Imagine you just delivered an impeccable SEO strategy, complete with detailed recommendations and clear priorities. Six months later, you're reviewing progress only to discover that most of your recommendations remain… untouched.
Sound familiar?
Despite your expertise and the potential impact of your suggestions, implementation has stalled.
This is the implementation gap.
One of the most significant challenges in SEO consulting, and it's costing you valuable growth opportunities.
The implementation gap can be impacted by negligence or a lack of resources, but it also reflects a fundamental challenge in how we approach SEO consulting. While traditional SEO consulting focuses heavily on technical expertise, it often overlooks the critical human elements of organizational change, dooming even brilliant strategies to gather dust.
That’s where prewiring comes in.
What is prewiring? Prewiring is the strategic groundwork that creates change by guiding your point of contact and organizations through new practices.
Prewiring involves understanding organizational dynamics and aligning SEO initiatives with existing business processes and priorities before formally sharing recommendations. This prep work ensures that recommendations reach receptive ears and fit within established workflows.
Here are practical strategies we use for increasing implementation rates and driving meaningful change from the initial kickoff phase through longer-term challenges that arise.
First: Understand the Implementation Gap
This gap is typically caused by one (or both) of: resource constraints and/or communication. Breakdowns happen when there are great ideas, but no funds or people to actually do the work, or when there’s not a clear understanding of what to do, how to do it, or even why to do it.
Resource Constraints
Many clients aren't failing to implement recommendations out of negligence. Often, they're facing real constraints:
- Technical teams are already overwhelmed with other priorities
- Budget limitations prevent hiring additional developers, writers, designers, etc.
- Internal processes make it difficult to get changes approved
Communication Barriers
Sometimes, the way we present recommendations creates unintended obstacles:
- Technical language that non-SEO professionals struggle to understand
- Overwhelming clients with too many recommendations at once
- Failing to contextualize the impact of each change properly
- Not providing clear implementation instructions
Special Sauce: Creative Problem Solving
No matter what stage of implementation you are in, everyone must try to be a creative problem-solver. Bringing ideas and solutions to conversations instead of the same roadblocks over and over again.
Here’s an example:
We recently kicked-off an engagement with a new client, and were struggling to get our updated and new content pieces through their review process.
Instead of following up again and again, or leaving this as an open item on our task list, we took a different angle, and introduced an AI-powered content reviewer to accelerate stakeholder approvals.
Our client had a goal of publishing 50 pages by the year’s end. Still, stakeholder’s competing priorities made that tough. That custom reviewer used AI trained on the client’s brand guidelines and historical stakeholder feedback, flagged issues like tone, length, structure, and repetitive phrasing before anything reached stakeholders.
We were able to submit content that was already aligned to brand expectations, earning stakeholder trust and reducing their review time. In some cases, stakeholders even got comfortable approving content without a full manual review. This change shortened our turnaround time from months to weeks and increased implementation speed by 15%.
The Stages: How to Maximize Implementation Success at Each Stage of Your Digital Journey
Kickoff Stage
Starting a client relationship on the right foot is essential for building trust and ensuring long-term success. The kickoff phase is your opportunity to demonstrate expertise, establish expectations, and align with your client’s goals. By asking thoughtful questions and showing a clear understanding of their business, you can lay the groundwork for a collaborative and impactful partnership.
Building Confidence Through Preparation
A great kickoff starts before the meeting itself. Begin by sending an introduction questionnaire to your client. This step is critical for gathering the foundational information you’ll need to tailor your recommendations to their unique case. The questionnaire should cover key areas such as:
- High-level business goals and how digital fits into their strategy.
- Seasonality, competitors, and key focus areas, products, or services.
- Their tech stack, CMS, and team structure.
- Current performance metrics and what success looks like to them.
💡Try to understand a client’s tech stack, CMS, team structure, and site change/publishing process from the start!
Once you’ve received the responses, take the time to analyze their answers thoroughly. Identify overarching goals, align on critical initiatives, and prepare clarifying questions. This preparation will ensure that your kickoff meeting is focused and productive.
Structuring the Kickoff Meeting
The kickoff meeting is where you solidify alignment and build excitement for the engagement. Start by introducing your team and their roles, creating a sense of collaboration from the outset. Next, confirm the client’s goals and collaborate on key performance indicators (KPIs) to ensure you’re working toward shared objectives.
From there, discuss your initial strategies and priorities, drawing on insights from the questionnaire. Be transparent about processes and next steps, setting clear expectations for timelines and deliverables.
First 90 Days of Engagement
The first 90 days of an SEO engagement are pivotal. This is when you immerse yourself in the client’s business, build trust across teams, and establish processes that ensure seamless implementation of your recommendations. Think of this phase as the bridge between strategic planning and actionable execution.
We recommend starting with an immersion session. It’s a deep dive into understanding the client’s workflows, challenges, and objectives. The goal is to align your SEO strategies with their broader business priorities while uncovering insights that will shape your approach.
[TIP] Build momentum early by delivering small but impactful wins, such as keyword research or metadata updates. Use these opportunities to identify and map out process workflows, such as where bottlenecks occur, what steps take the most time, and where efficiency improvements can be made.
Immersion Sessions
Begin by conducting stakeholder interviews with key players—decision-makers, content creators, developers, and more. These conversations will help you map out the end-to-end implementation process, identifying bottlenecks and blockers along the way. Use these sessions to assess the client’s search maturity by evaluating their resources, knowledge, and capacity. This will reveal gaps in their processes or understanding, enabling you to refine your approach and provide targeted support.
Dive into practitioner sessions with specific teams:
- SEO Contacts: Discuss analytics and reporting in-depth, focusing on how they measure success, why they track specific goals, and their existing baseline performance metrics
- Paid Media Teams: Align on search strategy to ensure cohesion between SEO and paid efforts, optimizing overall search performance
- Key Stakeholders (e.g., Product Marketing Managers): Understand their goals and discuss how SEO can integrate into and support their objectives
- Developers: Understand workflows, CMS capabilities, and technical constraints, ensuring that recommendations can be implemented easily
- Content Teams: Explore editorial processes, writing styles, and available resources. Discuss branding, what takes the longest in their current process, and how to streamline reviews and approvals to make the process easier
Across all these sessions, clearly outline what you will need from each team to make the program successful. Use this opportunity to align on key details, such as branding guidelines, process bottlenecks, and review preferences.
Collaboration and Process Refinement
The immersion session is also a time to collaborate on refining workflows and aligning strategies. Brainstorm solutions to simplify implementation, tailoring recommendations to fit within the client’s existing tools and systems. Highlight quick wins while co-creating processes that ensure long-term success.
Deliverables and Outputs
By the end of the first 90 days, you should deliver:
- A comprehensive process document that integrates with the client’s workflow
- Custom reporting that aligns with decision-makers' metrics and KPIs
- An actionable roadmap featuring both immediate opportunities and long-term strategies
Asking the Right Questions
To ensure nothing falls through the cracks, address key logistical and operational questions:
- What is the approval process for content and pages?
- Who handles CMS implementation, and what resources are available?
- What is the standard publishing cadence?
- How long do updates typically take?
- Are there any dependencies or shared resources that could delay implementation?
- What tools or platforms does the client use for project management and communication?
- How are stakeholder approvals managed, and what is the escalation process if delays occur?
- Are there specific compliance, legal, or brand guidelines that must be followed?
- What level of access do we have to analytics, CMS, or other relevant systems?
- Is there a designated point of contact for each team involved in implementation?
What About When Things Aren’t Going Well?
Tough Conversations
Something may have changed internally. A long-standing developer may have left the company, or they may have changed their project management software. Whatever the case, sometimes things change, and recommendations that were once implemented rapidly are now sitting in a backlog. Even with a solid SEO strategy, sometimes recommendations aren’t getting implemented. In many cases, the roadblock stems from communication challenges rather than purely technical issues. This is where the STATE framework—adapted from Crucial Conversations—can help you navigate tough discussions.
💡 The STATE (Share facts, Tell your story, Ask for their story, Talk tentatively, Encourage testing) framework provides a structured approach for addressing implementation roadblocks via discussion.
Share your facts: Highlight the objective data that explains why your recommendation matters.
- Organic traffic is unseasonability down -11% MoM
- Competitor X continues to outrank us for 17 terms related to this topic
Tell your story: Explain your interpretation of these facts and how they connect to broader business goals.
- At this current rate, we will not hit our quarterly traffic goal
- We will not be able to outrank competitor X by the end of the year if our backlog continues to grow
Ask for their story: Once you’ve shared your perspective, invite the others’ point of view. Ask open-ended questions—“What challenges are you seeing?” or “How can we adjust to make implementation easier?”—to uncover hidden constraints or misunderstandings.
Talk tentatively: Approach these conversations as a collaborative problem-solving effort, not a lecture. Use language like, “What if we...?” or “Could we consider...?” to keep the door open for suggestions and encourage a sense of joint ownership.
Encourage testing: Finally, propose a low-risk way to “test” or pilot a recommendation if there’s hesitation. For instance, implement one aspect first to gather results. This approach can turn a hard “no” into a “let’s see if works,” paving the way for broader buy-in.
Business Review Meetings
Bi-annual or quarterly business review meetings serve as a great checkpoint for identifying implementation challenges with top-level key stakeholders.
💡 The SCQA (Situation, Complication, Question, Answer) framework can help ensure your implementation issues are clear during presentations.
Note: The SCQA framework was introduced by Barbara Minto in The Pyramid Principle and can be used for many other instances.
Situation: Clearly outline the current state of affairs. Describe the market landscape or the project status in a way that everyone in the room can agree upon.
- Organic revenue has increased +10% YoY
- Organic traffic is down -12% YoY
Complication: Introduce the core problem or complication that’s jeopardizing your progress. This creates urgency and interest among stakeholders because they understand that something critical needs attention.
- However, we are only able to update 2 pages per month
- Implementation is down -17 pages YoY and there are 19 recommendations in our backlog
Question: Next, pose the central question that needs to be addressed. This step bridges the complication to the solution, framing the focus of the discussion.
- What does it take to expedite the developers’ process?
- Given delays in reviews and the risk of losing more traffic, how can we accelerate the review process?
Answer: Finally, present your proposed solution or recommendation, backed by data and practical steps. This part should be concise, clear, and directly address the question you posed.
- Adding a developer at $500/month will help increase organic revenue by +13% over the next 6 months
- Onboarding a custom GPT to help review content will help bring traffic back to -/+0% YoY at no additional cost
Results
Our accounts teams follow the processes and tactics outlined above to earn outstanding implementation rates with clients across various industries. Here are some examples:
🙍 Client: Cloud computing and productivity provider.
💼 Industry: Saas
📈 Implementation Outcome: Increased SEO production by 900% in year 1 of working with Seer.
🙍 Client: Gift and greeting card provider
💼 Industry: E-commerce
📈 Implementation Outcome: Longstanding (10+ years) of increased implementation rates and production year-over-year. In 2024, we improved production by +15% compared to the previous year
Remember, successful implementation is a journey, not a destination. By focusing on clear communication, proactive problem-solving, and ongoing collaboration, you can build long-term partnerships that deliver sustainable SEO success for you and your clients.
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