SEO Strategy4 min

The SEO Prioritisation Framework: Do This First, That Never

You have 100 things on your SEO to-do list. Here's how to figure out which 10 actually matter.

The biggest SEO mistake isn't doing the wrong things.

It's doing the right things in the wrong order.

Spending 3 weeks writing a blog post when your site has crawl errors is like painting a house that's on fire.

Technically, painting is a good thing to do. But maybe handle the fire first?

The ICE framework for SEO

We use a modified ICE framework across all our campaigns:

I = Impact. How much will this move the needle?

C = Confidence. How sure are we this will work?

E = Ease. How hard is it to implement?

Score each task 1-10 on all three. Multiply. Sort by total score.

The highest-scoring tasks are your priorities. Period.

Real examples

High priority (do first):

  • Fix broken redirects on high-traffic pages (Impact: 9, Confidence: 9, Ease: 8 = 648)
  • Add missing meta descriptions to top 20 pages (Impact: 7, Confidence: 8, Ease: 9 = 504)
  • Submit XML sitemap (Impact: 8, Confidence: 9, Ease: 10 = 720)
  • Medium priority (do this month):

  • Create content for 5 long-tail keywords (Impact: 7, Confidence: 6, Ease: 5 = 210)
  • Improve internal linking structure (Impact: 6, Confidence: 7, Ease: 6 = 252)
  • Low priority (maybe never):

  • Redesign the blog layout (Impact: 2, Confidence: 3, Ease: 2 = 12)
  • Translate site into 4 languages (Impact: 4, Confidence: 4, Ease: 1 = 16)
  • Don't reinvent the wheel

    We already scored and prioritized 113 SEO tasks based on 20+ years of data from 500+ campaigns.

    They're inside SEO Checkup. Pre-prioritized. Ready to execute.

    Free. No credit card. 30 seconds.

    Stop guessing what to work on. Start knowing. Then build a roadmap around your priorities. Ahrefs' guide to SEO basics offers a solid framework for prioritizing too.

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