In college I had a friend who said “If it’s not worth doing, it’s not worth doing right.” I think that is a moment of genius. He communicates a subtle message — and it is NOT laziness. It is about priorities. If you have limited time you have to choose what gets done right, and what just gets done.
You have a lot of possible choices in an search traffic campaign:
- Site design
- Keyword research
- On page copy
- On site links
- URLs
- Images
- Usability
- Off page links
- Legacy domain issues
- Content generation
- Paid search
- Site architecture
- Search submission
- Meta data
- Social media
- Customer interactions
It is quite reasonable that some of these are overlapping in your mind. Regardless you need to ask yourself: if I have to get it done ASAP what do I take the time to nail down? There are many reasons that time becomes an issue; for large agencies you may have too many clients per SEO specialist (Thanks Mike), you may have put SEO in the wrong phase of your plan, or you may just be making a last ditch effort. In any case if you do a little bit of everything you will return a lot of nothing. So what would you bet on if you were under the gun?
Quick keyword research, good on page writing and buying traffic?
Good keyword research, quick rewrite and meta data?
Maybe you would spend 24hr making a linkbait and IM everyone and their grandmother.
Share your thoughts.

2 Comments
I think it has to be on “page design” and “on-page copy”. The presentation is key, everything can build from there.
When you say page design I assume you mean the way it looks. So, if we make it pretty and well written people will like it?
That is an interesting plan.