The document should look much like any other plan that you’ll create, for instance your business
plan. In this plan, you should have an area for background information, marketing information,
plans for growing the business, and plans for managing problems that may arise.
An SEO plan is very similar. You’ll have your current standings, the goals that you plan to hit, and
the marketing efforts that you plan to make for each page (or for the site as a whole). You’ll even
have the capital expenditures that you plan to encounter as you implement your SEO plan.
You’ll also want to include the strategies you plan to use. Those strategies can be efforts such as submitting
your site or pages from your site to directories manually and planning the content you’ll use
to draw search crawlers, or they can be keyword marketing plans or pay-per-click programs you
plan to use. Also be sure to include a time line for the testing and implementation of those efforts as
well as for regular follow-ups.
Follow-up is also an essential part of your SEO plan. Many people believe they can develop and
implement an SEO plan and then just walk away from it. The truth is, however, that SEO is not just
a one-time event. It’s an ongoing process that requires testing, monitoring, and often re-building.
A good plan for conducting follow-ups is to plan for them quarterly. Some companies will choose to
follow up and reassess their SEO bi-annually, but to be truly effective quarterly is much better. One
thing to keep in mind, however, is that following up on your SEO efforts too soon is non-productive.
In many cases, it takes at least three months to get a clear picture of how successful your efforts are.
Conducting an evaluation before that three-month mark could have you chasing after an elusive SEO
goal that doesn’t really exist. Or worse, it could lead you away from a successful SEO strategy.
Give your plan at least three months but no more than six between checkups. Once you create the
habit of re-evaluating your SEO efforts on that time schedule, it will be much less time consuming
than you assume.
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