SEO roadmap template: six months, month by month

The roadmap most businesses are sent is a Gantt chart: forty tasks across twelve months, colour-coded, with no line for enquiries anywhere on it. Nobody can tell from it what the phone will do in month three. The template below is built the other way round. It starts from the enquiries the business needs by month six, then fills in the months that get there, and every month names the page it touches.

This is the roadmap behind our SEO services.

Download the SEO roadmap template (Excel)

It opens in Google Sheets as well. It is free, it is not gated behind an email address, and you can change anything in it. If you send roadmaps under your own brand, remove the Read me tab and keep the shape.

What the template contains

Six tabs. The second one is the reason the others exist.

• Read me. The rule, the routine and what never goes in, for whoever inherits the file.
• Goals. Five numbers at month zero and their month-six targets: enquiries traced to search, calls from the Business Profile, clicks, impressions, pages indexed. Every one from an account the client owns.
• Roadmap. Six months. Each month has a stage, its work as rows, the page each row touches, what it needs from the client, a status, the date it was done and what changed in enquiries afterwards. The suggested rows are a starting shape for a local service business; you replace them with the client's own pages.
• Backlog. Everything that could be done, scored by what it does for enquiries (1 costs enquiries now, 2 costs clicks, 3 can wait) and what it costs in hours, then given a month or dropped.
• From the client. Ten things only the client can supply, from Search Console access to twenty phone photographs of real jobs, each with the date asked and the date received.
• Quarterly review. What moved against month zero, what was done, what comes next and why, and the decision.

Why it runs backwards

A business hires an SEO to get customers, so the number the roadmap is built to move is the number of people who enquire. Set that first, from the client's own inbox and phone log, and every month after it has a job: the work that gets from the baseline to the target, in the order that costs least when it is late. A form that does not send costs every enquiry from that page, so it is fixed in week one. A guide that supports a competitive page costs nothing until that page exists, so it waits for month five. Ordering by what a delay costs is the whole method, and it is why the first month looks unglamorous.

The six months

Month one, foundations. The Business Profile claimed or verified with the right primary category, one host answering with the other three redirecting, the sitemap submitted, every money page indexed or the reason found, and the enquiry log started with a test submission from a phone. Nothing here shows in a ranking report. All of it shows in the enquiry log.

Month two, the pages that earn. One page per service the business sells, area pages only where the business genuinely goes, the name, address and phone made identical across the profile, the site and the directories, and a review request sent after every job.

Month three, proof and conversion. Photographs of the real work and the real team on the service pages, the enquiry path tested again on a phone, the first two guides answering what customers ask before they call, and the first monthly report with the five numbers in it.

Month four, the competitive searches. The two or three searches that would change the business, each given the best page in its market, plus one page worth linking to, measured against what the linkers in the niche already cite.

Month five, supporting content. Guides that feed the competitive pages from their body, speed measured on field data with the largest image fixed first, and links lost since month one asked for back.

Month six, the review. Six months of enquiries against the baseline, page by page. Pages with no impressions merged or removed with a redirect. The next six months planned from what earned and what did not.

What a roadmap never contains

A ranking as a goal, because a ranking cannot be invoiced and can be made to look good with searches nobody makes. A month with no named page, because a month nobody can point at is a month nobody can hold you to. A task nobody owns. A promise about when Google will do anything. A fee: the roadmap is the work, and the proposal carries the money.

Keeping it honest

The roadmap is a plan and the report is the check. Each month, the report reads the five numbers against the Goals tab and lists what was done against the Roadmap tab, so a month that slipped is visible the month it slipped. At the quarter, the review asks one question first: did enquiries move. If they did not, the next quarter changes, whatever the rankings say. If they did, the review names the pages that moved them, because that is what the next six months are built on.

Under your own brand

Agencies that resell SEO send this roadmap with their own name on it, and it works that way because nothing in it points at whoever does the work. Section three of the proposal template, the work month by month, is this roadmap in short form; the arrangement from the agency side is on the white label SEO page, and the six months above are the shape our own SEO services run to.