Your SEO Roadmap for 2024

👋 Hey, welcome to a 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of my weekly newsletter. Each week, I tackle reader questions and share actionable insights on building and growing great products.

Table of Contents

• Technical SEO: Focusing on What Matters

  • Cross-links

  • Finding What to Fix

  • Page Rendering

• Editorial SEO: Content That Resonates

  • Establishing Topical Authority

  • Quick Wins for Immediate Traffic Gains

• Programmatic SEO: Scaling for Maximum Impact

  • Curating Content That Counts

  • Rethinking Category Pages

• The Long Game in SEO

What would it look like if we had an SEO roadmap for a company in 2024? How would it be structured? These questions have been buzzing in my mind lately, and I wanted to share some practical and tactical insights with you.

So today, we're diving deep into crafting your 2024 SEO roadmap and focusing on the strategies that truly move the needle.

A fully optimized SEO channel can be responsible for 60% of all your traffic. 

As paid advertising gets trickier and more expensive, it's time to unlock the potential of other channels. SEO and organic traffic have been shining stars, consistently delivering impressive results when given the attention they deserve.

It's a marathon, not a sprint. But it can become a game-changing channel with the right investment of time and effort.

You've probably heard of the 80/20 principle, where 20% of your efforts yield 80% of the results.

Well, in the world of SEO, we often witness an even more extreme distribution, where a mere 5% of your SEO efforts generate nearly all the impact.

Let me illustrate this with a common scenario.

You may have a treasure trove of 100 articles in your content arsenal, yet a mere handful of five articles drive the lion's share of your website traffic.

Or perhaps you've poured your heart and soul into a laundry list of SEO tasks, only to discover that just one or two items from that exhaustive list were the true drivers of success.

Unraveling the mystery behind this vital 5% requires a systematic approach.

You need to roll up your sleeves, experiment with various strategies, meticulously analyze the outcomes, and identify the patterns that correlate with tangible impact.

Once you've cracked the code, it's all about repetition—recreating those successful tests to sustain and amplify their impact over time.

In the following sections, I'll share the initiatives that, through thorough research and analysis, seem to have the most significant impact.

Most SEO work is stuff that's true but has zero impact. So, we only want to do the impactful stuff.

This is a short list.

Obviously, it depends on the company, but in general, this tends to be the list of stuff that drives the most impact, and I'll go through each one by one.

Technical SEO: Focusing on What Matters

I'll start with technical SEO, where people waste the most time but have the lowest impact. Two elements truly move the needle here: internal links and ensuring that Google can seamlessly read your pages.

Here is an example of what's often presented as a technical SEO audit.

So you're gearing up to kickstart a new project, and you're handed a laundry list of technical tasks. This list, though comprehensive, often holds just one golden nugget of impactful insight, surrounded by a sea of items that, quite frankly, don't move the dial.

These less impactful tasks include the likes of the HTTP vs. HTTPS debate, missing alt tags, page speed optimizations, and the absence of those elusive H1 tags. While they might be technically accurate, they fall into the category of "true but zero impact."

Now, let's break down the two important factors that influence most.

Subscribe to Premium Membership to read the rest.