Companies need more than basic SEO tactics in today’s competitive digital space to stay ahead. SEO now must align with company products to bring real, measurable results. Businesses are shifting focus from increasing keywords or pages to ensuring SEO efforts help meet product goals and drive growth.
Gus Pelogia, SEO Product Manager at Indeed, shares his insights on this approach. He has over ten years of digital marketing experience. He has led successful SEO campaigns across various industries, including travel and e-commerce.
In this article, we’ll explore strategies shared by Gus on aligning SEO with company products. You’ll learn how to work closely with product teams, balance technical and creative efforts, and use Minimum Viable Products (MVP) for testing. These steps will help ensure your SEO efforts support your company’s goals.
How to Align SEO with Company Products
You must adopt a product-based mindset to ensure SEO aligns with a company’s products. SEO success goes beyond merely increasing pages or keywords. It’s about outcomes, not just outputs.
Here’s how you can achieve that alignment:
1. Focus on Measurable Outcomes
Before implementing SEO strategies, think about the long-term impact. Ask yourself: Will this strategy matter six months from now? It might not be worth pursuing if you can’t measure its success or tell a future story about its impact.
2. Measure SEO Impact
Execution doesn’t end when a new page or structured data is added. You need to measure its effectiveness:
- Is Google picking up the new data?
- Are search engine result pages (SERPs) reflecting your updates?
- Has the click-through rate (CTR) increased?
3. Work with Product Teams for SEO Alignment
Collaborating closely with product teams ensures mutual goals. For example, if a product team tags pages based on categories, leverage that tagging for SEO purposes. This alignment creates efficiency without duplicating efforts.
By adopting a product-focused approach, SEOs can ensure that their efforts bring real, measurable benefits, ultimately contributing to the company’s goals.
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Balancing the Science and Art of SEO with Company Products
SEO blends both scientific and creative approaches. On the technical side, structured data, page speed, and optimization efforts are well-defined, with measurable outcomes.
You can plan, test, and track these activities to gauge their impact on rankings and user experience. However, off-page SEO, such as link building, relies more on strategy and intuition.
Although acquiring high-quality, authoritative links is known to be valuable, the exact impact remains uncertain due to Google’s algorithms.
Working Within Uncertainty
While it’s challenging to predict the exact value of specific SEO activities, it’s still possible to follow a directional approach.
For example:
- Structured Data: Implementing structured data might yield different results across various regions or page types.
- Link Building: The value of a link varies depending on its source and relevance to your domain.
By assessing the potential return of each task and the resources required, it’s easier to prioritize efforts.
For instance, if one task promises a 10% traffic boost but takes six months to implement, while another offers 5% with a shorter turnaround, the latter may offer better overall results when resources are limited.
Creativity in Problem-Solving for SEO with Company Products
SEO also demands creativity when addressing technical issues. For instance, canonical tags may not always work as intended due to elements being misinterpreted by Google. In such cases, thinking outside the box to troubleshoot problems is crucial for success.
Integrating SEO with Company Products Roadmaps
Integrating SEO into a product roadmap requires careful planning and collaboration across teams. SEO strategies often extend beyond two-week sprints, especially when dealing with large projects.
To ensure alignment, it’s important to coordinate SEO efforts with product development, ensuring both are moving toward shared goals.
Steps to Integrate SEO with Company Products Development
- Collaborative Planning: Meet with the product team to create a shared roadmap. This ensures SEO goals align with product objectives, minimizing conflicts and duplicating efforts.
- Prioritize Tasks: Focus on a few high-impact tasks at a time. It’s more efficient to tackle two or three key projects rather than spreading resources across too many initiatives.
- Evaluate Impact: Consider the estimated results of each task before starting. If a project is expected to bring significant traffic growth, prioritize it even if executing it takes longer.
- Iterative Progress: Break large projects into smaller tasks or “sprints,” ensuring incremental progress. Celebrate small wins along the way to keep teams motivated.
Collaborating Across Teams
Effective collaboration with UX designers, engineers, and content creators is key. Often, different teams work on similar goals without realizing it. Clear communication prevents duplicated efforts and ensures everyone contributes to a unified outcome.
By coordinating projects and sharing credit for successful outcomes, teams can avoid working in isolation and accelerate progress.
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Developing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for SEO
When developing an MVP for SEO, the goal is to create the simplest version of an idea that can prove its potential impact. This approach allows teams to test strategies without investing too much time and resources upfront.
Steps to Build an SEO MVP
- Identify the Core Function: Focus on the simplest version of your SEO idea that can demonstrate results. For example, if you’re updating salary information on job listing pages, test the updates on a few pages before rolling them out site-wide.
- Run Tests on a Limited Scale: Select a group of pages or a small market to test your idea. Start small to manage risk and gauge whether your changes produce the desired outcome.
- Evaluate Early Results: Once the MVP is live, monitor its performance. If it shows positive results, you can expand the effort. If it doesn’t meet expectations, the early test saves time and resources, allowing you to pivot without major losses.
Choosing Pages for SEO with Company Products
Selecting the right pages for testing is crucial. You may:
- Test in low-traffic regions to reduce risk.
- Run tests on high-traffic pages for faster results.
- Focus on specific categories or page types.
The choice depends on the potential risks and rewards, balancing the need to prove effectiveness without compromising significant traffic.
Conclusion
In conclusion, aligning SEO with company products requires strategic planning and collaboration. Focus on measurable outcomes, integrate efforts across teams, and prioritize high-impact tasks.
By consistently evaluating and adjusting your approach, you can ensure long-term success. Ultimately, SEO with company products should drive real, measurable results that align with business goals.