Chapter 03: Re: Do two things in a quarter

Storytime.

We’ve worked with 50+ SaaS companies. 
Here’s something we found: Most of these companies were trying to do everything at once when it came to SEO. They were running around, ticking off endless SEO checklists, without seeing real results. It was chaos.

But some companies took a different approach. They focused on just a couple of things each quarter, and that’s where the magic happened.

When I worked in-house at a company, I reported to the Senior Director of Marketing. Every quarter, he’d point out a couple of things to focus on for the quarter or month. At first, I managed everything in SEO, juggling multiple tasks with no clear focus. But he made me stop and look at the data.

Here are actual examples from our work:

1. The company had over 200 ebooks on its website. The pages they were published on weren’t optimized. So, in one quarter, we optimized the templates and also worked with the web dev team to auto-generate 1 new page for each chapter of the ebook. By the end, we had generated 800 new pages from the content we already had. This helped us increase ebook leads by about 25%.
   
2. In another quarter, we found that the company had 10,000+ pages, and a lot of them were outdated. So, for that quarter, we focused on deleting 5,000 unnecessary pages. Again, a big project, but over the next 2 quarters, we saw a 30% increase in traffic.

Every time, we focused on just two things, and by the end of the quarter, we saw real, measurable results—results that could be directly linked to those two focused efforts. It was a total shift in my worldview. I realized that trying to do everything isn’t just inefficient—it’s counterproductive.

The lesson?

How to pick the two projects for the quarter?

If you’re just starting your SEO journey, your SEO team (in house or agency) should be able to help you with this. Give them the constraint of 2 projects per quarter and ask them to prioritise the projects by the estimated impact of the work.

If you’ve already been doing SEO for a while, make sure you have an executive SEO report, created the way we’ve described it in this chapter. Using the report and the recommendations of your SEO team, you should be able to take a call on this.