What's in Your SEO Plan?

Below is a list of reports and actionable lists to carry over to your project management system (or spreadsheet). The planning phase might take up to a month or more, but definitely will save you a lot of time and frustration later in the campaign. Do Remember, this is boilerplate, so you can switch in new research and datamining tasks you pick up from events. Isn't it nice to have a place to start putting the "stuff"?
1. Obstacle Analysis Report (OAR) - This report will help you discover potential crawl and indexing issues. It is mostly focused on how search engine or Crawler friendly a website is. Criteria might include: checking for broken links, dead links and any duplicate contents, analyzing your HTML and XML sitemaps, optimizing robots.txt and .htaccess files, to help crawlers get to the content you want indexed and away from the content you don't. The OAR might also include a review of Google Webmaster or some other tools and Google Analytics. Basically, your On-page "stuff" goes here.
2. Competitor Analysis Report (CAR) - This is your baseline report, your Day 1, your "aha" moment, where you get to discover some exciting things about your competition, and some occasionally depressing things about your current SEO performance. Having access to Hit-wise is the most ideal starting point (if you can afford it). If not, tools such as Compete.com, SEMRush, KeywordCompetitor, and OpenSiteExplorer.org can give you really nice insight into where your competitors are earning links, what keywords they are getting traffic from (AdWords(Campaign), Referrals and Organic search), and even tell you how much more money they spent on specific keywords last month versus the month prior (a keyword performance indicator).
3. Link Analysis Report (LAR) - This report is fun. Using tools like webmaster or any other available tools, you'll be seeking out and creating an organized inventory of link opportunities. Categorize your opportunities by classifications such as: Web Directory, Business listing Directory, Industry Blog, Regional Blog, Industry Portal and Forum, Industry Experts, Niche Social Networks, and so forth. From here you have a few choices of how to store the information. I prefer Google Docs; you can prefer any other available tool. If you do use a Google spreadsheet, break your classifications into their own tabs or link building becomes unmanageable.
4. Keyword Discovery Report (KDR) - You'll already have a boatload of data from the first three reports to help with this, possibly the most important, report. You can also explore a number of other tools to help tally up all the keyword opportunities. WordTracker and Google AdWords will provide some excellent ideas, but nothing will beat what you'll find in your own web analytics and Webmaster Tools (provided you are actually tracking conversions and/or sales). With competitor data, you can run pivot tables in Excel to learn about the frequency of keywords the major competitors appear to be receiving traffic from. Purge out the terms that are too broad or not searched enough to be bothered with, sort by relevancy and search volume and you've got yourself a list of keywords to optimize for.
Now that you have all this required data, what the heck do you do with it? Here's where actionable items or deliverables come into play.
1. Put your OAR items into a To-Do List within your project management system (under the milestone of On-Page SEO)
2. Put your CAR items into a Google spreadsheet so you can track and monitor changes over time
3. Put your LAR classifications into one or more To-Do List within your project management system (under the Off-Page SEO milestone), put the opportunities into a spreadsheet or any other available tools.
4. Put your KDR into a Google Docs spreadsheet, create a new tab called Content Tracking Spreadsheet with a column for just the top 100 or so keywords, and create columns to track Page Name, Title, Meta Description, Has Video?, Image Name, Image Attributes, Has 450+ words of Content? Matt Cutts did not Throw Up, Is Engaging? Etc. In your PM system, your content writing tasks can be assigned (put the list under the On-Page SEO milestone)
Now that the technical stuff is done, you get to start the creative and social media campaign planning. Pull a group of some super smart people into a room for a full day and come out with awesome link wheel, link bait, widget, tools, and other link building strategies to add under your respective milestones.

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