Ben Ballance

What’s the bare minimum documents you need to get started for an in-house SEO program?

Since coming across The Kool-Aid Factory, I’ve been thinking a lot about how documents are used to clarify, record, and organize work within an organization.

The problem I’ve found with trying to institute a new document or practice within an organization is staying power. Inevitably, there’s a big excitement when something first rolls out, followed by a fairly consistent pattern of usage, followed by a slow, sad decline as the document gets unwieldy or otherwise useless.

A bit like this:

With that in mind, this is an attempt to sketch the simplest set of documents to get started for in-house SEO teams.

There will almost certainly be holes, but I think I’ve narrowed it down to two:

Document #1: The backlog

Here’s where you keep your ideas and opportunities for SEO fixes and features.

The things you come across in the depths of a full technical audit of your site. Content ideas you dream up in the shower and need to do keyword research to validate. The fixes you need to get done but don’t have the development resources to do yet. The backlog is your place to keep track of the constantly shifting priorities and opportunities.

It helps answer the question: what should I work on next?

Ideally, your backlog has a few columns. Things like:

• Level of effort (something as simple as low, medium, high will get the job done)
• Potential impact (this will be combined with the ‘Level of effort’ to form the basis of your prioritization. Again, low, medium, high is fine)
• Status of the initiative (again, these can be customizable based on your workflow)

As you use your backlog, you may find you need more information to be housed in it. That’s fine, but be a stickler – only add things if absolutely necessary. The goal is to avoid the backlog becoming dense and unwieldy because, then, no one will use it.

Document #2: The keyword matrix

This can simply be a listing of the priority organic landings pages of your site, along with the corresponding keyword targets you are aiming to rank with them.

Beyond that, you can also include information such as:

• Meta data
• Internal link metrics
• FAQ/People Also Ask content

The sky’s the limit, really, but ultimately the goal is for this document to act as the source of truth for your primary money-making pages. That way, everyone – whether on the SEO team or stakeholders on other teams has an agreed-upon idea of what to work towards.

It helps answer the question: what is the goal of this page?

Using these two docs as a hub for everything else

Everything else should build from these two documents – both linking from and back to one or both. For example, if you need to put together internal linking recommendations to boost your primary transactional pages, your keyword matrix will help inform the optimized anchor text you want for your internal links.

Additional resources

• Backlog Management for SEOs – The SEO Sprint
• Aleyda Solis’ SEO Recommendations Prioritization Template is a good place to start building a backlog
• The Gray Company has a few solid examples of keyword matrix templates