About the Author
Corey Morris is the President and CEO of VOLTAGE, a search marketing and website agency for expertise-driven organizations. He has spent more than two decades in digital marketing and SEO, and he wrote the book on the Digital Marketing Success Plan® (DMSP), the planning process VOLTAGE uses with clients. Corey has published more than 150 articles and expert contributions across Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, and Forbes over nearly a decade, and he still writes regularly for the first two. His Search Engine Journal articles alone have been read nearly 1.7 million times. He has spoken at SMX, Digital Summit, and SMPS. He's also a sought-after podcast and media guest, with more than 75 speaking, podcast, and media appearances. He served as an officer on the board of the global search marketing trade association, founded a Kansas City search marketing conference, and was named the 2019 KCDMA Marketer of the Year.
An endless checklist drains the purpose out of search.
A tremendous amount of work goes into search engine optimization (SEO), and today that discipline has expanded into broad online visibility, covering organic search results, AI Overviews and large language models. To keep up with this demand, many marketing teams adopt an “always-on” approach and build massive, ongoing checklists of tasks to complete every single month.
Checklists can be useful, and they should still be questioned. I have seen many teams fall into the trap of completing tasks simply because they are on the schedule. When we operate this way, day-to-day distractions and the habit of piling new tasks onto existing efforts blur the lines, and we lose sight of where one initiative ends and another begins.
When search becomes an endless checklist, it loses its sense of investment and expected return. We stop asking why we are doing the work, what it is producing, and how those decisions were made.
Sprints move search from always-on to always-progressing.
The alternative to the endless checklist is a sprint-based approach, which brings purpose, focus and strategy back to our execution. Instead of doing a little bit of everything all year long, we break our work down into defined periods with clear milestones.
This forces us to set specific starting and stopping points, which is very important in an environment where attribution and measurement are constantly shifting. Here is how we can put sprint-based search strategies in place.
1. Define specific sprint themes.
Execution must always start with strategy. We have to identify what actually matters to the business right now and where search visibility fits into that goal.
When planning a sprint, define a clear theme and objective that is specific enough to be meaningful and measurable. Instead of setting a vague goal like “improve rankings,” set a focused sprint objective like “improve organic conversions for our top five service pages over the next thirty days.” This instantly gives the team a clear lens for prioritizing their daily tasks.
2. Build a backlog instead of a to-do list.
As you identify technical issues, content gaps and new opportunities, document them in a backlog, and resist the urge to treat that backlog as an overwhelming, immediate to-do list.
Your backlog is a repository of ideas, and we use it to feed future sprint planning. If a task does not serve the specific goal of the current sprint, it stays in the backlog. This protects the team from distraction and keeps resources flowing toward our immediate strategic priorities.
3. Review and reset.
At the end of each sprint, we stop and review our progress. We document the results, analyze what worked and define what comes next.
Treating every sprint as a distinct project allows us to change direction if market conditions or search algorithms change. We move from doing search out of habit to managing it as an intentional system driven by return on investment (ROI).
Focused sprints protect your momentum.
Some foundational work should remain ongoing, such as routine technical audits and monitoring crawl health, but the strategic growth of your digital presence still requires dedicated focus. We have to stop executing blindly, ask for clarity, organize our work into focused sprints and move the business forward intentionally.
The question to ask is whether you are managing a strategy or just checking boxes. If you want help turning your backlog into focused sprints, our SEO services are built to work this way.