
The way you plan your strategy for each site will differ according to your goals for that project. Depending on what your goals for the project are, the plan could go many different ways. Some people like to focus on one website at a time and try to get it ranking as fast as possible while others will focus on several sites and take their time. It will usually depend on your timeline and budget for the project more than anything else. However, it is important to always remember that SEO is an ongoing process so it is never really “finished.” You should be prepared to continuously invest in SEO to maintain and defend your rankings.
Once you have a general idea, you should rewrite your entire plan and break everything down into individual tasks which you can either do yourself or delegate to your team. It is especially important to make sure your goals are reasonable and achievable. SEO is different than many other web projects in that you can’t really guarantee an achievement within a set amount of time. There are just too many moving parts and variables to be able to make a blanket guarantee like that.
That being said, every real world project requires deadlines because that is just how things get done. Deadlines should be set regarding project tasks but flexibility can be important. For example, if you are working on a long term optimization campaign for a large site, you will want to reassess your campaign on a regular basis to make sure that everything is going as planned. Depending on how the search engines are reacting to your campaign you may find you need to be more or less aggressive.
The vast majority of SEO optimization services will review their campaign from project to project. If a webpage ranks earlier than expected than why use up the budget? It may be better to set those funds aside for “maintenance” SEO, which is usually less expensive and requires less work than the initial promotional work necessary to get “on the map” in the search results.