Listening Matters, Googlebot is a User, Surviving Scrum
Edition #15 - Monday 3-2-1
Hello 👋,
Welcome to the 3-2-1 Monday newsletter.
Every Monday morning, start your week with the following:
💡 3 short ideas about working with devs and product teams.
📰 Two articles to explore to help be more effective with product and dev teams.
❓ One question for you to think about this week while working.
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💡 3 Short Ideas
Short ideas on how to improve working with devs and product teams.
1) Listening Matters
Listening is one of the most important skills you can have when working in any team.
BUT especially when you are working with product and development teams.
As a Product Manager at DeepCrawl, I realised that one of my most important meetings was the weekly or monthly catch-up with different team members.
In these meetings, I learned to shut up and listen to what was happening to other team members.
Why it matters
How well you listen can have a major impact on the following:
📈 Your effectiveness in working with tech teams, and
🤝 The quality of your relationships with these teams.
For example, listening can help you:
Gain information
Understand
Learn.
While in catch-up meetings and listening to senior developers, sales and customer support, I learned much about the business from different perspectives.
I call this discovery, and listening to different team members allowed me to gain further context around problems within the business. I could use this information to:
🚦 Prioritise initiatives ruthlessly
🛍️ Get buy-in for initiatives or projects
🦒 Identify new potential opportunities
How to Action
Honestly, one of the best ways to improve your listening skills is just to:
Book a 1:1 meeting with the head of the department
Ask them questions like: What are they working on and Why it matters
Shut up and listen.
I’ve used this technique many times to better understand and gain context around development, business and product teams.
2) Googlebot is a User
A long time ago, a backend developer explained to me that an API endpoint is a type of user for a front-end developer. The backend and frontend need to communicate with each other using a specific set of rules to send and receive information.
This blew my mind and got me thinking.
If navigating the web as a person using a browser boils down to:
User-agent
Chrome browser, and
A specific set of communication rules
Then isn’t Googlebot technically a user? Technically Googlebot has:
A set of user agents.
A set of rules to allow it to crawl and index content.
A web rendering service to view web pages like a human user.
However, Googlebot navigates the web very differently from the average person (Source: Martin Splitt).
Why it matters
Although websites are built for people, nowadays, it’s just as important that bots can utilize our websites so our content can be crawled, indexed and ranked in search results.
Just like any human end-user, Googlebot must be given clear signals from a website owner to help it understand which pages to crawl, index and rank in search results.
For example, a case study from David Lewis of Trainline shows the benefits of understanding how Googlebot crawls the website. In his deep analysis, he identified that the Trainline team needed to improve how Google crawled and indexed valuable pages.
This meant that the team needed to:
Deleted 130 million pages that were wasting the crawl budget.
Improve internal link coverage to valuable pages across page templates.
Since implementing these changes in Autumn 2021, you can see a steady increase in global organic search traffic to the trainline.com website.
💡 Important note
The actions to improve the crawl budget are the same ones that can help you increase rankings and organic traffic of a website — this isn't a coincidence. When you solve crawl budget and indexing issues you also improve query-independent ranking signals for unique content. AJ Kohn once famously named this phenomenon CrawlRank - “You are what Googlebot eats”.
💡 Important note
How to action
For SEO professionals, it is important to understand our target audience.
A key end-user to drive Google organic search traffic is Googlebot.
Although Googlebot cannot buy anything on your website, it’s critical these bots be able to crawl, index and rank your website for relevant keywords used by your target customers.
A good starting point to understand how Googlebot views your website is to verify a website in Google Search Console.
If you’re a large website (1M+ pages), then I’d strongly recommend investing in tools that can help you better understand how Googlebot interacts with your website.
Further Reading
I’d also recommend better understanding Googlebot by reading the following:
Overview of Crawling and Indexing by Google Search Team
Crawl Budget Management For Large Websites by Google Search Team
Crawl Budget by Blind Five Year Old
Understand the JavaScript SEO basics by Google Search Team
Googlebot & JavaScript: A Closer Look at the WRS by Martin Splitt
Render Budget, or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Render Server-Side by Kazushi Nagayama
3) Surviving Scrum as an SEO
Most SEO professionals working in product and engineering teams need to learn to survive Scrum.
What is Scrum?
Scrum is a systematic agile process that is simple and lightweight that product and engineering teams use to get technical projects executed.
Scrum is about the incremental, iterative approach to delivering work that helps to reduce risk and create predictability within the team.
This allows teams to create releasable pieces of work that add up to creating useful products and features of websites that drive results.
Why it matters
If you work with a product and engineering team, there is a high probability that they will be using the Scrum framework (or a hybrid approach).
So you need to learn to survive within the systematic process.
According to the State of Agile report in 2022, which surveyed 3,000 IT and business professionals, Scrum is the most popular agile framework used by IT and engineering teams practising agile.
Scrum is also becoming a more searched-for agile framework globally based on Google Trend data for the last 5 years.
How to action
As an SEO, there are three core survival tips:
🧠 Brainless Process - The Scrum framework is only as smart as the team that uses it and requires you to create a product backlog, goals and a clear strategy actually to drive value.
🌀 Backlog Management - When adding tickets to a Jira backlog, you need to make sure you are being strategic and actually have a process to break them down into realistic tickets.
💃 Events Tango - At its core, Scrum is made up of five key events that SEOs need to be included in any part of to make sure that tickets are actually implemented.
I’ve written about it in great detail in a newsletter if you want to dig in and find out more 👇👇👇.
📰 2 Articles to Explore
Articles to explore to help be more effective with product and dev teams.
Active Listening
by Mind Tools Content Team
“Clearly, listening is a skill that we can all benefit from improving. By becoming a better listener, you can improve your productivity and your ability to influence, persuade, and negotiate.”
😱 The SEO Scrum Survival Guide
by Adam Gent
“Scrum is a lightweight and simplified agile framework, that product and engineering teams use to break down work and execute projects. Although it is simplified, it isn’t simple. If you’re new to working in a product and engineering team that uses Scrum, it can be daunting to get your head around.”
❓ 1 Question For You
A question for you to think about this week while working.
What are you doing to be better at active listening within your team?
How did I do this week?
If you enjoyed reading this article, then consider the following:
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