What are the company's priorities?

[kexej28769@nongnue]

Which people have resources they are willing to dedicate?

#2 was key. Without it, the idea that one of the properties might have the greatest opportunity for search traffic wouldn’t matter if they didn’t have any resources to dedicate to implementing the SEO team’s recommendations.

Similarly, in the first example above, the vendor was unable to keep up with the client’s workflow and lost the client. Make sure you are able to identify which wheels are turning that you can uae number data to get things done. There may be some tactics that will have a greater impact, but if the client is not ready or willing to do them yet, you are pushing a rock uphill.

Do: Understand the competitive landscape.
What is this site up against? What is the realistic chance of competing with them? Knowing what the competitive landscape looks like, how will that affect your approach?

Real world example:
Site B has a section of pages that compete with older, stronger, more established, content-rich, link-rich sites. Since this is a new section of the site, Site B needs to do almost everything — technical optimization, content creation, promotion, and link building. However, the nature of this competitive landscape shows us that being first to publish can be important here. Site B’s competitors often have content if not months before the original content brand owner (Site B). How?