Welcome to the ever-changing world of SEO. Like your favourite thriller movie, it’s full of twists and turns where swift victories and quantifiable results make all the difference.
In this perpetually changing digital landscape, an agile strategy like SEO sprints can bring impressive outcomes in record-breaking time.
Picture SEO Sprints as a turbo-charged way of enhancing your website’s visibility on search engines. At Contactora, we’ve crafted this approach into something close to an art form.
Key Takeaways
- SEO Sprints are time-bound plans to increase website visibility fast.
- SEO Sprints focus on critical tasks for quicker results, not just a checklist.
- They provide cost-efficient work with top impact areas and reduce wasted time.
- There are different types of sprints, such as strategy, content, and link building sprints.
- These sprints have clear objectives, steps for doing the tasks, and ways to check progress.
What are SEO Sprints?
SEO Sprints are an innovative approach to SEO revolving around time-bound and highly focused sets of tasks. Unlike traditional SEO retainers, which often involve ongoing, broad strategies, SEO Sprints are designed to deliver more rapid and concentrated results.
Here’s the process:
- Planning: Every SEO Sprint begins with meticulous planning. We set specific aims for each Sprint, from enhancing on-page optimisations and generating high-quality backlinks to creating authoritative content. The ultimate goal, however, is consistent: to generate more leads and boost your business revenue.
- Breakdown of Tasks: We break down the comprehensive SEO process into short, intensely focused sets of tasks, each completed within eight weeks. This condensed timeline instils urgency and fosters productivity, leading to faster results.
- Structure of Sprints: Our Sprints are structured strategically. We commence with a ‘Foundation Sprint’, which includes a full site assessment and formulating an action strategy. Following this, we transition into ‘Content’ and ‘Link Building’ Sprints. While Content and Link Building Sprints can be repeated as necessary, the Foundation Sprint is typically completed once to provide a solid base for future optimisation efforts.
Sprints accelerate your SEO outcomes and ensure they’re targeted and impactful.
Why choose SEO Sprints?
Choosing SEO Sprints offers numerous benefits like quick and measurable results, cost efficiency, focused strategy implementation, and better management of project objectives.
Quick Results in SEO
SEO Sprints are well-known for generating quicker results in SEO. They put you on a fast track to success, especially when Google’s rapid ability to index and rank is harnessed.
This technique gives your website an immediate edge by targeting the most impactful SEO tasks first, hence getting quick, measurable outcomes.
Cost Efficiency
The sprint approach helps us allocate resources strategically, focusing on high-impact areas first for quick, measurable outcomes. We also gain by reducing wasted time on low-yield activities or trial-and-error methods standard with traditional SEO retainers.
Our agile strategy ensures every cent contributes towards achieving our key performance indicators (KPIs), whether boosting organic traffic or improving keyword rankings.
In this manner, SEO Sprints presents a cost-effective avenue to drive growth and increase ROI without draining your budget.
Better Management of SEO Services
Through SEO Sprints, managing SEO services becomes a smoother process. The objective is clear, and the smaller tasks are organised in order of priority. This organisation allows teams to navigate through their workload more effectively.
They can focus on one task at a time without getting overwhelmed by the enormity of an all-encompassing SEO strategy. Plus, with transparency being a vital element of this methodology, every progress made and challenge encountered is visible to everyone involved.
Focus on what needs doing in order of priority.
Our process is methodically designed to optimise your website before we begin content creation and link building. This approach prevents dilution of our efforts or unnecessary prolongation of tasks, allowing us to extend optimal services to you efficiently and effectively.
Our priority-based approach means your SEO campaign is always streamlined, focused, and built for success.
Key Components of an SEO Sprint
In an SEO Sprint, the key components involve establishing a clear objective, executing the necessary tasks aligned with this goal, and closely monitoring progress while swiftly making adjustments.
Selecting the right objective
Determining the suitable objective is one of the most vital steps in an SEO sprint. Our primary focus is identifying specific goals aligning with your brand’s unique needs and visions.
We base these objectives on factors like competition level, industry trends, and keyword research. This process ensures we deliver measurable results while maximising your return on investment.
Implementation
Our SEO Sprints commence with a crucial first step: the Foundation Sprint. In this stage, we pinpoint what needs to be done and devise a comprehensive strategy. You can choose to implement this strategy yourself or leverage our expertise.
Here’s a glimpse into our implementation process:
- Addressing Initial Concerns: As part of the strategy execution, we rectify any technical and content issues that might hamper your SEO campaign. All these concerns are addressed before we focus on new content creation and link building.
- On-Page Optimisations: Our next priority is on-page optimisations. This involves tweaking existing site content or crafting new, authoritative content that aligns with our target keywords.
- Targeting Keyword Gaps: We create new content targeting identified keyword gaps after on-page optimisations. This content is meticulously written around the target keywords to ensure comprehensive coverage of your niche topics. We typically adopt a hub-and-spoke content strategy — creating authoritative hub articles followed by multiple spoke articles that delve deeper into the topic.
- Link Building Sprint: The final phase of our strategy is the Link Building Sprint. Here, we concentrate on building links for the pages needing them most. We focus on ‘easy win’ pages requiring more links to establish authority. We pride ourselves on creating authoritative, white-hat links only. Our arsenal of link-building strategies includes HARO link-building, outreach to authority sites within your niche, broken link building, competitor backlinks, and several other effective techniques. We’re committed to producing links that genuinely boost your SEO performance.
Reportings
Actionable reporting is critical, but we don’t want to overload you with spreadsheets and technical jargon. You get access to a dedicated dashboard and client workbook for each project. You can find everything from your strategy decks to the details of each link built.
Each campaign also begins with an initial SEO snapshot, a comprehensive look at your site’s current position used to benchmark growth throughout the campaign.
Types of SEO Sprints
We focus on three types of SEO Sprints, each focusing on a different aspect of your search engine optimisation strategy, including the Foundation Sprint that sets the grounds for future efforts, the Content Sprint that hones in on creating and optimising valuable content, and the Link Sprint where we focus on establishing high-quality backlinks to improve domain authority.
Foundation Sprint
The Foundation Spint is about setting a roadmap to guide the entire campaign. It is by far the most intensive and timely sprint, but it is usually completed just once. Some sites may rerun the Foundation Sprint after 12 months to develop a strategy for new sectors.
- Analytics Audit: We thoroughly examine your Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager setup. This stage is crucial for confirming accurate metrics and event tracking, setting the foundation for insightful data analysis.
- Website Assessment: Our team manually assesses and categorises each page of your website. We identify and sort all technical issues in order of priority to ensure your site is at its optimal performance level.
- Content Review: We review the quality of the content on your site and make notes and suggestions if changes are needed.
- Backlink Profile Audit: We conduct a comprehensive review of your backlink profile. Not only does this help us pinpoint and remove any harmful backlinks, but it also allows us to determine the number of backlinks we need to build for each page.
- Keyword Research: We investigate which keywords could bolster your ranking and identify others you’re not currently ranking for. This research guides us in outlining the prime targets for your initial SEO efforts.
The Foundation Sprint’s final stage is to build your strategy for the next 12 months. This is compiled into a report summarising what you need to do in actionable steps. We also include the full data reports for your reference, but you don’t need to dig deep into the data to find the issues. Part of this will also include a call to walk you through the strategy and cover any questions.
Ultimately, the Foundation Sprint will give you a clear roadmap for prioritising your needs.
Content Sprint
The content sprint is about planning and creating content to target any gaps in your keyword strategy. We focus on a hub and spoke content model, which is excellent for creating topical authority. Content sprints can be repeated as each topic is exhausted. We can focus on researching and finding new topics to target within your niche.
With the content sprint, you pay for the amount of content you want to create. You can know how much content you need from the foundation sprint keyword research and content plan. If your budget is limited, you can order this as and when needed or have the content sprint rolling monthly.
Link Building Sprint
The link sprint is usually the last sprint we run or run alongside the content sprint. We approach each campaign differently, as not all sites will need many links, and some sites may need a few local connections to get the ball rolling. For example, a local dental clinic won’t need to be building links in the same way as an international SaaS company.
The link sprint can also be ordered as and when needed with as little as five links per run. The link sprint can be combined with our authority link building and run monthly if your budget allows.
SEO Sprints vs. Traditional SEO Retainers
Investing in SEO is crucial for many businesses, and choosing the right approach can significantly influence the results. SEO Sprints and Traditional SEO retainers are two distinct methods for achieving the same end goal. However, they both have their unique attributes.
| SEO Sprints | Traditional SEO Retainers |
| SEO sprints generate quick results. They are a way of reallocating the SEO budget to disciplines with quicker wins. This could be especially beneficial for small businesses with limited budgets. | SEO retainer aims to work on all areas of SEO over a more extended period. SEO agencies will seek to engage the customer for as long as possible to make it profitable. Often not completing critical tasks immediately. |
| SEO sprints focus on achieving a specific objective in a short period. This is ideal for businesses that wish to increase their ranking for a particular niche. | Traditional SEO retainers provide a more extensive service. They focus on many different areas of SEO simultaneously. Often, results are slow as efforts are spread thin. |
| SEO sprints consist of three well-defined steps: Foundation, Content and Link building. This structure ensures that actions are taken based on data-driven insights. | With Traditional SEO retainers, the process is not as well defined. It typically involves a mix of several SEO practices, such as keyword research, backlinking, and content optimisation, without a strict sequence of steps. |
| In an SEO sprint, the focus shifts to the next objective once the targeted goal is achieved. This continuous shifting of focus ensures that high-priority tasks are completed first. | In traditional SEO retainers, multiple tasks are carried out simultaneously. All functions are considered equally important and may compete for resources and attention. |
In conclusion, businesses should choose an SEO approach based on their specific needs, budget, and the urgency of their goals.
SEO Sprints are perfect for fast-moving marketing campaigns and sites struggling to get footing. SEO retainers are better suited to sites established within their sector and must maintain their position.
For sites that need to maintain their position, we recommend our link building and content writing services, which can be run monthly. You can also consider our Content Sprint or Link Sprints for maintaining and growing an established website.
Conclusion
Unleash the full potential of your business with SEO Sprints! Act now and open pathways for robust growth, greater visibility, and impressive digital performance. Don’t hold back – chat with our expert team at Contactora or request a free proposal today to see how transformative an SEO Sprint can be for your website.
