In the early days of my SEO career, I often found myself spending way too much time on details and cumbersome tasks that ultimately weren’t going to make a big difference (if any at all).

It’s a double-edged sword – spending time learning and honing your SEO skills is a necessary part of the SEO learning curve. Only experience will teach you how to identify and focus on the things that matter most.

But it’s not always the best use of time for the clients who pay you.

As I developed my skills and became a senior SEO, I became much more efficient in identifying the highest-value tasks for clients, and allocating my time to the right things.

I became good at – and a big advocate of – applying the 80/20 rule, also known as the pareto principle.

This principle states that 80% of results come from 20% of efforts. I find this to be particularly true in SEO.

Let’s take a look at some common areas of SEO where the pareto principle applies.

Keyword Research

I remember working on an e-commerce store with about 75 product categories and around 5,000 products.

We spent countless hours doing keyword research for every single product category and even for individual products.

We ended up with perfectly optimized page titles and header tags, sure… and they did start ranking!

But it came at an embarrassingly high cost.

A much better approach would have been to identify some commonalities between how people search for the most popular category pages and products in general.

Looking at common e-commerce keyword variations like:

• Buy <product category>
• Buy <product category> online
• <product category> for sale
• Etc.

We could have spent 30 minutes researching this for 5-10 different categories and products, look at what ranks, and we would have had a pretty good idea of what types of keywords and page titles tend to work well in the particular e-commerce vertical.

Then extrapolate and apply a single template to all of the page titles of the category pages and product pages.

Most of the page titles would have probably been just fine, at a fraction of the time.

If you can achieve 80% of results in 30 minutes of work instead of 15 hours, it really doesn’t matter much if there’s the odd exception where a different page title variation would have been the better choice.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t strive for a perfectly optimized website.

But you can periodically analyze the data, chip away at the remaining pages and make some tweaks here and there as and when you encounter them – while you shift most of your effort on the next high-value task.

Content Production

I often notice a focus on wanting to make every single piece of content perfect – while a “good enough” approach is often more than sufficient.

This might be a controversial statement, but hear me out here.

When I write an article, it often doesn’t take me that long to get to a stage where it’s good enough. It’s not perfect, but it contains the main message I want to share, and I’m happy to hit “Publish”.

You’re reading one of those good enough articles right now.

Sometimes I get caught up in details because something isn’t quite perfect – and before I know it, I’ve just doubled the time I spent on the article while adding maybe 10% (or even less) extra value.

The same goes for finding and selecting images for articles.

It’s better to spend 5 minutes finding a good enough image than to spend an hour finding the perfect image.

I can easily produce 2 good enough articles in the same amount of time it would take me to produce 1 perfect article. That’s double the output. It’s not quite 80/20, but the same principle applies.

By no means am I saying to publish garbage on your website!

But if reaching 80% of your potential quality output allows you to double your production, it’s worth considering. If you leverage AI writing assistants, you could reach an even higher output.

Besides, you can – and should – be tweaking and updating your pages regularly anyway.

Like Seth Godin says: “always be shipping”. Publish first, perfect it later.

Related: How to Generate Endless Content Ideas and Never Run Out of Topics.

Link Building

Building high value backlinks – using whatever method of link building you choose – is going to take a lot of time, a lot of resources, or both.

In almost all cases, acquiring a few really powerful backlinks will do more for your rankings than acquiring a large number of low-quality links.

20% of the backlinks drive 80% of your results.

Quality over quantity.

You won’t hear me advocating for buying backlinks, as it’s against the Google guidelines. So this is just a thought experiment.

But if you’d get an offer to buy a link for $1,000 on the best and most powerful page imaginable in order to rank for your target keyword, and you get certain guarantees that it’ll stay there.

Or you could invest $5,000 into link building services where you’re not exactly sure what’s going to happen or whether it’s going to work…

Then opting for the one guaranteed powerful backlink for 20% of the price might be the better choice.

Conversions

It’s not uncommon for websites to generate 80% – or even more – of their conversions (such as inquiries and sales) from only a fraction of their pages.

The same goes for SEO traffic – you often see a handful of pages driving very high traffic to the website, while the rest of the pages combined drive very little in comparison.

It makes sense to pour most of your SEO efforts and resources into improving the rankings of those few money pages.

You don’t need to rank for all the keywords, you need to rank for the right keywords.

Whether you work with an SEO freelancer or an agency, their starting point should be to:

• Identify which pages are the revenue-generators of your website
• Determine which keywords have the highest buyer-intent in your industry
• Building a strategy to improve your visibility for those pages and keywords

Focus 80% of your SEO efforts into improving the 20% of pages and keywords that generate the most sales and revenue.

Focus on the Right Tasks for SEO Success

When starting an SEO campaign, one of the most important things you should do is identify where the opportunities for growth are.

This should then be translated into a set of actions and implementations that matter and will actually move the needle.

Apply your available resources the right way, and you can get a lot done.

Contact me if you need help improving the SEO of your website – I use the pareto principle to ensure you get the most out of your investment.