SEO Product Management: What is it and How To Succeed at It?

SEO product management. What is it about? In today's edition of Crawling Mondays, we are going to go through it with 2 people who have a lot of experience with SEO product management. I have invited Adam Jen and Sam Torres, who have lots of experience from every single angle. So thank you. Thank you very much, Sam and Adam. Before starting our conversation, Though I want to thank Content King, who's today's episode sponsor. Content King is that tool that you want to be alerted when anything in SEO goes to hell. If someone implements or releases something that they shouldn't, if there's a bug at every level of configuration from technical to content. So go and take a look at Content King. And now we are ready to start. our today's conversation. As I mentioned, I have Adam Jen, who's the founder of the SEO Spring newsletter, which is actually a very useful way to follow up and understand better SEO product management. And then he's also an independent SEO program manager himself. Hello, Adam. How are you?

Hey, Aleyda. Thank you for having me. It's great to be here. I'm a big fan of the podcast for a long time, so it's great. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you for coming. On the other hand, I have Sam Torres. Sam is the CEO and co-founder at Great. Hello. Hello, Sam. How are you? Hello, Aleyda.

Thanks for having me. I'm excited.

I am excited too, especially because this topic is relatively new, right? And I believe that it is natural. SEO in the last few years has become much more mature, more sophisticated, more bigger companies have started to develop their in-house SEO program and are not seeing SEO purely as a marketing role, but also as a product role. This is exciting for me to see because in my former life, I was a front-end web developer slash web designer, and I was more involved in that area. So I would like to hear from you regarding SEO product management. When would you say is more relevant for teams to have an SEO product management role inside or hire external consultancy in order to take At least the base into account.

Sure. An SEO PM or an SEO product manager is probably a, well, it's a type of SEO specialist who works with product engineering teams, works within those teams to what I call driving business impact, right? Impactful problems. And they'll work cross-functionally to deliver what is, what some people call SEO features, but what I guess most SEOs will call recommendations, right? But these are features that are bets. They're big, small bets. They're gonna drive organic traffic and revenue. And really the 3 key things that I kind of bucket what an SEO PM does, what I do, what other people I've talked to are SEO PMs do is they'll shape a strategy and create a roadmap and set goals, usually using something called OKRs, which we can chat about in a second. They'll continuously sync teams so they're not just handing off a checklist to a dev. They're briefing the dev using what's called PRDs or one-pagers or product briefs. They'll be talking to designers and talking to the sales team and the marketing team and the content team to make sure that what they're building— like, you're reducing risk, really. The more you talk to people, the more you get feedback on things, the less you need to do what's called rework, because you don't want to do that. Because once you release something, people don't like you know, fixing things generally, at least in my experience. And finally, like you will sit and ship the work with the dev team. So you'll sit in planning, you'll sit in QA, you'll sit in standups, you'll brief and break down tickets in Jira usually. That's really the job of a PM. Now, the difference between an SEO person and an SEO PM is usually that the SEO PM's more hands-on. Like I am pulling people into meetings. I am following up with the UX person, working with the UX designer to build out templates and designs that we can then come and bring in the dev in and we can chat about it. And I'm creating web development strategies in Miro boards. And I'm really hands-on with the team within the engineering and product team so that we're driving growth for the business. Now, what kinds of companies usually have SEO PMs is usually enterprise. companies. However, what's really interesting is I've spoken to a lot of SEOs recently who are tech SEOs, maybe heads of SEO, who sit in and work in products engineering teams. So I don't want to just be like, if you don't have the title of SEO PM, SEO product manager, you can't do the thing.

It's interesting that you mentioned that because in a couple of cases, actually my key person of conversation within the company besides the in-house SEO is the PM. Right. But this is not an SEO PM, it's a PM in general, but of course he's SEO savvy as well as savvy in UX and PPC, every area that knows that will bring traffic value growth to the product itself.

So I think for me, just the top level for SEO PM is just really that, and to Adam's point, a lot of technical SEOs and even content SEOs are already doing it. They're just maybe not labeling it as such, but it's really just laying down that roadmap. Prioritizing, communicating, making sure it's actually getting implemented, doing QA, and really just collaborating across different aisles in the company. Because SEO really does touch so many different things, and that's also another soapbox I could get on another day. But there's really just so much impact that SEO has. And for me, what I've seen for companies that are starting to implement SEO PM programs is honestly those who are more driven by e-commerce. So we're seeing a lot of e-commerce companies are starting to implement these because the company itself and management is having almost a mind shift of SEO used to feel only like a cost center, like in advertising. And they're realizing that no, it really is a revenue generator. It is a sellable product, just like the actual things you're, you're really selling on your website. So just that mind shift. So I will say one of the best things about it too, and Adam, you kind of talked about it where it's really all about aligning the SEO activities to the overall business goals. Well, suddenly when you're speaking like that, because I think traditionally, and I've been in SEO for probably way too long, but for the longest time metrics were just, we were measured by how much traffic are we bringing in? And so thankfully, there has been this shift really in the last decade of we need to talk more about results and what is it actually doing for the business on the bottom line. And this is just, I feel like, another phase in, in that journey of we are going after major business goals. And so since we're now talking about those types of objectives, we're also able to get a lot more buy-in from management. Because when they're able to see the impact that you're going to have, that directly relates to what they care about, it's just much easier to get that buy-in and get people willing to invest and take the time because SEO takes time.

I think that the focus or angle of SEO integrated with the product totally makes sense and it should have made sense right from the beginning, right? Because realistically, more than a purely marketing activity is an activity that pretty much touches or has an influence or needs to have an influence and alignment through a lot of different areas, more than just marketing, right? And having that role to ensure that there's alignment is a really good idea to avoid the typical issue of working on a silo and not getting buy-in and not getting cross-departmental support. And yes, and potentially across many organizations. If an SEO especially will go and say, oh, here are my recommendations, right? It will be completely different if someone who's called an SEO product manager, oh, okay. Like we need to. hear this person out because has a product management role, project manager role, coordination, communication, ensuring that something else is achieved. Again, it shouldn't be necessarily like that, but I can see that happening just because of the change of role, right? What would you say are the keys, the fundamental steps to ensure that a good SEO product management program is set in organizations? What are the building blocks, criteria, main steps to start?

Document, document, document. Sorry, I love documentation. And so I think that's really one of the biggest things that's always gonna be my first tip is just, you know, you've gotta write documentation. It's probably one of the least fun parts, but also saves you so much time later. And then also as you're building those types of like best practices documentation, don't feel like you have to reinvent the wheel. Some of it already exists, right? There's a ton of resources that you have, Aleyda, in, in learning SEO. There's a lot of things out there, but documentation is always going to help. Using the Google search web guidelines is huge. So documentation is definitely my number one step.

So my experience of being a PM in a company that tries to sell to SEOs is interestingly, you need to actually deprioritize your SEO skills and dial up your communication, dial up your business savviness, dial up your ability to talk and dial up your ability and you need to be able to listen. Right? Because I find throughout my career I spend a lot of time talking at people. Okay? But when you're in a PM, your job is to solve people's problems that is impactful to a business. So it drives— basically people like your product, so they pay you money for the thing. Yeah? So if you're in e-commerce, you sell products. If you're B2B, you sell usually a service. A SaaS company sells software, et cetera. But that really means that you need to listen to their problems, right? And then come up creatively, strategically with potential ideas to solve those problems. So for me, strategic kind of thinking and communication and thinking about obsessing over the problems is really the key kind of building blocks to any PM, not just an SEO one, but, you know, A growth PM, platform PM, and it's just continuously needing to do those things over and over and over again. The other thing that I think a lot of people probably don't realize if they're PMs is ownership, right?

Mm-hmm.

The ability to own a project and not just sit back and be like, oh, the dev isn't doing this thing. So, you know, I'm sure someone else will sort it out. It's like, no, you need to go to the developer, understand what the problem is. See if there are any roadblocks, go and talk to maybe the Scrum Master or the project manager and then sort that out. But basically you can't just sit and let others deal with problems if it's related to the product because you own that product. The SEO program is on your shoulders, the results are on you. So you need to be actively managing your manager, actively managing the relationships with development and the design and the content team. You need to own those things. And interestingly, when you talk to SVPs or talk to other PMs or VPs of product, I think they naturally do that. They naturally own things. And I don't think they realize they're doing it. Some people will not actively own that relationship. They'll just sit back and I think that building block is something that you need to either train yourself on, because everyone, I think everyone can get better at that, or just realize what's happening.

Or actually start creating your own website because what you're pretty much describing is what I go through with Remoters and learning SEO. I need to coordinate the work of the web designers, developers, the content people collaborating with us, prioritize features. For example, we have a job board. So what features are we going to prioritize first based on the impact that it will, it will have on our revenue and functionality that people are asking. But then we also have all of this, all the areas that we want to create, bring more users. So, what do we prioritize first? And of course, when you're doing it for yourself, as in my case, I am a co-founder here, it feels different because you have founded it. But I can imagine that it might be tricky stepping on into that sort of role when you're not used to getting the leadership, let's say, of it. Completely critical when you own the product. You're like the mini founder of the product, pretty much. What would you say are some of the biggest mistakes? mistakes that you have seen people doing whenever setting an SEO product management program or starting a role?

I guess for me, the biggest mistake is not testing your assumptions. So we just talked a lot about listening. We talked about being proactive. Something I've noticed from building software, building platforms, you know, building SEO features is at every, at every level. top-level strategically, opportunities, the tasks within them, there are just bundles and bundles of assumptions, right? Maybe you assume that this initiative, like you said, can be implemented by the dev because you've worked on this platform before, and now that means that you can implement this thing with the dev team in the next 2 weeks. Or maybe the dev assumes that, well, you haven't given him the anchor text for that, for that internal link, so he's just gonna write, you know, learn more or something, right? Or the UX person assumes that what they've designed can be done by the dev. That happens all the time, right?

Mm-hmm.

So every level there are assumptions, and you need to just open a Word document or a Google Doc and just list those assumptions down and then prioritize them by what is going to kill my idea. I've got a great idea. We know we're gonna add this new internal link module. Internal, you know, improved facet navigation, whatever it is you're gonna do, that new SEO feature that is gonna improve your marketplace website, e-commerce website, you know, listing website. And then just write down those assumptions in a list, order them, and then just go and talk to people and make sure that your assumptions aren't going to kill your idea because I've seen it happen so many times by founders, by other PMs, by designers, by SEOs. You have to get out those assumptions and just start, start making sure you're listening to people and understanding what it is that could kill that idea. And sometimes what you'll find is there's always a middle ground. So yes, you know, you can't do this or that, but as Sam said, you know, this system doesn't allow us to do this functionality, but we can do this or meet you halfway. Do you know what I mean? And you can, you can avoid so many problems just by writing down, literally writing down your assumptions, ordering them by risk, what's going to kill my idea, and go off and talking to people. So product teams will do that. They'll come up with these feature ideas, these new ways to solve customer problems. They can't start building for 6 months and not have any results. So they have to go off and experiment, which is kind of the minimal viable product kind of thinking, lean thinking ideas of You know, could you do a survey? Could you talk to customers? Could you build like a, there's lots of like prototyping tools nowadays you can build, like Figma itself. You can actually build the UI of a, of a website and then make it clickable. So it's almost like you're navigating around it.

I typically see more issues, and maybe this is cuz I'm usually on the sales side of not planning enough time for QA or keeping a list. So I'd say even like when you've had clients for a long time and teams change, Are you still doing the same kinds of QA tests and making sure that things are still intact? So I would say it's, you know, remember that when you get a change implemented by dev, it's probably not a set it and forget it, right? You need to continually check. So, uh, funny you were talking about Content King. I love that tool because it does those things. Because for example, anecdotally, we've been working with a client for 3 years. Their dev team changed and suddenly they got rid of the H1 on the homepage. And I'd be like, hold on, I need it back. So it's just, you know, and, and what we realized, and this was a miss on my part, was I had not put— because that change had happened like 3 years before, it was not on my QA list that every time they do a major launch, I'm checking this. So that's what I would say is like, keep in mind, like everything that you're doing on the front end with planning and ticket writing and implementing, you should probably plan about as much. And maybe not as much investment. Ideally, if you do your planning really well, it doesn't take as much, but QA is really important and following up. It shouldn't be like, well, it took me 6 hours to do this thing, so I'm going to need 15 minutes for the QA. No.

Wrong.

I love, love, love that you mentioned QA because actually that I have a couple of pet peeves regarding that beyond the timing. And they always come up with different excuses. Dev environments not being the same as the production ones. And I'm like, what is the point for me to be testing in this environment where half of the pages are not there, where there's like literally not a replication of what is actually on production? And then the other one is regarding QAs are the what-ifs, right? We always assume the best scenario and that is a mistake. Oh, we are going to test and validate and everything will go well. No, what happens if it doesn't, which many times it won't. It's important to, I believe, to set the alignment of understanding Since the beginning saying, okay, we will have like a week or 2 weeks. But if at some point the minimum viable best practices recommendations or base of SEO is not properly validated to be approved for release within these 2 weeks, you cannot do it.

You should sit down before it's released and make sure that everything meets that pass or fail criteria. I have found that using what I call scenarios or examples to illustrate, if, if it looks like this, if I, if I do this and do this and it's, the code should look like this. And this is what I'm checking.

What are the tools and resources in general that you would like to recommend that you find useful when doing those specific activities that you think that are more key for an SEO product manager?

So, for the first is any kind of roadmapping tool. There are a ton out there. I've, depending on the client, sometimes we just use a Google Sheet because they're pretty low tech and need it easy. But there's, there are a ton of roadmapping tools out there. A lot of them may integrate into the ticketing system you already use, and you being the engineering team, so I would look for things that can integrate because it'll just make your life that much easier to know what tickets are getting picked up, Where does it apply? Having something that's gonna be robust and allow you to kind of move those priorities and see where things are going, and then also be able to share it, to communicate and show people where you're going so that they can get on board and become advocates for you. That's really, you know, step one is make sure you've got that, that plan documented and it's in a way that's easy to share, easy to adapt, right? Because in SEO, one of my favorite things and also the most frustrating things about this career is Our, our days are never the same. It's constantly changing. It's constantly in flux. So we'll never be bored. But that also means our roadmaps need to be pretty flexible. So have a tool that, that really enables you to, to do that.

The thing about the product and engineering community is that they're all building tools all the time because that's what, that's kind of their job. They, they look like, but what I would say is don't just use a tool that you Google and find online. double-check with the team what they're using. So for example, for documentation, Confluence is used a lot, or maybe they might be using Google Docs or Notion or Asana, right? If you're using roadmapping, I use what is called the Now, Next, Later framework or roadmap. It's 3 time horizons: now, in the next 1 to 2 months, what you're working on; next, what you're doing discovery around, what you're building in the next 3 to 6 months; later, which is just like, man, we might do that later. Right? And the reason why I use that framework, there is no tool for it. You can use like a Trello board or you can literally open Google Slides and just put 3 columns and just put like little boxes. I do that with your tool, whatever tools you're using, just keep it simple because as I've said, it's already complex. So I'm just like, use Google Docs to brief if they don't use anything or use Confluence or use whatever it is they use already to do it. Use like Trello or Asana to have like, I just have the The classic Kanban now, next, later columns for like road mapping, like don't make it too complicated. And then obviously there's Jira for ticketing, which you're probably going to use because they use it, right?

I completely agree what you mentioned that we should minimize any burden or challenge to communication and we should try to align as much as possible with whatever platform is already being used. Most bigger Companies will end up using Jira, for example. And then don't overcomplicate if you're in a smaller company, right? And if your team is very visual and they prefer, so for example, to having a Miro type of collaboration and charts, workflows to organize, just what is important here is to make it happen. To start wrapping up our today's edition, I would like to ask you for a couple of final SEO product management tips. Anything that you haven't mentioned yet and you think is fundamental, is important, is critical that you would like to leave as a last message to the audience?

Just always keep thinking about the test, like test, learn, improve. It is such a fundamental way of product teams thinking and how, like you're saying then about shifting mindsets for certain companies, like, oh, actually we need to get SEO involved in product. That ability to test, learn, and improve and just, you build on top of your learning, right? So you don't, you never stay the same. You should be continuously learning and And testing out what works, what doesn't. You're betting. And think about your roadmap as a series of bets that will help you win your overall strategy, whatever, you know, whatever that is, right? Growth, building out, you know, building out features, international SEO, you know, expansion, whatever it is. Think of them as bets. The second thing is always think about making sure your website is future-proof. Basically, things don't just get fixed once. Devs love it when you help them build systems, help them build features that make their lives easier by them not touching it again. So build things that scale effectively so they don't have to go back. A title tag system, you can build some functionality into the custom CMS that means you and the team can make changes to title tags so the dev doesn't have to keep uploading that Excel sheet you keep sending them in a weird JSON format. done that before. You know what I mean? Building out those future-proofing features that make the devs' lives easier is something I have found some devs will not do anything unless they do that. So think about those kinds of things that you can do just outside the box. Don't just fix the thing. Build a system, a scalable way for you to not— take the burden off them and just allow others to make changes instead.

I love that you mentioned scalability because this is, I'm pretty sure, an issue that many of us have had in general as SEOs thinking whenever you start analyzing or auditing the website, if only they have had an SEO right from the beginning to set the URL structure or the navigation or the way that are linking to each other and the criteria used or the ability to change canonicalization quite easily following certain rules. And that is part Indeed, of, um, something that from an SEO product management standpoint could have been defined, established rules since right at the beginning, rather than having to request a developer to do it every single time, which is at some point not even viable or profitable to do anyway. So 100%.

For me, it would be really just collaborating with other teams. Remember that they're people too. And then part of that is also remember that they're experts in their own fields and you are an expert in yours. So, you know, I, I mentioned a little bit earlier, setting aside the ego, setting aside the best practices and trying to find good solutions also means knowing that you're bringing the SEO knowledge. You understand, you know, as a, you know, as an SEO PM, you may understand that, hey, implementing this feature will move the needle a whole lot more than this one, right? So that's the expertise that you're bringing in, but recognize other people's expertise and where they can help you and where you can help them. Like really trying to make it more about the relationship with your team. is always going to make things that much more successful because then you are going to build advocates for you as opposed to having to fight against devs all the time. Like Adam, you're talking about making their lives easier and building systems. Yes, it's because when you do that, you are investing in them. It is the same as any relationship. And so just, you know, keeping in mind that they have their goals, they have the things that they're being held to, or they're going to be marked on, on their review. Understanding where they're coming from, trying to empathize, and then just recognizing where, where each other's strengths are is really one of the biggest things to seeing success when you are in this role, because you are collaborating with so many other teams that it is a whole new set of skills to learn.

I would like to mention something that especially because there's always so, so much that you can do and you have constraints on timings and resources, et cetera. And I believe that especially talking with newer SEOs, right? So much opportunity or so much holding me back. And what I will say is that remember that you're not paid to spot all of the SEO issues here, but for achieving SEO goals by solving those that are actually hurting the business and what is holding you back from achieving the goals that decision makers, the owner, the founder actually care about. So it's important here that alignment is well set right from the beginning on one hand, and the other hand, your priorities are also aligned with the ones of the business and you have a good criteria going on all the time. And also realizing that that is the beauty of the SEO process, right? That it shouldn't be a one-time type of effort, but it's an iterative incremental type of ongoing process. So you don't need to tackle everything in the single, in the first sprint, right? There will be many of them. And what is important is that you prioritize what would actually drive change, allow you to also show value. in order to earn more and get more resources and make things happen. So thank you. Thank you very much, Adam and Sam. I really appreciate the conversation. I had an amazing time and learned tons and more. I'm sure that also the audience did. If you liked today's edition, please, of course, like the video, subscribe to the channel to not miss any other editions of Crawling Mondays. And remember to follow Adam and Sam. They are very active in social media. They have their blogs, they have their newsletters. If you want to learn more about SEO product management, but also a variety of technical, strategical SEO management topics, they're amazing at it. Follow them right now. And thank you again for joining our today's edition. Until the next one. Bye-bye.

Bye.