Priorities on Ice? Open the SEO Icebox.

I’m a gal of action. If something needs to be done, now’s a great time to do it. So I’m finding one of the hardest parts of in-house SEO for me is the icebox. While I try to chill out, I’ve got to remind myself what I would have told my clients in this situation: Stop focusing on what you can’t do and start doing what you can.

Our development team has different priority levels for projects: active, backlog and icebox. We might all agree that a project is a critical priority for SEO, but when pitted against resource conflicts like server uptime and affiliate widget development not even I can argue that my SEO project is more critical to the bottom line. So while I’m cooling my heels in the icebox waiting for the resources to get my technical SEO roadblocks removed, I’m turning to my own SEO icebox.

Most tasks in my icebox have kept perfectly well. Some of them are even interesting! A competitive analysis on a key rival. An analysis of the URLs driving keyword traffic, and whether they’re the URLs most likely to convert. Research into relevant directories & wikis to submit to. Stockpiling content to flow into the pages that will exist when dev thaws out my SEO project. And many others.

Yes, some things expired too quickly or grew a thick layer of freezer fur. For instance, it’s a bit late to whip up a Father’s Day landing page. But if it had been a higher priority, it wouldn’t have been in my icebox in the first place. So no harm done.

So that’s my mantra this week: Stop focusing on what you can’t do and start doing what you can. It may not be the huge leap forward I want, but I’ll be better positioned to leap farther faster.


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Originally posted on Web PieRat.