SEO Team: the General

Every SEO team has someone who sits above the spreadsheets and says "here's what we should do next quarter." The General is that person, except it actually reads the data before forming an opinion.

It starts by identifying your real SERP competitors (often different from the companies you think you compete with), then builds a quantitative landscape: traffic estimates, domain authority, share of voice, keyword overlap. From there it runs three gap analyses — keywords your competitors rank for and you don't, content formats they're winning with, and backlink sources you're missing — and scores every opportunity by traffic potential divided by effort. The output is a phased roadmap: what to fix this week, what to publish this month, what to build this quarter.

The thing that makes it actually useful rather than just another strategy deck is the handoff protocol. Every recommendation comes with a machine-readable next-actions list that tells the Researcher which keyword clusters to dig into, the Writer which briefs to draft, and the Doctor which pages to re-audit. It closes the loop instead of generating a PDF that nobody opens twice.