A video from 2016 made the rounds amongst the Wayfair SEO Product team this week and I found it very useful. Teresa Torres shares insights into her experience working with Product & Engineering teams as well as defines what product discovery is and how to measure success.
As the discipline of SEO gets intertwined more in product management, there is a lot we can learn from product discovery frameworks. Curious technical and analytical minded SEO practitioners can naturally excel at product discovery because we’ve been doing details of it for years. By that I mean actions such as competitive analysis, keyword research, data analysis, etc.
While we’re naturally good at the details, we flock to solutions for our collaborators. I have found from experience that flocking to solutions is not as effective. What is effective is defining outcomes and problems for teams to discuss, refine, and rally around first. Then diving into solutions & experiments.
See a very simple example below…this can certainly get more complex with other strategic SEO pillars such as internal linking or schema but starting simple is key.
- Business Objective: Grow our base of new customers
- SEO Objective: Begin ranking for new keywords tied to priority business topic with a minimum of 2K new pages.
- SEO Outcome: Drive new customers to site by increasing organic traffic to new pages with new keywords by H2 ’22.
- SEO Opportunities / Problem(s)
- Potential new customers are searching Google every day for what we sell. We identified 5K relevant keywords with search demand which we aren’t ranking for.
- No clear system for programmatically generating new pages.
- Manual creation would take far too long.
- Discuss more with your team…..
Stopping here to call out that this is Product Discovery. If you are in an SEO Product Manager role, I recommend trying to frame your idea or project in the context above first prior to going into what we get to below which is known as Product Delivery. This is so important due to the cross-functional nature of an SEO Product Manager. You need to give your team ownership and context of the business objective and problem, then invite them to use their expertise on solutions / experiments.
What I like about this approach too is I hope you can feel less alone on your SEO island where you feel like the only one driving ideas and presenting solutions.
- Solutions:
- Consider technology vendor who has an out of the box solution
- Build scalable system for programmatic page generation
- Leverage machine learning to pursue a mix of programmatic content creation and manual curation
- Discuss more with your team…..
- Experiments:
- Run 3 month pilot with vendor solution and measure impact.
- Use GPT-3 machine learning model to produce content for 25-50 pages and gauge if it comes back descriptive and quality enough for customers.
- Discuss more with your team…..