SEO leaders are product managers
SEO can realize its full potential when it is a part of the product team
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As a consultant, I see the SEO efforts of many companies, and one of the most eye-opening discoveries I have made is that a simple thing like who and where SEO reports to can make a huge difference.
A big reason a company may leave its SEO potential unfulfilled is that it isolates the person or people responsible for SEO in the wrong team structure. The organization makes the SEO manager an individual contributor (even when there are multiple SEO team members), forcing them to go through their manager to get anything done. That manager will then ladder up the request to their manager, and then the request will move horizontally to the other functional teams.
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Like that game of telephone you might have played in school, the message can get garbled. By the time the SEO request reaches the engineer who will act on it, the level of importance and details may have been lost.
Early in my SEO career, an SEO viewpoint made it to the executive level of decision-making because SEO was a reliable channel that was considered critical, but now, that coveted attention belongs to the paid marketing team.
I was fortunate in that I made quarterly presentations to leadership and had the opportunity to raise my concerns about backlogs, resources, and the direction of efforts. Today, many companies I meet with have zero visibility into their SEO needs from anyone at the senior leadership level.
There is hope
Yet, despite what any leader believes, SEO is just as critical as ever, and the solution to fixing this game of telephone could be solved by where SEO sits in the organization.
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.
(By “own”, I am referring to allocated time from those other teams.)
Those requests are subject to deprioritization as they make it to a project manager’s kanban board, as each functional owner will have their own prioritization queue. Additionally, the requests might be forwarded to people the SEO manager doesn’t know.
I consulted for one company where the SEO manager laddered everything up through her manager, who then drafted the requests into tickets that were fired into a void for engineers to grab at will. Unsurprisingly, this company had a multi-year backlog and still had open tickets for tactics that had been deprecated.
The fix is in how SEO controls resources.
SEO is product and the SEO manager is a product manager
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; their roles always rely on other teams and are inherently cross-functional.
As with any product manager, the SEO PM should sit in the middle, controlling the inputs to the SEO product simultaneously rather than acting as a marketing manager, linearly making requests of each team.
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. I have yet to meet a CMO happy to carve out a part of their team and responsibilities to donate them to another team.
Nonetheless, the actual reporting line should not be a blocker if the team truly wants to see SEO succeed. The marketing leadership can still set up the SEO manager as 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. Preparing to relaunch a site or build a new microsite wouldn't make much sense 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 colossal screwup only happened because the SEO owners had SEO requests from others. A product owner would develop an end-to-end plan to launch a product—in this case, content. That launch should have included 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.
Where I have seen this marketing-to-product mindset shift matter the most is on finances.
Budgets
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. There is a whole lot of “give us the money and trust us”. 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 because it’s much easier to tell the CAC + LTV story.
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 initiative.
When SEO is benchmarked as a product investment, it becomes much more acceptable to be confident in the investment outcomes rather than have a perfect financial forecast. On the other hand, when SEO is benchmarked against other marketing campaigns, it suddenly looks like predicting a coin toss when compared against a perfectly outlined paid marketing campaign.
Lastly, budgeting for SEO as a product gives the freedom to build the long-term roadmaps required for SEO, whereas marketing campaigns are usually measured monthly or quarterly.
Reporting
When SEO is considered marketing, it must be measured similarly to other marketing KPIs. Generally, SEO shoots itself in the foot when it reports on KPIs like rankings that don’t translate into the same KPIs that the other channels use, like LTV, but you can do even better than that.
When you measure SEO like a product, the primary metrics become leading metrics like adoption and engagement, which only become eventual conversions rather than the direct conversion metrics of another marketing channel. 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.
SEO is not just hygiene
Too often, SEO is incorrectly viewed as a hygiene item, a part of a marketing checklist, and not as a significant driver of a company’s growth. The phrase “can you SEO this for me” is used when SEO is simply viewed as a last step before launch.
Viewed correctly through a prism of growth, SEO is a key component of a product launch, or not. (Read Product-Led SEO to learn more.) Allow SEO to reach its potential by viewing it as a product, and the SEO manager as a product manager.
SEO is hard enough to see returns, so boost the team by uncapping their potential.
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Appreciate the insight, Eli. Thank you for sharing. Sitting in business and marketing dev mgmt roles my entire career, I totally get this. In my GTM system, my model has SEO as the second, third, and fourth steps in the strategy development. It's only second to the client's current or perceived company and product positioning. It is necessary to have that as the baseline or the premise. Then we get to really the first three steps, all centered on SEO. So, my model all starts with SEO. I love the productizing SEO. I've approached similar marketing components in the same way. When I am learning something on the job, I always employ the concept of just Project or Product Manage the heck out of it because if you apply rationale and logic to your actions, you can't go wrong (mostly:-).