The Complete Checklist for Running a Successful SEO Project

What does a successful SEO project feel like?

In the image: a client of ours from the US shares feedback on the quality of the work and the files so far.
We’ve only been working together for two weeks, but it’s always nice to get positive feedback this early. When you set high standards from the start, you have to keep them up 😉

Project management is a craft built on 3 components:

1. Strong human communication
2. Professional team leadership, with a focus on planning and prioritization
3. Clear progress reporting to your client.

Win on all three and you have a successful project.

The client will stay with you, enjoy working with you, enjoy the results and the return on their investment, and even refer you.

But the craft is making all 3 components work at the same time, and all three have to work.

If one fails, the whole project fails

For example:

You have an excellent work system, you’re pros who know your client’s site map by heart, and you’re pushing results at an amazing pace, but the client knows nothing about it.

You don’t communicate the work and the results to them. No reports, no updates.

Maybe one client will appreciate your modesty and let you work in peace.

And maybe another client will argue the results would have come with or without you.

You’re invisible, so they’ll leave after 3 months. That’s very likely to happen if you don’t keep up regular communication with your client.

Or, for example,

Communication and reporting are excellent, but there’s no structured team leadership and no planning or prioritization.

The team runs “however it sees fit,” so it focuses on the less important things, and the results come late, if at all.

The client sees no progress in indexed pages, rankings or traffic, and even though you’re super nice, there’s a fair chance they’ll reconsider the whole thing.

So how do you run an SEO project successfully, from start to finish?

1. The client understood there’s potential in their niche, and together you set a budget, goals, expectations and a timeline for the period ahead.
2. There’s a precise brief, you held a kickoff with the client and the whole team, and you built a strategy for the coming quarter.
3. You communicated every project milestone to the client on an ongoing basis.
4. There are working files covering every SEO aspect and everything that needs improving.
5. All the work is organized transparently and clearly for the client, and shared with them online.
6. The brand and its competitors are considered in every idea and every step you take.
7. The project manager and team members can recite the client’s services and nuances in their sleep.
8. There are fixed routines for tracking the client’s progress on technical issues, rankings for the keywords you defined, traffic to money pages, and organic leads / sales on the site.
9. There are reports summarizing everything the client received and their progress across all areas, and at the start of every month you sit down to go over it together, along with the plan for the coming month.
10. The results come.

The takeaway?

Successful SEO project management isn’t the results.

It’s how you drive the results.

Results are just a byproduct of how the project is managed. More than that, remember it takes two to tango: both the service provider and the client are responsible for a successful project.

When a client asks me “So when should I expect results?”, I always tell them to treat the ongoing work as a kind of result too, because the ongoing work signals which results are on the way.

In SEO you may not be able to predict exactly when growth will come or exactly how much things will rise and improve, but you can, and should, generate as many indicators and as much positive or negative feedback as possible along the way.

If your client doesn’t understand what kind of saga they’re getting into, they’ll get out of it very quickly, and you’ll both lose.

• Is SEO even worth it for them?
• How much budget and effort do they need to invest?
• How long do they need to wait?
• Do they feel the project is well scoped?
• Is their brand given serious attention throughout the work?
• How many updates do they get during the month?
• Are all the working files visible and clear to them?

   

Put all of these questions into your checklist, turn that checklist into a work system with routines you follow, and you’ll make your projects succeed.

I want to share our working checklist for successful SEO project management. It includes more than 50 onboarding tasks and monthly routines, covering both managing the client and driving the results.

This checklist works for freelancers doing SEO for clients, for agencies, and for business owners doing their own site’s SEO who want to run it like a professional SEO project.

👉 Click here to open the checklist

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