Prioritize SEO efforts like a pro with THRICE
In SEO, measure THRICE, cut once.
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SEO teams often fail in internal prioritization because, without a disciplined system for deciding what gets asked of engineering and in what order, SEO just becomes a to-do list. Early in my SEO career, I burned months of goodwill on useless tasks because it was a “best practice”, and then wondered why engineering never even opened my tickets when I had an urgent request.
Before making any requests of an engineering team, make sure you are using your political capital effectively; otherwise, the teams you request from will not implement your fixes next time.
Think of any SEO effort like withdrawing from a finite budget. You can ask for the biggest effort, but if it doesn’t pay off, you have spent all of your allowance with nothing to show for it. When you prioritize efficiently, you give yourself the space to make big requests that might otherwise fail because you have banked other successful efforts. Goodwill is not finite.
Even if a prioritization process still supports making big requests, at least you have clarified from the outset what the expectations will be. Next week, I will go deeper into how to develop this thinking, but this post is about the framework I use to make all of this systematic: THRICE.
Introducing THRICE for SEO
THRICE stands for Time, Headcount, Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort. The ICE method (pioneered by Sean Ellis) is in my book, and it's still useful, but adding the other dimensions of Time, Headcount, and Reach includes additional metrics that matter enormously for SEO.
THRICE allows you to score and prioritize any initiative openly and on a standardized format. When you do this transparently, you can “show your work” of why something matters in the big picture and then even score diplomacy points by letting go of things that don’t score high enough.
When you walk into a meeting and say, “I would really like to do this particular project, but it didn’t score as well as YOUR project in our THRICE framework,” you are banking political capital and showing that you are a team player.
I score each metric in this model on a 1-10 scale, but you can use 1-100, 1 -1,000,000, low, medium, high, or whatever works for you. (Note: If you choose to use a textual ranking system, make sure it is linked to a quantitative parallel so you can score automatically.)
Here are the definitions from an SEO lens of each aspect of THRICE and how to utilize this framework.
Time
On many occasions in my career, I have advocated for SEO efforts only to discover that it took a long time to launch. If you are going to get raises and bonuses (or retained as an agency) on an SEO effort, the last thing you want is to put all your eggs into that basket and then just wait months to even have something to report. By using time as a prioritization lever, you can resource initiatives that deliver faster ROI and bank political capital to use on efforts that will take longer to show results.
A page update can have a fast turnaround and score 10/10, while a new subdirectory will take longer and score 5/10. A brand-new website requiring design and marketing resources will be a 1/10.
Headcount
Many times, SEO teams get excited about initiatives and push for their launch, only to discover how expensive they are when they require external support or many internal employees to spend time on them. Including headcount, whether internal or external, as a lever provides an honest way to assess the cost side of the SEO equation before looking at the upside in benefits.
Simple SEO fixes will require minimal engineering hours and will always earn a score of 10/10, while anything requiring external agencies that bill for hours will receive a 1/10.
Reach
When it comes to SEO forecasting and quantifying opportunities, I have never been a fan of keyword research. Keyword research is notoriously inaccurate for various reasons, and I hardly see the point of building an entire forecast from a wrong genesis. Instead, I like to use the total addressable market (TAM) for SEO forecasting and forecast an expected reach rate. Keyword research tells you how many people searched a specific phrase last month. TAM (an upcoming newsletter will share more) tells you how many people have the problem described by that phrase.
For Reach in the THRICE model, I use a variation of TAM, but narrowed down to the people who will be impacted. If I am adjusting a homepage, I start by estimating how many potential customers there are for the product, then narrow that to how many people might interact with the updated homepage.
If I launch a new product or page for SEO, I start with TAM and then narrow that down to predicting how many people it might attract with improved search efforts. Remember, these are not precise predictions; they are just numerical scores. If it’s the whole world, it might be a 10/10; if it’s just a handful of people, I would score it a 1/10.
Impact
This is where you will score how much the change you are making will affect the total outcomes of what you are doing.
For example, if I were to create a new subdirectory for a new language on the site, I would estimate its impact on revenue. I would imagine quite a bit, so that would be a 10/10. Alternatively, if I add alt text to every image on the site, it may not affect revenue, so that would be a 1/10 score. Something in the middle would be a meta description designed to increase CTR, it may or may not change things, so it could be a 5/10.
Confidence
While many marketers like to put a strong sales effort behind getting buy-in for a new initiative, this is where you will be brutally honest about the likelihood of the impact happening.
Interestingly enough, this is where scores would flip on the big initiatives. I would have absolute confidence that adding image alt text will have a low impact, so this would be a 10/10, but I am only mildly confident that translating a site into a new language would have a major impact, so that would be a 5/10. Our previous example on the meta description might still be a 5/10 in this column too.
Effort
The last metric in this model is how much work something might take, and this is where you win all the diplomacy points. To make the model work, you score things that take a tremendous amount of effort lower, and easy tasks will score higher. This will mean that low-impact but easy work will be approved, but messy, complicated, high-return projects will not.
This is an additional filter on the Headcount metric, which is primarily intended to capture expensive projects, while this metric captures the size of the project.
When an engineer sees that you've honestly assessed their team's workload and let a promising idea go because it was too resource-intensive, they start to trust the process. They know you are a team player who wants the best for the company.
Returning to my earlier examples, it might be almost no effort to create a new page, so that would be a 10/10. Translating the entire site in a new language might be 1/10, and adding text to every image might be 5/10. Meta descriptions are 10/10 if you have a programmatic tool in the CMS, or 1/10 if they need to be done manually.
There is no perfect way to score things, so I try to be honest about how much work it might take relative to other things.
Once I score all initiatives, I add the scores in each column. The items that score the highest will be normalized between Time, Headcount, Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort.
To illustrate with two examples that show how this works
Change the title tag on a homepage:
Time - Even if it requires opening up rarely visited source code, it still will only take a short amount of time - 10/10
Headcount - This can be done by just one engineer without needing any agency resources - 10/10
Reach - everyone that sees the homepage - 10/10
Impact - title tags can be very impactful for SEO KPIs - 10/10
Confidence - In past experiences, title tags drive expected impact - 10/10
Effort - even if it’s manually coded, it should only take a short amount of time - 10/10
Total score = 60
Translate the whole site into French
Time - Most language launches I have been a part of have taken 6-12 months. 1/10
Headcount - Language launches include language experts, QA, specialized software, design, product, engineering, and even finance (for currency). This is expensive - 1/10
Reach- there are 60 million French speakers in Canada and France (there are other French speakers in other countries that don’t have the same economic profile as Canada and France). Reach is then compared with other languages, such as Spanish and English. - 3/10
Impact -adding a new language opens up the site to a whole new audience -10/10
Confidence - Adding a new language will certainly add more search traffic - 10/10
Effort - Even if you machine translated the content with AI, this is still a substantial undertaking - 1/10
Total score = 26
If these are the only two items on your roadmap, naturally, you would opt for the initiative with the highest score.
THRICE benefits in action
When you present your methodology, you can show how you considered and discarded each option, and why you chose the plan you did. Score the rows in partnership with the teams working on them. This gets them invested early and increases the likelihood they actually ship what you need. Most of my THRICE meetings include stakeholders from other teams, so their assessments are reflected in the prioritization.
The framework extends to SEO tests, acquisition ideas, and agency selection. Most SEO teams will read this and think they already prioritize well. They don’t. They prioritize loudly, where everything is mission-critical, and then nothing gets done. THRICE forces the argument into numbers before it becomes a meeting.
Paid subscribers to this newsletter can start with this template. If I can help you with prioritization, please reach out.
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