SEO is a Product Effort

Maximize SEO potential by viewing it as a product effort and not just marketing

This week’s newsletter is sponsored by the Digital PR agency Search Intelligence, which uses PR methods to grow a link portfolio and North Star Inbound, which is a recommended agency for SEO and content strategy. See their case studies linked in the newsletter.

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One of the many reasons a company may leave its SEO potential unfulfilled is because they inadvertently silo the person or people responsible for SEO in the wrong place. The company leaves the responsible SEO party as an individual contributor, forced to go through their manager to get anything done.

Early in my SEO career, an SEO viewpoint made it to the executive level of decision-making, but now, from my experience consulting with larger companies, it is far less critical (please email if you are open to sharing your own experiences).

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Organizationally, SEO is often viewed as a marketing function. Tasks are structured as campaigns relying on other marketing contributions, such as content and design. Technical tasks like building or launching a page happen elsewhere in another divisional organizational structure within the company. In most companies, marketers don’t “own” technical resources; therefore, the best SEO teams can do is make requests of other teams.

SEO is product

Instead, SEO should be viewed as a product in and of itself. This way, the engineering tasks would be part of the product roadmap and launch process. The SEO manager should be a product manager and not a marketing manager. Product managers are akin to symphony conductors, and their roles always rely on other teams and are inherently cross-functional.

In many organizations, the marketing team sources and budgets for SEO, so declaring SEO managers as product managers is not going to be a successful effort. Nonetheless, this should not really be a blocker if the team truly wants to see SEO succeed. The marketing leadership can still set up the SEO manager as if they were a product manager.

Approaching SEO as a Product function helps clarify its inputs and outcomes on multiple levels. One big area that this influences is planning and resourcing.

Planning

When planning for SEO goals, all required resources from other teams must be allocated simultaneously. It wouldn’t make much sense to plan to launch a collection of pages or a new micro-site without pre-allocating the design time and engineering plan. I once worked with a client who had spent a million dollars on externally sourced content but never published it because no one had set up a CMS.

This is one of those things that marketers can act as if and look to the product teams for inspiration. On the product management side, new initiatives are never approved with the hope and prayer that everything will work out when the time is right. All products that are prioritized will get the resources to complete the project. Shifting SEO to a Product function means it deserves and will receive planning and resources on time.

The place where I have seen this marketing-to-product mindset shift matter the most is on budget.

Budgeting

When budgeting for a marketing plan, SEO usually falls to the bottom since the story of investment to output is more challenging to sell to the CFO.  Traditionally, this means that SEO will get the short end of the stick for hiring software and contractors, whereas paid marketing teams might be flush with cash.

Thinking of SEO as a product realigns the expectations of investment. By its very nature, a product needs investment because it is a priority, even if it is on a long-term scale. Typically, product teams aren’t resourced because they have a direct line to ROI but because the product is a business necessity.

Planning for the whole year or quarter AND having big goals that aren’t just tactics is a winning formula for locking up budgets, and coincidentally, this is also a winning formula for SEO success.

Output and Reporting

When SEO is considered marketing, it must be measured similarly to other marketing KPIs. Paid marketing teams have LTV (customer lifetime value) goals (hopefully), and brand teams share their impression, leaving SEO being measured on rankings alone.

Relegating SEO to mere rankings is a terrible way of measuring progress since rankings are just a vanity metric. Instead, we should measure SEO like any product: by adoption and engagement. A leading good metric is growth in impressions on search pages, but ultimately, every product is measured by its contribution to a company's top and bottom lines.

Adding cross-functional headcount

Making the case to add more headcount for SEO efforts can be very difficult if the success metrics are too hard to reach or inappropriate for the channel. When we view SEO as a product, the primary headcount metric moves from KPI-driven to deadline-driven. If you are launching a new CMS and can’t meet the launch goal in the planned timeframe, an extra engineer might be needed.

The question that should be asked is, what is the headcount necessary to meet the goal within the desired time frame? This question applies to both external and internal headcounts.

Truthfully, not much has to change regarding reporting, salary, and even titles to make SEO more aligned with the product. When SEO is viewed as a product, it mainly changes awareness and management.

The current method for managing SEO certainly leaves value on the table. Therefore, it may be helpful to change the structure of how SEO should be conducted within a company. An investment in SEO is an investment in a growth channel. (I didn’t touch on it here, but my favorite place for SEO within a company is on a growth team, usually a hybrid product and marketing team.)

Good SEO is not just hygiene

If SEO is incorrectly viewed as a hygiene item, a part of a marketing checklist, understandably, there may not be excitement about giving resources to it. However, viewing it through the prism of growth makes the ROI calculation far easier to develop. Those things that matter should also be planned for in a roadmap.

Viewing SEO as a product allows SEO to reach its true potential.

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