Why SEO Should Be A Product

I'll go out on a limb and say…

SEO should be a product as it is a channel for organic traffic and revenue generation.

SEO as a product is mostly business.

• He understands that he is working in the first digital world.
• Make sure your digital properties (websites, apps, etc.) are SEO friendly.

This way, other digital assets can be found when potential customers search online on their own device, search in an app, or start a voice search.

Simply put, product management is a problem-solving discipline that brings empathy for customers. Meanwhile, search engine optimization (SEO) is a broad and growing consideration for customers using connected devices to find information, products or services.

There are more and more places where people search more than traditional search engines such as Google, DuckDuckGo, Baidu or Microsoft's Bing. Potential customers can start their product search on Amazon or YouTube if it is a visual search.

It all depends on the goal. What do customers want?

To clarify, this article is not about optimizing product pages for SEO.

Instead, look at the bigger picture of spending product resources on organic traffic and revenue growth and why SEO should be considered a product by businesses.

SEO as a product. what do you mean:

Let's be clear that this is a relatively new concept.

A Google Trends search shows that demand for "product management" will peak in December 2022.

In contrast, the search term "SEO" shows a healthy demand for time.

Parallel SEO has been around for over a decade (and growing). Meanwhile, new product management is becoming popular. It will take some time for the SEO Product Manager role to become more mainstream.

More importantly, what needs to be improved is how organizations run their SEO programs. SEO is a product and is seen as an aspect of business that drives revenue and customer acquisition.

SEO as a product means that product management is applied to search engine optimization.

For a long time, SEO was mostly about keywords, specifically how many and which ones you use on your page. So Google's algorithms have evolved significantly to sniff out the bad ones.

To evolve and evolve with the times, Eli Schwartz outlines the concept of a product-based SEO approach. In his book Product-Lead SEO, Schwartz explains:

"Product-based SEO efforts don't just work with certain companies; instead, it's a process that every SEO-savvy website should use."

An important part of building a product-based SEO strategy is the product (any type of offering) being developed. It should be presented in the same way as any other product. Manage product plans, roadmaps, project and partner input, and, most importantly, incorporate user feedback.

Unlike SEO efforts based on keyword research, product-based SEO strategies must be relevant to the product market.

This means compassion for the customer, which mostly brings profit to the company. For SEO it is a web crawler like Googlebot and Humans.

As an SEO product manager, you have to consider two main customers: search engines and people .

Most product managers focus primarily on target customers or market segments (as defined by the company), but fail to realize that major search engines like Google are the customers who use products and features built for the web.

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4 main reasons why SEO should be a commodity

Consider the following compelling reasons why SEO should be a commodity.

• Treating SEO as a product means treating it as a channel to generate organic traffic and revenue. SEO best practices are incorporated into online activity to ensure that search engines find your website and that people searching online find your brand's website or social media pages.
• SEO product managers understand external factors (such as how search engines work) and how to optimize website features to optimize a website for SEO and organic traffic.
• Due to the fluid nature of research, SEO must have its own roadmap for continuous improvement (such as machine learning advancements), areas of growth (such as producing useful content), and maintenance.
• No company has unlimited funds or capital to acquire new customers through a significant investment in paid search. Organic traffic is a complex and measurable source of income for new website visitors. A resource needs protection and development to grow.

There are product managers for everything important to a business, and why wouldn't you want one?

Some companies have product managers for research, but usually they track searches to customers' website and their experience of finding products or not.

Instead, I'm referring more to SEO product managers who focus on two primary external customers: search engines and customers who visit websites from search engine results pages.

Read the job description for any product manager role and you'll see that developing superior application and/or e-commerce experiences for top tier companies, delivering customer experiences that drive sales and retention is critical.

The role requires a balance of analytical and creative skills with strong consumer instincts.

The product manager writes the requirements in a ticket that works in the engineering team. This is where SEO requirements or considerations can come into play.

Is there a relationship? So it needs an identifier code as an identifier so that it can be "read" by search engines.

Publish a visual product carousel? Make sure it's not blocked by JavaScript, because if it's disabled on the client side, it won't be visible to the client or search engines.

SEO is a growing discipline because it cares about getting organic traffic from Google searches and understanding user queries and their changing intentions over time. This ultimately means that the dashboard itself will move and change.

In the Search of the Record podcast, John Mueller talks about the fluid nature of the search. He pointed out that Google's rankings can change as queries and user needs change.

Human nature is fickle and our needs change over time. Because of this, it is important for businesses to focus on growing organic search as a channel to continue to generate revenue and attract new customer traffic.

"What will we do with the next algorithm update?" By simply avoiding asking, or "What keywords are ranking today or not?" - This is a narrow view of how to look for work.

It's more effective to solve, "What does my customer want first? And how do we make sure Google knows we're delivering?"

SEO is a product that uses a product framework that helps identify useful work and implement it on the website. So teams can measure, learn from and improve over time.

How does SEO product management fit into the organization?

In larger organizations, SEO is usually handled by managers or technical SEO, content SEO and marketing analysts. SEO is usually not vertical within the product.

But no matter where SEO is located in an organization, there is always complexity and ambiguity that must be navigated and delivered through a structured approach.

SEOs often suffer from a lack of resources (especially engineering) to maintain and publish.

One part of the production process that most SEO professionals don't understand is the time frame for completing the job. Most of the big tech companies (Apple, IBM, Microsoft) use agile methods to create work. Recently, more and more companies have adopted this approach as a way to work on and iterate on strategic initiatives.

This cannot be overemphasized. In the agile approach, the engineering team works in sprints and a certain number of sprints are organized every year. This is especially true if you are an eCommerce brand operating during a "code lock" period, often November - January when no codebase updates are made.

Because the number of sprints is limited, the planning process involves prioritizing roadmap items, working backwards from the "lead down" period.

This also means that if you enter a new or temporary job, it will replace the existing initiatives. These are transactions that the SEO product manager manages and communicates with management.

In the year Early 2022, I spoke at an industry conference about an SEO product manager's engagement points with engineering teams in an agile process that SEO managers are not used to.

Just like before, during, and after strategies, there are specific ways SEO product managers can support teams on their journey to make SEO work together.

Products are where the resources are

SEO as a source of acquisition must have resources to contribute to the company's profits.

Of course, product managers can access and coordinate these resources. Engineering resources are usually assigned to product managers on a vertical or discipline basis.

If an organization works where SEO is seen as a product in itself:

• Product owner.
• SEO product roadmap.
• Resource allocation for SEO initiatives.

Unlike the rest of the roadmap and product team, any marketing plan will be a roadmap for the planned SEO work.

It's the difference between the power to design the work on your own roadmap and asking another team to have some resources to do your job (whatever that sounds like).

SEO as a product drives organic traffic and revenue

While SEO is a product in itself, it empowers teams to do what's best for their business in designing and developing customizable channels for customer acquisition and revenue.

It is the result of continuous technical improvement and updating of information content between people's needs, from information to marketing.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of guest authors and not necessarily search engine land. Staff writers are listed here.