04/02/2025
Your 2025 SEO strategy checklist:
Phase 1: Audit
Crawl your website with a tool like Screaming Frog (connect GA/GSC/other data) and export as a CSV.
Enter each URL into Search Console or Ahrefs and find its best-ranking keywords. Add them to your spreadsheet.
Audit each blog post and assign actions (Leave, Merge, Delete, Update, Rewrite).
Phase 2: Quick Wins
Identify technical fixes in your audit like internal linking, canonical tags, 301 redirects, sitemap, etc.
Find ways to optimize your existing pages for the keywords found in your audit (new sections, updates, headings, snippets/AI Overviews).
Phase 3: Customer Research
Talk to, survey and/or interview your customers to learn:
- Problems before finding your product
- Features they bought it for (and use)
- Why your product vs other solutions
- Other solutions they considered
- How it solves their problems
Phase 4: Topic Research
Enter your competitors' websites in a tool like Ahrefs and export their keywords to reverse-engineer their SEO.
Identify ‘seed’ keywords from your customer research and use general brainstorming to start your research.
Enter your ‘seeds’ into a tool like Ahrefs and use the ‘Matching terms’ report to find topics to target.
Identify topics to build landing pages around the different features or solutions your product offers.
Identify bottom funnel topics like competitor comparisons, competitor alternatives, and best-of guides.
Identify middle funnel topics like how-to guides, templates, tips, and anything relating to customer problems.
Identify top funnel topics like glossaries (e.g. ‘what is X'), topic vs topic, ‘ideas’ lists, and anything to capture awareness.
Phase 5: Content Plan
Collate all identified topics into a simple spreadsheet to execute over the following months.
Prioritize your content ideas by ease of ranking, commercial intent and potential traffic.
Strategy done.
- Fix your technical issues
- Optimize your existing content
- Create new content from your plan
- Scale content production with AI (like Byword)
And don’t stop.