Sample Project Templates Gallery

Marketing Template-Optimizing your Website for Search Engines

This project template is based on a real project executed to optimize a website for SEO purposes.  It outlines a best practice, incorporates all relevant reports, analysis, and even highlights the collaboration that took place among team members. Using this template will allow you to manage your SEO web site optimization project from the initial Project Initiation phase to the final ongoing optimization phase.
Any project can be saved as a template in Clarizen, but this particular project template reflects the best practices learned during project implementation, clearly outlined in Clarizen with the right steps for successful execution.

Benefits of Managing This Project with Clarizen

Clarizen provides an integrated environment that managers and their teams can use to better plan, manage, and execute their projects. Using the Clarizen roadmap, you will be able to clearly view the phases and their respective activities, see immediately when tasks are off track, and make the appropriate adjustments to ensure on time delivery. Marketing projects like SEO involve endless documentation. With Clarizen, you can attach the related project research material and collateral directly in the right context of your project. In addition, all project communications taking place during the project can be captured in context and logged in the project.

The Story Behind the Template

A cloud-based software company wanted to improve its placement on search engine results pages (SERP) for main keywords in order to increase the number of visits coming from organic search.

To do this, the company needed to optimize key pages on its website to improve accountability and authority rankings in Google in several key ways:

-          Provide better content, targeted to the company’s potential customers

-          Improve user experience on the site

-          Improve call to action conversion rates

 The project scope included:

Building the company personas ­ - In order to create content that is optimized, you need to understand to whom you are marketing. Personas are a useful tool to help marketers gain a clear picture of their customers and prospects, and better define how they will respond to messaging.

Defining search behavior for potential customers –Understanding how prospects search is also important when considering which content to optimize.

Understanding user behavior on your site – This step helps you understand how users behave once they arrive at your website. This will provide critical insight in terms of which pages should be optimized.                                                                     

Optimize top 20 pages of the company site – Once you know which pages are driving the right traffic, you can work to optimize those for the appropriate keywords. Steps include:

• Optimizing technical SEO elements like titles, friendly URL's, meta data etc
• Enrich the page content with targeted keywords
• Refining your call to action
• Reviewing and refining your navigation

The Project Manager’s Perspective
Many organizations might try to juggle a project like this with traditional tools -- like Excel, email and maybe a whiteboard. But to achieve the desired results in the required timeframe, the project manager leveraged Clarizen. Clarizen allowed her to keep numerous tasks on track, including the deliverables from the consulting firm, tracking progress and quickly identifying bottlenecks, publishing changes that team members can follow, and move the project forward on time.  Most importantly, the project met its objectives, providing valuable insight and bringing measurable results.

The Phases of the Project

As you’ll see in the template, the project was broken into 8 main phases:

1. Project Initiation
2. Market Analysis
3. Develop Target Personas
4. keyword Strategy & Recommendation
5. Identify Competitors & Core Set of Keywords Targets
6. SEO Diagnostic of Top 20 Site Pages
7. First Round of SEO Implementation
8. Ongoing Optimization

Each phase -- or milestone -- contains a group of activities and deliverables, and the initiation of the next phase is dependent on the completion of the prior phase.  The phase Market analysis for example set with its activities the understanding for the company market, who is the company customer?  What his search behavior and so on. Defining the targeted customer is the baseline for the keywords strategy and so on.