Managing SEO playbook

How will this SEO playbook help me and my business?

Our playbook series of marketing templates is aimed at helping you quickly review the main activities you need to work on and get better results from different digital marketing channels. This playbook focusses on search engine optimization (SEO), giving you a 'fast start' checklist of all the factors businesses need to get right for SEO success. This helps give the top-level view with a simple list of factors to consider.

You might feel the draw of "newer" forms of marketing, such as content marketing or social media marketing - and they certainly have their place - but SEO is still a fantastic way to drive quality visitors to your site. Some businesses and blogs, including Smart Insights, deliver well over half their traffic from organic search through their SEO mastery, or the strength of their brand. We drive almost 80% of our 500,000+ monthly unique visitors from SEO!

How is the SEO playbook structured?

The concept is based on the idea of playbooks in American sports. The coach compiles a book of offensive and defensive plays to be used when their team is in specific situations or has desired results. That's just how our marketing playbooks works – we signpost essential tasks and refer you to the resources you need to complete them.

A marketing playbook defines the types of communications, best practices and optimization techniques that should be used to maximize return-on-investment for different marketing objectives. They are designed to help you prioritize where you need to focus your efforts, with quick links to relevant resources to help you in each area.

With this SEO playbook, we have listed all the steps needed for a strategic review of your organic search marketing aimed at defining improvements to results. The steps are:

• Step 1: Carry out an audit and set your goals
• Step 2: Make sure the engines can find your content
• Step 3: Improve on-page optimization
• Step 4: Create awesome content for SEO
• Step 5: Use content marketing to earn more quality links
• Step 6: Refine your internal linking
• Step 7: Improve SEO through Analytics

Who is the SEO playbook for?

This playbook is aimed at anyone involved in managing SEO who needs a high-level overview of the main activities needed for successful SEO:

• Marketing, e-commerce, and digital marketing managers who need to understand and improve SEO to help review potential improvements to discuss with their in-house team, agencies or consultants, i.e. it will help marketers ask the ‘Smart questions’ to improve SEO results.
• Agencies and consultants who can use it to review their process and techniques, making sure they are aware of the last Google changes and techniques.
• Smaller businesses who can use it to boost their business with SEO without the need to invest in SEO consultants or agencies. budget owners in companies managing paid media activities either via internal specialists or external agencies.
• SEO specialists who can use it to compare against their SEO programme to identify improvements.