Time’s up. Your big strategic think is over.

How cool is a profession where every vertical you work in presents different challenges and opportunities and, every week, the ecosystem we operate in evolves? The challenge of SEO is hugely rewarding and exciting and if you’re like me, solving the problem is by far the best bit of a project.

The other thing about SEO is the resulting traffic is hugely valuable so businesses want to spend money gathering the strategic secrets to free traffic and conversion. I’m not saying having a detailed planning phase is not important, it clearly is. But there comes a time in every project that you need to park the thinking, get your team together and release your rank-enhancing thoughts into the wild.

We’ve studied the real SEO winners. Those that take a huge slice of their market’s SEO traffic. I believe it is this transition from planning to doing that separates the winners from the losers, not a significantly different strategy. And that’s where the phrase “doing is a ranking factor” comes from.

Once we understood this we were able to look at how technology can be used for both the planning and implementation phases, in addition to providing the control loop at the end to show you whether the plan works and what needs to evolve the next time around.

Obvious features required:

• Project team with permissions
• Task lists with due dates and priorities on each task
• Tasks that can be assigned and reassigned to team members
• Email alerts when you’ve been assigned a task
• Attaching files

Less obvious but very important:

• Reporting on who’s doing what and when – I am sorry to say that some people do what’s inspected not what is expected. If you’re an agency with clients, they want to see what is being done. When they can, they invest.
• Recording what was done against changes in rankings and traffic – there’s no better motivation to do more than seeing your efforts deliver results.
• Link data interaction recording. For example ‘my colleague thought this link source was poor and suggests we don’t even open it’ (2 minutes of scanning average website saved and invested in a good website), and ‘John is already talking to this blogger, I’ll chat to John about this before I make it look like we not very organized’ (5 minutes of blogger outreach saved and reputation protected).

Other essentials:

• More accurate, segmented link data that stopped you wasting lots of time and wishing you we not assigned the link building task
• And so on… there are more, but these are the essentials.

Try Linkdex out, do more and rank higher

Perhaps try these features in Linkdex, for which you can sign up to a free trial, and see what a difference they make. And please let me know how you get on.