SEO vs Business Outcomes, SEO PM Explained, Three Responsibilities of an SEO PM
Monday 3-2-1 - Edition #12
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) SEO vs Business Outcomes
It’s easy to celebrate feature releases, lines of code or writing a tonne of content but how do these deliverables drive results for both the user and the business?
This is one of the biggest mindset shifts when SEOs move into product and engineering teams. Instead of measuring outputs (links, content, title tags, etc.), SEO professionals need to learn to focus on maximising outcomes.
What is an outcome?
An outcome is a way to measure success based on positive user or customer behaviour. It’s what you want customers to do to drive business results.
To maximise outcomes we need to focus on shipping the right deliverables that help change user behaviour and drive business results.
One question I get asked a lot is “How can we maximise outcomes in our day-to-day work”?.
The simple answer is split outcomes into two types:
📈 SEO outcomes - The positive change in user behaviour that will drive relevant SEO traffic.
💰 Business outcomes - The positive change in user behaviour that will drive business results from SEO.
SEO Outcomes
To get users to click on our page search snippets in search engine results pages (SERPS) we need to focus on the following three factors to move the needle:
📏 Improve rankings - Rank higher for the current keywords you’re ranking for by optimising content.
🎹 Increase queries - Rank for new relevant keywords by adding more pages to the website.
↗️ Improve click-through rate - Improve the click-through in SERPs by optimising search snippets.
Business outcomes
A key problem I notice with many SEO professionals is that focus on “optimising” for SEO traffic but we don’t take into account the business outcomes. The change in user behaviour that drives business results.
For example, is the SEO channel helping to:
Drive relevant traffic to purchase products
Sending warm leads into the sales funnel
Increasing the number of assisted conversions
As SEO professionals it is important we identify both the SEO and business outcomes within our campaigns to make sure we are executing work that positively drives results for the business.
This can take time (as SEO is a lagging metric) but as long as you can see progress and adjust the strategy based on feedback, eventually, you can see results for the business.
I’ve written more about identifying SEO and business outcomes in the following newsletter 👇.
2) What is an SEO Product Manager?
I define SEO product management as follows:
“An SEO Product Manager is a specialist who delivers business impact for an organisation's website through SEO by shaping the strategy, roadmap and goals, continuously syncing with teams to align on the strategy, and working with the team to ship the work.”
Adam Gent, The SEO Sprint
An SEO product manager is a specialist PM working within an organisation to ensure the website's content is useful, discoverable, and accessible to customers and search engines.
SEO PMs work with product, content, UX design and development teams to ensure the website gets crawled, indexed and appears in search engine results throughout the buyer's journey.
SEO product managers work with teams to optimise the website to help make content discoverable in search engines. Examples of features might include:
🕷️ Crawling and Indexing: An SEO PM works with developers to ensure the website has business logic to automatically exclude low-value pages from being indexed.
🔗 Link Architecture: An SEO PM works with developers to add related articles and nearby location internal linking from core pages to other relevant pages.
💻️ Semantic SEO: An SEO PM works with developers to ensure page templates are always well-structured and each template is marked with the relevant schema.org markup.
✍️ Content: An SEO PM works with content and product to ensure that pages are optimised and that the brand/website appears through the buyer's journey.
🎫 Title Tags: An SEO PM works with developers to create a feature that allows the SEO team to make title tag changes to core pages without requiring a developer to make the change.
The goal of an SEO product manager shouldn't be to just "ship features" but instead maximise outcomes. Just like product managers, our work should aim to positively change user behaviour and drive results for both the customer and the business.
I’ve written more about the SEO product manager role in greater detail 👇
3) Three Responsibilities of an SEO PM
Lenny's newsletter highlights that any product manager's job has three parts: shaping the product strategy, syncing the people, and working with teams to ship the product.
Since becoming a product manager, and working with clients, these three parts of the role have helped me understand the job of an SEO PM, and they go about solving impactful problems.
These three core responsibilities of an SEO product manager are:
🖌️ Shape - An SEO PM must create an SEO strategy and roadmap that aligns with the business strategy and identifies the most impactful problems.
📶 Sync - An SEO PM needs to get stakeholders' buy-in and align everyone around the SEO strategy and roadmap.
🚢 Ship - An SEO PM must work with developers, designers and other stakeholders (usually using agile methodology) to execute the strategy and roadmap.
When these three parts are aligned, an SEO product manager will start to solve impactful problems for a business.
Let's quickly dig into each of the three parts and get a better understanding of them.
I’ve written more about the SEO product manager role in greater detail 👇
📰 2 Articles to Explore
Articles to explore to help be more effective with product and dev teams.
How to inspire creativity and innovation with one simple prompt
by Jeff Gothelf
“By reframing the requirement away from a specific object to the intended result, Daniel explicitly created the psychological safety for creativity and innovation to take place. The team felt safe to explore new, different and sometimes unrealistic ideas. They stretched and through that exploratory process were able to come up with some amazing ideas to recreate an experience in an exciting new way.”
Outcome Over Output
by Martin Fowler
“I've always been of the opinion that outcome is what we should concentrate on. If a team delivers lots of functionality - whether we measure it in lines of code, function points, or stories - that functionality doesn't matter if it doesn't help the user improve their activity.”
❓ 1 Question For You
A question for you to think about this week while working.
Are you focusing on maximising outcomes in your SEO campaign?
If you enjoyed reading this article, then consider the following:
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