How to Build an SEO Roadmap & Strategy in 2025

Written by: Anastasija Vasilevska
Jan / 14 / 2025

Building an SEO roadmap strategy is like planning a road trip. Sure, you may know how to get from point A to point B, but what about all the pitstops along the way? Or the unexpected roadblocks?

You need a step-by-step plan to get to your destination or, in this case, reach your SEO goals. The SEO roadmap gives you a clear view of all the opportunities for improvement with detailed directions to guide you through the challenges. It ensures you stay afloat while adapting to unexpected algorithm updates or competitive shifts.

In this post, we break down how to build an SEO roadmap and strategy in 2025 that leads to measurable results.

What Is an SEO Roadmap Strategy?

An SEO roadmap strategy includes all the steps to optimizing a website for search engines. This doesn’t mean you have to revamp the whole site but only sections that are necessary (e.g., the blog section or service pages). So, the roadmap is entirely unique to your SEO situation.

Depending on what you want your strategy to focus on, you’ll have to create a unique SEO roadmap outlining the steps it’ll take to get the desired results. 

Key Element of an SEO Roadmap

When creating an SEO roadmap, you have to pay attention to all aspects of the strategy:

  • Your budget and resources
  • Availability of team members
  • Level of expertise of each member for easier task planning
  • SEO gaps and opportunities
  • SEO limitations (such as cannibalization issues or indexing problems)
  • Your competition and their SEO strategies.

Why Use an SEO Roadmap?

Did you know that Google applies over 200 ranking factors when reviewing your content? Now, imagine checking them off one by one—it’d take ages. The whole point of an SEO roadmap is to help you prioritize.

Another reason to use an SEO roadmap strategy is to not lose yourself in the pile of tasks you need to finish. You’ll need a clear overview of all the technical and non-technical SEO tasks you need to include and who to assign them to for a successful SEO strategy.

By using an SEO roadmap, you’ll also be able to gauge how much time each task would take on average, which will help you set a long-term plan (e.g., a 12-month strategy).

Finally, the SEO roadmap can be updated constantly. Every time you need a crutch in your SEO efforts (e.g., after a drop in rankings following a Google update), you can add it to your SEO roadmap sheet and start working on it immediately. This will help you prioritize time-sensitive tasks, do quick fixes, and achieve quick wins.

Website analytics presented on laptop

Types of SEO Roadmaps

Depending on your SEO needs, there are a few basic types of SEO roadmaps you can create:

On-page SEO Roadmap

An on-page SEO strategy focuses on everything content-related on a website. So, if a website has a blog section or product pages, optimizing these pages is part of the strategy. On-page tasks may include:

  • Writing new blog posts
  • Reoptimizing outdated or low-ranking content
  • Adding missing meta titles and descriptions
  • Aligning meta titles and descriptions with the current year/trend
  • Optimizing images for SEO (adding alt tags, compressing image size, and adding focus keywords in file names)
  • Updating page structures and keywords for core pages.

Off-page SEO Roadmap

Off-page refers to SEO tasks you do outside the website to boost its visibility, such as:

  • Creating an interlinking strategy for quick-win pages
  • Obtaining high-quality backlinks
  • Optimizing for social media platforms
  • Optimizing your Google Business Profile
  • Guest posting.

All these tasks are supposed to increase your brand awareness and direct more users to your website.

Local SEO Roadmap

A local SEO roadmap is designed to help you get leads for a specific location where you offer your services. These tasks can include:

  • Optimizing for local keywords
  • Updating your Google Business profile
  • Getting business reviews and increasing your Google rating
  • Creating localized content
  • Creating location pages.

Technical SEO Roadmap

Technical SEO focuses on fixing technical issues with your website that might be hindering your clicks and impressions. Here are some tasks you can include in your strategy:

  • Improving site speed
  • Fixing broken links
  • Implementing structured data
  • Creating an XML sitemap
  • Optimizing for mobile.

Creating an SEO Roadmap Strategy in 5 Steps

Here’s how to create a complete SEO roadmap strategy in only five steps:

  1. Identify SEO Challenges and Solutions

Do a full SEO audit of your website to understand where you’re falling behind. Analyze on-page SEO and make note of things that should be improved (e.g., filling out missing title tags and descriptions).

Next, check if there are any technical issues that are disrupting the flow of traffic to your website. This can be broken links, duplicate content, deindexed pages, and more.

Finally, do a competitor analysis to pinpoint areas of improvement. Once your research is complete, you can start breaking down your findings into tasks.

Pro tip: Teamwork makes the dream work! Try holding a brainstorming session with your team and have everyone pitch their ideas. It’s so much better when you’re seeing things from different team members’ perspectives (content writers, SEO strategists, link specialists, etc.)

  1. Establish Quick Wins and Long-Term Goals

To start creating your tasks, differentiate between quick wins and long-term goals. An example of a quick win would be improving linking between pages ranking on positions 10-20 to get them higher in SERPs. An example of a long-term goal would be to improve conversion rates over the next year.

Once you have a clear division between the tasks, start listing quick wins that you can start working on immediately. These are the tasks that will yield the quickest results, which you can present to your client to show them that your strategy is working.

  1. Break Down Goals into Actionable Steps

Once you have a list of your tasks, create a content calendar and divide tasks by team members and deadlines. Don’t forget about KPI monitoring and reporting—this task should be part of the regular workflow and, ideally, should be done monthly.

  1. Set Realistic Timelines

Next, set timelines for each group of tasks. For example, quick-win tasks should show results within 1-3 months, while long-term tasks might take over six months to complete. This will help you communicate the strategy to your client so they know when to expect results.

  1. Regularly Review and Adapt

Once each task has been assigned to a team member, you can start tracking progress. Have each member add notes and report progress for each task so that you’re all aligned with the projected timeline. 

If anything happens while you’re carrying out the SEO roadmap (such as a new Google update), make sure to tackle these problems head-on instead of waiting to see what happens. Google algorithm changes happen every few months, and if you don’t learn about them immediately, your rankings might stall or drop.

Final Thoughts on Building an SEO Roadmap Strategy

Building an SEO roadmap isn’t hard when you follow our step-by-step guide. Of course, it’ll get more detailed the more research you do, but this is necessary to identify all the issues and learn how to create an SEO strategy like a pro.

If you feel more comfortable leaving strategy building to professionals, our SEO team at SmartClick can help you create the ideal SEO roadmap. Contact us and tell us about your industry and business goals, and we’ll present you with a long-term SEO strategy.