🌀 What is SEO Discovery?
🌀 What is SEO Discovery?
A process to help SEOs think more strategically, get buy-in from other teams and decide what to work on next.
A weekly newsletter that provides practical advice for SEOs on how to work with product and development teams.
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A key problem within SEO is that our strategies or plans can get rejected.
Although this can be frustrating, it might be that it is a symptom that you are disconnected from the rest of the business.
How can we become more connected to the business and get buy-in?
By learning to walk in the company’s shoes, understand the target audience and validate our recommendations.
I call this decision-making process SEO Discovery.
In this newsletter, we are going to cover the following:
⛔ The problem with traditional SEO strategies
✅ What is a product discovery, and why does it matter?
💔 A lack of strategic buy-in is a symptom of disconnection
🌀 What is SEO discovery?
🧰 How does the SEO discovery process work?
🤔 What is the difference between SEO discovery vs SEO strategy?
🔁 Why the SEO discovery process never ends
⛔ Problem with traditional SEO strategies
A key problem in SEO is getting our recommendations executed by businesses.
This happens for many reasons, but one key reason I've found is that we create our strategies and plans in isolation from the wider business strategy.
The result of this isolation is that we "pray and spray" our SEO recommendations based on contextless SEO tools or checklists. Uncertain of the broader business context and strategy.
This results in our SEO actions getting rejected by technical teams because they don't align with the broader business and team roadmaps.
The days of clients implementing 100-page SEO audits are gone.
Instead, business teams require SEOs to provide a clear set of coherent initiatives which can be connected to the broader business strategy.
This idea isn't new. Tom Critchlow at the SEOMBA has highlighted that getting buy-in requires executive empathy and aligning our work with the companies to get buy-in.
"Putting together a strategy requires empathy. Executive presence is the art of seeing the problem from someone else’s point of view.
Dealing with executives requires a level of empathy - what do they know about SEO? How much do they know about your plans? They likely have a stacked roadmap already, why should they care about additional work?
You have to put yourself in their shoes to be able to understand how to get buy-in and support for your work."
- Getting Buy-in Requires Executive Empathy
It is only by putting ourselves in the shoes of other business stakeholders that we can start to align our SEO Strategy with the company's strategy.
But how? If a strategy is just about putting our actions into the context of the wider business, how exactly do we walk in the shoes of other teams?
Interestingly, I think the answer lies in a growing trend called product discovery.
❓ What is product discovery?
Product discovery is a decision-making process that product teams use to decide what to work on next by deeply understanding their target audience and their pain points.
"We typically define product discovery in contrast with product delivery. Product discovery is used to describe the work that we do to make decisions about what to build, while product delivery is the work we do to build, ship, and maintain a production quality product."
- Teresa Torres, Product Talk
Product teams use various tactics to validate product ideas including: A/B splitting testing, prototypes, customer interviews, customer surveys, user story mapping, opportunity solution trees, jobs to be done, etc.
Product discovery aims to validate product ideas and deeply understand customers so that delivery teams can build the best solutions to solve the customer's problem.
It requires you to not just speak to customers but deeply understand the company strategy and the plans of other teams. This means you need to be constantly collaborating and speaking to other teams.
How do I know this? Well, at DeepCrawl, we ran discovery tracks alongside delivery tracks when building the new app and segmentation.
Every week we ran customer interviews, and surveys and tested prototypes to test user journey flows to validate our ideas before adding them to the development backlog. We did it for almost 1.5 years.
At the same time, the product and engineering team was constantly on weekly, monthly and quarterly calls aligning with marketing, customer success and sales teams.
We were in a constant state of researching, validating and testing our ideas.
✅ Why product discovery matters
There are three main reasons that product discovery is important:
Mitigates risk - It ensures we are solving the right problems and building the right solutions.
Builds empathy - It helps teams walk in the customer's shoes and stops them from disconnecting
Three constraints - It allows teams to ensure the business solution is viable, usable and feasible.
Product discovery is key to ensuring that product teams are NOT disconnected from user needs, what is being built and the broader business strategy.
If product teams become disconnected from both users and the business, then it means that the delivery team (developers) build solutions that don't solve user problems. This resulted in customers being dissatisfied with the product or service, impacting the business's bottom line.
💔 Lack of strategic buy-in is a symptom of disconnection
OK, this is all fascinating, but what does it all have to do with the problem of getting buy-in from SEO strategies?
The point is that if you struggle to implement SEO strategies or work, it's likely a symptom that you are disconnected and isolated from the business.
I've witnessed this as a product manager and as a consultant. Although the initiatives or actions follow best practices or seem perfectly viable, they might not align with the "direction" of the company. As a PM, I learned to say "not now" all the time. Why? Because the technical team had limited resources and capacity.
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully."
-Steve Jobs
As an SEO or digital specialist, this can be frustrating, and downright nightmare fuel. When you spend more time in a company, talk to different stakeholders and get feedback, you start to see decision patterns.
Although you can't predict what decisions will be made, you can become more strategic by deeply understanding why decisions are being made in a business.
This can help you decide what to work on next, but how do we do this? Well, just like product teams, we need to learn to walk in the shoes of the business and customers.
In other words, before any SEO strategy or plan, we must invest in SEO discovery.
🌀 What is SEO discovery?
I define SEO discovery as follows:
SEO discovery is a decision-making process that plays a role in helping SEO teams decide what to work on next. It is a continuous process split into two parts: understanding the business and defining the problem. SEO discovery work precedes and helps define SEO strategy.
- Adam Gent, The SEO Sprint
If we were to visualise SEO discovery, it would be a diamond where the team discovered ideas and then defined valid oppurtunities:
SEO teams use discovery work to shift through a "sea" of ideas based on multiple data points (business, customer and SEO) and then refine valid oppurtunities that overcome a key problem based on our deep understanding of the business.
SEO discovery work is split into two parts:
📈 Business Context - Deeply understanding the target market, the business strategy and internal processes to clarify the problem (this helps us build empathy and context for our work).
🛒 SEO Oppurtunities - Using unlimited tactics to spot technical, content and link issues on a website (the usual ways we as SEOs identify problems - this is where we excel).
Note: It is important to highlight that SEO discovery work isn't new. I know many consultants, agencies and freelancers who do discovery workshops to narrow down exactly what business problem needs to be tackled. Examples include Tom Critchlow's Workshops as Portals, Teresa Torres's Oppurtunity Solution Trees and Jake Knapp's The Design Sprint.
🧰 How does the SEO discovery process work?
There are an unlimited number of ways to do SEO discovery work.
Different teams have different approaches to conducting SEO discovery work. For example, some teams hold quarterly meetings to review the business strategy, while others talk to customers and business stakeholders. Some teams even organize workshops before starting a project to better understand the business.
There is no right or wrong way to approach SEO discovery work. The goal is to build empathy with the business, put yourself in their shoes, and identify the most promising opportunities to focus on next.
Personally, I've developed a structured process called the SEO Discovery Loop.
The SEO Discovery Loop is a systematic process that is split into four key parts:
🗃️ Understand the business - Understand the business by asking key questions and talking to stakeholders to have golden knowledge nuggets
🎯 Define user outcomes - Understand the target audience, their pain points, and what is the exact behaviour we want to change to drive positive business results.
🤔 Clarify the problem - Once we deeply understand the business and target audience, we must clarify the problem, ask the right questions and identify potential solutions.
🧪 Validate SEO oppurtunities - Finally, we need to ensure the opportunities we've identified to overcome the problem are viable, useable and feasible.
The point of the SEO Discovery Loop is that it helps me (and other SEOs who take my course) to build empathy and walk in the shoes of the business. I like to think of it as an engine that helps SEO teams clarify what needs to be built next.
The process is a loop because as soon as you've defined the problem and coherent actions to overcome it, another one appears 👿.
🤔 What is the difference between SEO discovery vs SEO strategy?
SEO discovery and SEO strategy are both sides of the same coin.
If we visualise these two processes together, they'd be a double diamond that is connected together:
Think of SEO discovery work as the "mess" you make when researching, validating and testing ideas. If you ask any product manager to show you their discovery work, you'll likely be sent Figma designs, spreadsheets full of product data and notes from customer interviews. SEO is no different, we make a large mess using technical tools, keyword research and content audits.
From this mess, we define the problem and a small list of valid ideas to solve it.
The strategy is the "polished" work we produce from discovery work. During the strategy process, you present your polished plan to business stakeholders to get buy-in and feedback. This means that valid ideas or initiatives might change or be excluded from the strategy.
The output of strategy work should be to ruthlessly prioritise and sequence your initiatives into a coherent plan and roadmap to overcome the key problem.
I'll write more about SEO Strategy in the future.
🔁 SEO discovery is a continuous process
It is important to understand that SEO discovery, like product discovery, is a continuous process.
It never ends.
The rate at which it is needed might depend on the business. In some organisations I have worked with, SEO discovery work needs to happen all the time. The pace is fast, as markets, customer behaviour and team roadmaps can change constantly.
In other, larger organisations, SEO discovery work only needs to happen once a quarter or every 6 months. The organisation's pace is slower and the work being completed takes longer.
Regardless of the pace of the organization (fast or slow), SEO discovery is always needed to build empathy and walk in the shoes of both the business and its customers.
📌 Summary
Let's recap what we learned in this newsletter:
Traditional SEO strategies - A problem with many SEO strategies or plans is that they are built in isolation from the business, which can result in our recommendations being rejected.
We need to build empathy - As SEOs, we need to develop empathy and walk in the shoes of the business to get buy-in for our initiatives.
Product teams build empathy - Product teams use a decision-making process called product discovery that helps them decide what to work on next, mitigate risk and validate ideas.
SEO Discovery - As SEOs, we need to learn to use an SEO discovery process to identify from a sea of ideas what valid oppurtunities the business needs to work on next to drive results.
How SEO discovery works - There are an unlimited number of ways discovery work can be done; I use an SEO Discovery Loop framework to help build empathy and decide what to work on next.
SEO Discovery vs SEO Strategy - SEO discovery work and SEO strategy work are two sides of the same coin; good messy discovery work helps to form good polished SEO strategies.
SEO discovery is continuous - SEO discovery work is continuous and never-ending, regardless of the organisation's size; it's always needed to help SEOs develop empathy and validate ideas.
📚 Further Reading
If you want to read more on the subject of product discovery, I'd recommend reading the following:
Product Discovery by Marty Cagan
Continous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres
Product Discovery Basics by Teresa Torres
Dual Track Development is not Duel Track by Jeff Patton
The Evolution of Modern Product Discovery by Teresa Torres
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