
• (1) ~150 words of writing (includes revisions)
• (1) Create a quick banner/graphic for a piece of content (revisions included)
• (1) Publish a piece of content to the site 

Link Building Action Items:

• (1) Research and develop a list of ~5 link creation targets
• (1) Evaluate a competitor’s backlink profile for reverse-engineering purposes
• (1) Find ~2 broken link building opportunities

Architecture and User Experience Action Items

• (1) Implement conversion goal tracking
• (1) Develop, optimize, and implement homepage title tag & description for one page
• (1) Warm up our inbound link creation targets
• (1) Create an e-mail address and connect it to our email system
• (1) Study link creation target content and linking trends
• (1) Keyword research
• (1) Develop a better title tag infrastructure for the subpages
• (1) Optimize ~5 images
• (1) Remove organic search spam from Google Analytics
• (1) Set up segmenting in Google Analytics to drill down search analytics
• (1) Set up phone call tracking service, such as CallFire (you would pay for the service directly)

What if a task is bigger than an action item?

Bigger tasks will need to be broken into a couple of action items. Here are some potentially bigger tasks and their respective number of action items. Anything a little more complex than the single action items above will consist of multiple action items. Here are a few examples:

• (4) Set up a split testing service and a test
• (4) Move standalone blog to the main domain
• (2) Create and send an outreach/followup campaign
• (5) On-page optimization of one page including keyword research and ~450 words of content creation
• (5) Guaranteed DA30+ in-content backlink
• (4) Guaranteed DA20+ in-content backlink
• (3) Guaranteed DA10+ in-content backlink
• (30) Higher-quality inbound link campaign, yielding 5 or more links

What could a realistic first month look like on a 14 action item plan?

The first month is usually spent getting the site’s on-page SEO ducks in a row and start planning our first “power page”.  Typically it looks something like this:

• (1) Keyword research to determine initial list of main and secondary keywords to focus on first (homepage)
• (1) Develop, optimize, and implement homepage title tag & description for home page
• (1) Implement basic conversion goal tracking
• (1) Remove organic search spam from Google Analytics
• (1) Optimize ~5 images
• (2) Research and develop a list of ~10 link creation targets
• (1) Study link creation target content and linking trends
• (1) Create power page topic
• (1) Power page content framework planning
• (4) Start creating a power page (these four action items cover the first 600 words of an eventual 1500+ word piece of content)

What could a realistic second month look like on a 14 action item plan?

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Bigger tasks will need to be broken into a couple of action items. Here are some potentially bigger tasks and their respective number of action items. The number in parenthesis represents the number of action items it would take.

• (6) Continue creating the power page we started last month (these six action items cover the next 900 words of the piece of content)
• (1) Create a quick banner/graphic for a piece of content (revisions included)
• (1) Publish a piece of content to the site and optimize the page
• (2) Add 10 more link creation targets to our list
• (2) Send out a round of e-mails to ~20 link creation targets
• (1) Study link creation target content and linking trends
• (1) Create our next power page topic

What kind of results can I expect?

Our plans typically generate a positive ROI. Though, the actual results vary heavily from client to client. ​

What if I want my team to take care of some of the action items and just have you do the things we don’t want to do?

During the engagement, we will reach out to you via email at the beginning of each new period and let you know the action items for the upcoming month. If you have any concerns with the plan, just reply back and let us know within a few business days and we can adjust from there.

How does reporting work?

Our “monthly updates” essentially serve as an SEO report.

They include a look at how your KPI’s (sales, leads generated, e-mail signups etc) are being affected by organic traffic, a look at how the overall organic traffic is changing, a look at how the current traffic compares historically, and any relevant thoughts on new challenges or opportunities we’ve uncovered in our monthly analysis.

We also give a letter grade for each of our Three Pillars of SEO along with some perspective on why they got the letter grade they did. ​

Lastly, the monthly update has a list of the action items (or suggestions) for the month, along with accountability for the action items from previous month(s) and how they’re coming along.

With these SEO programs, you can sit back and relax and have the action items taken care of on your behalf – you don’t even have to reply to the email. Or if you’d prefer we spend your action items in another area, just let us know within a few business days of receiving the monthly update and we’ll use that time in a way that works better for your business.

This give you flexibility and and control, as you want it.