“Has anyone in this room ever played Mario Kart? The tasks we’re currently juggling and the speed we’re working at are giving me Rainbow Road energy.”

One of my colleagues laughs at my question, finds the Rainbow Road track on Spotify and cranks up the volume. We laugh, bob our heads to the nostalgic beat and continue working.

I imagine myself starting my final lap of Rainbow Road as the music plays in our office. The beats become faster, my hands grow clammier and my focus sharpens as I look out for hazards on the track. I’m overstimulated.

But instead of racing other drivers, I’m racing to complete my SEO and content tasks before new priorities flood my pipeline.

How many SEO professionals have witnessed this fast-paced feeling in the current search landscape?

Not only must you achieve and report on website growth. You must also know your next strategy or solution and be on top of the latest trends and updates.

And yet, for all the speed at which our industry evolves, our SEO roadmaps often resemble congested highways, crammed with endless tasks, bottlenecks, stakeholder input and unexpected diversions.

What’s an SEO to do?

This article won’t promise you a streamlined and stress-free roadmap – that’s unrealistic. I instead want to help you manage your congested SEO highway in a way that’s smart, sustainable and structured, so there’s no need to panic when the pile of projects and tasks start to feel beyond your control.

The restrictions of roadmaps

There are multiple SEO roadmap templates online, some better than others, that advise you on how to transform complex tasks into concrete steps and prioritise high-impact efforts that contribute to bottom-line outcomes.

I particularly appreciate this Ahrefs article on SEO roadmaps, in which Jamie Grant explains the importance of SEO roadmaps in helping “generate the buy-in for your long-term SEO strategy. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it will naturally take some time to action and implement your SEO strategy.”

SEO Roadmap example created using the free Ahrefs roadmap template.

I have used template after template of roadmaps and, while I find these an excellent starting point, roadmaps are almost always disrupted. In my case, disruptions have mostly consisted of changes to business goals and priorities, which is, of course, natural.

This departure or diversion from an SEO roadmap affects your ability to:

• complete planned tasks
• deliver predicted metrics
• secure buy-in
• feel a sense of accomplishment
• remain concentrated and motivated
• build or sustain confidence

Every business’ goal is to make something that people need/want/love. Your goal as a professional, whether you work in-house, in an agency or as a freelancer, is to align whatever is happening within that business with doing something that you need/want/love. To progress in your career, gain fulfillment, and achieve success, I suggest adding another dimension to your roadmap: the 50-30-20 rule.

It’s this balance between delivering results and finding purpose that you need in order to fine-tune your SEO roadmap; otherwise you’ll struggle to sustain both innovation and motivation.

How to segment your SEO roadmap using the 50-30-20 rule

Executing non-negotiable tasks (50%)

High-impact tasks are more likely to give you and your stakeholders a sense of accomplishment once complete. These align very obviously with company and client goals and are the easiest to generate buy-in for.

Different companies have vastly different SEO priorities; examples of these tasks could include:

• identifying “low-hanging-fruit” keyword opportunities
• fixing 404s and broken links
• conducting competitor analysis
• producing PR content
• publishing content to attract high levels of engagement and natural backlinks

Some tasks may require more effort than others.

These are the non-negotiables of your pipeline and should take up 50 percent of your time. Whether that’s 20 hours from your 40-hour week, four hours of your working day or two weeks of your month.

You should also categorise meetings discussing non-negotiable tasks as such; these too should fall under the 50 percent segment, so they don’t eat up any time allocated to other segments.

A colour-coded calendar. I like to colour-code my tasks and meetings, so I can see how time I’m dedicating to each segment and adjust accordingly.

I’ve read that finishing a big project or ticking off a task on your to-do list creates dopamine. If you don’t successfully or consistently complete enough SEO tasks in your roadmap, you could experience decreased motivation and reduced pleasure from achievement. It’s therefore critical that you remain honest and realistic with these non-negotiable tasks.

Time allocation for non-negotiable tasks (based on a 40-hour work week):

Manage your time however makes the most sense for you e.g.

• 4 hours per day
• 20 hours per week
• 2 weeks every month

Executing negotiable tasks (30%)

The issue with only prioritising high-priority non-negotiable tasks is that there’s a danger of pushing all your other projects into a backlog.

That’s why it’s just as important to devote 30 percent of your working time on “negotiable” projects that allow you to experiment with SEO, collaborate with others, learn, and satisfy your curiosity. I call these “negotiable” because, while they might not be considered high priority by all stakeholders, they are crucial to stay competitive and creative, have fun and grow your professional career.

Over the past year, I’ve used this time for:

• testing CRO and SEO hypotheses
• conducting more conversations with clients/products/sales teams
• researching SEO trends and updates
• biannual brainstorms and experiments to implement AI or automation
• networking with industry peers and learning from external professionals
• pitching and preparing to speak at conferences

Generating buy-in for these types of tasks is more difficult, but if you feel comfortable, frame it as necessary for innovation, crucial to stay ahead of your industry competitors and key for retaining creative talent and motivation.

Likewise, if you’re only completing the “urgent” ad hoc by-EOD tasks (which might not even strictly be SEO tasks) that enter your pipeline from one day to the next, you will likely lose sight of the bigger picture. After a few months, you’ll come to find you have not worked on any of your longer-term creative or collaborative projects.

I try to ensure that the time I’ve blocked out for negotiable tasks allows me to enter my deep focus mode, with little distraction from meetings or colleagues. If I don’t, I struggle to chip away at these projects because new obstacles enter my highway and divert my attention. If, like me, you work in a team, ensure you communicate how you’ve blocked out your time to help with your concentration and focus.

A colour-coded calendar. I like to allocate blocks of time based on what makes the most sense in terms of my concentration levels.

As before, any meetings discussing negotiable tasks should fall under your “negotiable” time segment.

Time allocation for negotiable tasks (based on a 40-hour work week):

As before, you should manage your time however makes the most sense for you e.g.

• 2.4 hours per day
• 12 hours per week
• 6–7 days per month

Auditing and adjusting your roadmap (20%)

An SEO roadmap is rarely without bottlenecks or congestion. Projects will be blocked and deprioritised, new tasks will enter the queue and sometimes new company goals will need to take precedence.

As Tori Gray, CEO and Founder of the Gray Dot Company, says: “Often the same resources are being pulled in a new direction, which can cause a distraction or total departure from the planned roadmap.”

But reroutes and diversions do not mean you’ve failed to execute your roadmap successfully.

You should always block out time every month to audit and adjust your roadmap. Use this time to build and review reports, and validate or critique your activities as part of an “alignment audit” to make sure your roadmap is still taking you in the right direction, even if there have been diversions and obstacles along the way.

Your monthly report allows you to assess obstacles and hazards as you go, reroute as necessary, and revise your ETA. You’ll get better at recognising where and when you need to make adjustments as time passes.

Your monthly report may prompt you to ask:

• Are we seeing results? How do these benefit the company?
• Are our goals and KPIs realistic? Do we need to make adjustments?
• Are realignments necessary due to new priorities?
• Which tasks should we focus on and/or deprioritise going forward?
• Are there opportunities to experiment or test in our upcoming pipeline?
• Do you feel good about your workload and career progression?

This should take up 20 percent of your time. That’s roughly one-and-a-half hours a day, one day a week or just over four days a month.

I tend to use Looker Studio monthly reports to come back to the bigger picture and gauge whether I am contributing to company goals by monitoring on-page engagement, session duration, conversions (or key events) and inbound/sales qualified leads from the website.

I also use these reports as a prompt to stay on track when it comes to industry trends by browsing the latest SEO news I find from LinkedIn and monthly reports such as Conductor’s 30|30 webinars.

Time allocation for auditing and adjusting your roadmap (based on a 40-hour work week):

As before, you should manage your time however makes the most sense for you e.g.

• 1.6 hours per week
• 8 hours per week
• 4 days per month

Final thoughts

Throughout this article I’ve based time allocation calculations on a 40-hour work week, but of course if your work patterns are different, you should adjust the time you’re allocating accordingly. In a similar vein, if you work freelance or for an agency and have multiple clients you’ll need to adjust the 50-30-20 time allocation based on your billable hours for each client.

The 50-30-20 rule is not just an effective way to manage the traffic in your roadmap; it also allows you to establish a rhythm in your day-to-day work, and over your career – respect this rule and stick to it as much as you can.

Don’t plan further ahead than three months. The likelihood is that a company’s goals will already have evolved and you need to readjust priorities.

There are things you can’t plan for in life; you don’t know when you’ll slip on a banana skin, or be ploughed off the Rainbow Road to find yourself having to restart your engine. Don’t enter the quarter, the month or the year with an overstimulating schedule, clammy hands and adrenaline.

Control the pace, plan your own development and be kind to yourself.