How to do Annual Planning for SEO
While SEO traffic can be volatile and plans need to be flexible, there’s still tremendous value in planning because that’s the only way the big initiatives get done.
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Most companies treat SEO planning like they treat their New Year’s resolutions. They set ambitious goals in December, get distracted by February, and by June, they are winging it based on tweets from Google. When Q4 rolls around, they start the same planning process, pretending that this time around they will keep to the plan. While SEO traffic can be volatile and plans need to be flexible, there’s still tremendous value in planning because that’s the only way significant initiatives get done.
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Growth teams need to be reactive to industry changes and should structure their time for surprises, but engineering and other teams that need long lead times don’t have the same level of flexibility built into their resourcing. Annual planning for SEO isn’t about keyword plans that you staple to the wall; rather, it should be a rolling effort on how you will use the resources you have available and creating a roadmap that leaves you in a better position once the plan is complete.
The ultimate goal of the annual plan is to have a plan that gets executed, not one that satisfies an HR or project planning requirement.
Building the plan
The first step is understanding where you are right now. I like to set up a realistic, no-holds-barred SWOT. This SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis should establish a baseline for what you are doing well and what you can improve. It will also examine the market to identify opportunities and areas that could upend them. Without starting with a SWOT, a plan is just a hypothetical wishlist of things the team wants to spend time on.
You cannot plan where to go if you do not know where you are standing. Maybe you shouldn’t be focusing on building new things if you have debt to pay down? Or perhaps the things you want to make don’t align with where your actual strengths are?
Create a traffic baseline and goal
Most annual plans include a traffic increase number; don’t create it without an honest look at your baseline traffic. Use Google Search Console, not rankings reports. In your traffic, separate branded traffic, which is out of your control, and break out traffic bumps that aren’t really part of your buyers’ journeys. Only once you have a clean baseline of your annual traffic can you put a growth number on top of that.
The growth number itself should be realistic. If you are in a brand-new space with increasing demand, 100% or even 1,000% might be possible, but if your traffic has plateaued over the years, 7% might be a big swing. Additionally, you need to consider the baseline's size. 7% on a million visits per month is far more attainable than 100k visits when the current number is 1,000. When you are building this plan, you need to strip out vanity and ego.
Revenue goals
Ultimately, the goal of SEO teams is not to drive traffic, so when you are drafting the plan, you really want to start translating the traffic goal you are modeling into revenue goals early in the planning process. Finance and other business teams won't be impressed by traffic increases if they don’t meaningfully impact the business. As you examine your SWOT, switch the focus to revenue or similar KPI’s and then adjust your opportunities to those that will have your revenue uplift. When setting a revenue upper limit, it’s very helpful to use a TAM analysis to keep the numbers in line with what is possible. Again, follow the same process to identify your SEO revenue baseline and achieve a meaningful increase. The same percentage rules apply.
Tactics
Once you have a clear picture of where you stand, you can start drafting tactics and plans that will hit your goals. I like to create a list of every possible thing I might do to move the traffic and revenue needles and then start digging into each initiative on its own with the broader product teams. First and foremost, you want to see what will have the most lift. If your goal is a 10% increase in revenue, but you have no confidence that a project would help you do that, then that is not a project you should undertake.
On the effort side, you want to do the same. If a project requires a year to execute or requires hiring a new team, that is not something you want in your plan. With your product and engineering counterparts, discuss what it might take to ship that initiative. How much time? At what cost? Is there a need to hire or partner? These fields now give color to the initiatives
Alignment
Most of the time, SEO and growth teams are not builders but conductors. The inability to execute on your own plans and goals means you need others to help you hit your OKRs. (An upcoming post will detail how to plan OKRs) Aligning with other teams' capabilities, resources, and their own goals is critical if you ever want to get anything done. In your conversations with product, engineering, design, content, and more, have them share their plans and generously offer up your help. Find points of alignment where they have similar goals and time to execute on your plans.
As they build and circulate their plans, you need to make sure you are included, because if you get locked out now, you are locked out for the year, and you will be counting on kindness and spare time to get anything done for you. If you need any external resources, including budget access, now is the time to have those conversations and ensure they are available for your plan.
When you build your plan, you should also call out these dependencies so you have an out if things don’t get executed during the year because another team wasn’t available. This isn’t an excuse; it’s a mitigating factor that didn’t allow you to perform if you cleared the capacity and the other team wasn’t available. This would be a poor excuse if you never even got the clearance from the other team.
Scheduling
The meat of an annual plan is actually the execution planning, which means your tactics and strategies need to be scheduled. They aren’t wishes that you hope will be granted by the end of the year. The prior steps informed you of how long these initiatives would take and what resources would be required. Now you can go back to your partners and align on execution schedules.
As you build your plans, each initiative will ladder into another. A site redesign, which might take months, would then underpin a redirect from the old site to this one, which could be a big project in its own right. Your annual plan shouldn't just be a slide deck; it should include a Gantt chart showing all these plans and their dependencies. Gantt charts aren’t very popular with SEO teams, but they should be.
Metrics and milestones
Just like a pitch deck for a startup, this isn’t a gift registry. When planning, you need to be able to show whether you are meeting specific milestones throughout the year. If you are going to miss your plan, it shouldn’t only come to light in December. Your plan should clearly specify which metrics you will use. As I said earlier, it should be revenue, but traffic might also be a component. If you have issues with accurate reporting tools, they become a dependency, and they should be called out as such.
For milestones, you can use quarter-end dates or the projected end times of projects. If a content library was scheduled to be completed in May, May 31st would be the milestone, and it is either complete or not. Then there are no surprises in December if you are still waiting to ship it.
The ask
Now that you have shown your plans and why they are a good investment for the company’s broader business goals, you are well-positioned to make any asks. Sometimes you don’t need to ask for anything if you have enough budget, team members, and tools, but don’t waste this opportunity. This moment is like when a genie pops out of a lamp, and you don’t have a wish. Come up with something that will help you get your job done or increase your company's visibility. Ask for a quarterly meeting with an executive, flexibility to try a new channel, or permission to go to a conference. If you have sold your plan well, this is a magical time of giving.
Companies that do SEO planning well treat it like a living document. They revisit it every quarter, adjust based on what they are learning, and stay focused on the outcomes that matter. Teams that fail either never make a plan at all or create one and ignore it.
The plan is not magic and not a crystal ball. Having a clear strategy, realistic goals, and a way to measure progress gives you a massive advantage over everyone who is just making it up as they go.
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