Quick answer: a working SEO strategy fits in five artifacts — a baseline audit, a keyword-to-page map, a technical fix list, a 90-day content calendar, and a KPI table. Copy the templates below, fill them in for your site, and you have a plan most agencies would charge four figures to produce. The keyword-to-page map is the one that moves rankings fastest.

Most SEO "strategies" fail before any Google update touches them — they fail because nobody wrote down which page targets which keyword, so effort scatters. This template exists to prevent exactly that. It is the structure we apply to Shopify stores, but every table works for any site.

Part 1 — Baseline (day 0)

Record these once, before changing anything, so improvement is provable:

Metric Where to get it Your number
Indexed pages Search Console → Pages
Keywords in top 10 / top 20 Your rank tracker
Organic clicks + impressions (28d) Search Console → Performance
Site health / audit score An SEO audit tool
Core Web Vitals pass rate PageSpeed Insights
Referring domains Ahrefs/Moz free checkers
AI visibility (is your brand cited?) Ask ChatGPT/Perplexity about your niche

Part 2 — Keyword-to-page map (the core artifact)

One row per important page. One primary keyword per page, ever. Secondary keywords are variations the same page can absorb naturally.

Page URL Primary keyword Vol Difficulty Intent Secondary keywords Status
/collections/linen-bedding linen bedding 9900 38 commercial linen sheets, linen duvet sets optimizing
/products/sage-duvet-cover sage green linen duvet cover 320 12 transactional sage duvet queen ranking #14
/blogs/news/linen-vs-cotton linen vs cotton sheets 2400 22 informational is linen better than cotton drafting

Rules that make the map work: commercial-intent keywords go to collection and product pages, informational ones to blog posts that link down to the money page; if two rows share a keyword, merge or re-target one; every keyword you care about must have exactly one owner. Finding the winnable rows is the research step — the low-competition keyword method and a keyword research tool fill this table fast.

Part 3 — Technical fix list (weeks 1–2)

Run an audit, then fix in this order — each tier blocks the one below it:

  1. Indexability — broken canonicals, accidental noindex, robots.txt blocks, redirect chains, orphan pages.
  2. Crawl clarity — XML sitemap accuracy, duplicate content, parameter URLs, hreflang if multilingual.
  3. On-page completeness — unique titles and meta descriptions on every mapped page, one H1, keyword in the first 100 words, descriptive alt text.
  4. Structured data — Product/Offer/Article/FAQ schema that validates.
  5. Speed — image compression, render-blocking scripts; chase real-user Core Web Vitals, not lab perfection.
  6. AEO layer — AI crawlers allowed in robots.txt, llms.txt published, a two-sentence direct answer at the top of every key page.

Part 4 — 90-day calendar

  • Weeks 1–2: fix. Technical tiers 1–3 done. Baseline recorded.
  • Weeks 3–4: optimize the money pages. Every mapped collection/product page gets keyword-led title, description, H1, first-paragraph answer, schema. (This is the step RankEngine automates and verifies across a whole catalog.)
  • Weeks 5–12: publish and link. Two mapped articles per week beats eight in week five and zero after. Each article: primary keyword in title and H1, a quick-answer opening, an FAQ block, and internal links to its money page. Interlink new posts into a topic cluster around each pillar.
  • Continuous: track rankings weekly, fix what the tracker exposes, request indexing for new URLs, prune or merge pages that never rank.

Part 5 — KPIs and reporting

Report these four, monthly, against the day-0 baseline: keywords in top 20 (the leading indicator — striking-distance terms are next month's top-10s), organic clicks on mapped pages (not sitewide vanity totals), indexed-page count, and conversions from organic. Add an AI column when relevant: brand mentions in ChatGPT/Perplexity answers for your core queries — trackable automatically.

The template's whole philosophy in one line: decide what each page is for, make the page unambiguous about it, and measure whether the map is coming true. Ninety days of that discipline beats a year of scattered tips.