choose-seo-strategy-and-priorities

name

choose-seo-strategy-and-priorities

description

Diagnose what to fix first for a described site by walking the SEO strategy decision tree (crawl → render → index → understand → rank), fixing the lowest broken rung first, then return the priority diagnosis, the indexation strategy, the E-E-A-T posture, and the conditions that would reorder the priorities. Reach for this when the user asks "our organic traffic is flat — where do we start?", "what should we fix first for SEO?", "which pages should we index or noindex?", or "how do we rank in a helpful-content world?". Used by `seo-strategy-architect` (primary).

Skill: choose-seo-strategy-and-priorities

Invoked by: seo-strategy-architect (primary). Also consulted by seo-implementation-engineer when a build reveals the priority was wrong and the strategy needs re-ordering.

When to invoke: "Our organic traffic is flat — where do we start?"; "what should we fix first?"; "which pages should we index / canonicalize / noindex?"; "how do we rank this content?"; any "what's the SEO strategy?" question.

Output: the priority diagnosis (the binding rung) + the indexation strategy + the E-E-A-T posture + the 1-2 flip conditions that would reorder the priorities.

Procedure

1. Restate the situation in the ladder's terms. Capture: the site (stack, rendering mode, size/URL count), the current organic performance (GSC impressions/clicks/coverage, the trend), the target queries & intents (what must convert), and the pain (not indexed / not ranking / traffic dropped / new site).
2. Walk the ladder, find the lowest broken rung. Traverse ../../knowledge/seo-strategy-decision-tree.md: crawl (robots.txt/sitemaps/log evidence) → render (does the crawler see the content) → index (right pages in, only right pages) → understand (IA, entities, schema) → rank (quality signals). A page can't rank if it can't be understood, understood if not indexed, indexed if not rendered, rendered if not crawled — so fix the lowest broken rung first.
3. Prioritize by the binding constraint, not by tactic fashion. Effort on schema markup while Googlebot is blocked is wasted. Name which rung is broken and put that first; sequence the rest behind it.
4. Set the indexation strategy per page class. For each template (product, category, faceted filter, pagination, internal search, tag, author), decide index / canonicalize / noindex / block — with crawl-budget and duplicate-content reasoning. Most sites index far too much; find the over-indexing.
5. Set the E-E-A-T + helpful-content posture where the binding rung is rank: people-first content, first-hand experience/expertise signals, author/entity trust, intent coverage — tied to the topical-authority map (hand to design-site-architecture-and-content-model), not a keyword-density trick.
6. State the flip conditions — the 1-2 facts that, if different, reorder the priorities (e.g., "if the SPA is actually being rendered fine, render drops and content quality becomes the binding rung").
7. Hand off: the chosen priorities + indexation strategy go to seo-implementation-engineer via implement-technical-seo-and-structured-data.

Worked example

User: "We launched a React storefront 4 months ago. Google indexed the homepage but almost none of our 8,000 product pages. Where do we start?"

• Symptom is at the render/index rungs, not rank — so don't start with schema or link-building.
• Diagnose render first: a CSR SPA that ships an empty DOM means Googlebot sees no product content on the second-pass render → the binding rung is render. Verify with URL Inspection "view crawled page" on a product URL.
• Priority order: (1) fix rendering — SSR/SSG the product pages so content is in the first HTML response; (2) then indexation — canonical per product, clean XML sitemap of the 8,000 canonical product URLs, noindex the faceted-filter combinations; (3) then understanding — Product JSON-LD + internal linking; (4) rank/E-E-A-T last.
• Indexation strategy: products → index; facet/sort/parameter URLs → block or noindex; internal search results → noindex.
• Flip condition: if URL Inspection shows the product content is rendered and indexed, render/index aren't the constraint — re-diagnose at understand/rank (thin content, no topical authority).

Guardrails

• Never prescribe a tactic before walking the ladder — diagnose the binding rung first.
• Fix the lowest broken rung first; higher-rung effort is wasted while a lower rung is broken.
• Index less, not more — hunt the over-indexed faceted/duplicate/thin URLs before adding pages.
• E-E-A-T is people-first content with real experience signals, not a keyword-density checklist.
• Internal site-search relevance is not technical SEO → route to search-relevance-engineering; paid → marketing-operations; the visual build → web-design.
• Volatile claims (Google algorithm signals, SERP features, rich-result eligibility, tool pricing) carry a retrieval date and are re-verified before a client commitment. See ../../knowledge/technical-seo-patterns-2026.md.