does it mean to be an SEO product manager? //

They are your best friend and the team you didn’t know you needed. They are essential for SEO teams in-house.

This article will discuss what an SEO product manager does and the skills required to be one. We also explain where it fits within the organization.

What does it mean to be an SEO product manager?

An SEO product manager (PM), at the highest level, helps teams optimize features or functionalities of a website to make it searchable by both search engines and humans.

This position is unique in that it can empathize and understand two types of customers.

• Googlebot is a search engine bot that crawls websites.
• Websites visited by potential customers looking for information and products.

Because it requires knowledge and experience in search engine optimization, SEO product management is a specialization within product administration. This role is different from the one of an SEO manager in two ways: SEO PMs and SEO Managers.

• To execute SEO roadmap initiatives, maintain a roadmap with your other product managers, engineers, and delivery leaders.
• Use software tools such as Confluence and Jira to create SEO requirements and maintain detailed product specifications for SEO initiatives.

The SEO PM assists in ensuring that all SEO requirements are included into technical work done by functional teams. This includes how a feature is built or coded so it’s SEO-friendly for humans and search engines.

Let’s first take a moment to define product management, as it has only been developed in the past two decades.

“While product management has been around for many decades, the title of ‘product manager’ only began to gain traction less than twenty years ago.” Sherif M. Mansour is a product manager at Atlassian. is one of the most important tools used by agile teams.

“A product manager is someone who determines the customer’s needs and larger business goals that a product or feature will satisfy, articulates what success looks for a product and rallies a team around that vision to make it a reality.

Product management can be described as a cross-functional, highly integrated role within an organization. SEO is no different. Jessica Bowman is an enterprise consultant at SEO Inhouse.

As such, an SEO product manager’s main role is to guide and advise colleagues on SEO best practices.

• Determining the most important KPIs for the business and providing advice on the SEO leading indicators to organic growth.
• It is important to understand concepts such as the signals that influence ranking factors and how major search engines like Google define a good user experience (beyond the bounce rate).

They work in collaboration with other teams to finish the job and make others around them more skilled at SEO.

It would be remiss of me not to mention that SEO as a product should be supported by an SEO product manager.

Search engine optimization is a part of a business, where a product manager works to increase organic traffic and revenue. This involves defining the vision, high level problems and what success looks. (Don’t worry, friends. I will be expanding on this topic in future articles.

What is the difference between an SEO project manager, an SEO product manager and an SEO manager?

I’m sorry that I lost you. These roles sound very similar, especially when the PM is abbreviated. This chart will help to clarify.

An SEO PM and SEO manager have significant differences in how they manage a product roadmap, and what their operational functions are.

SEO product managers have a list of features and fixes that they can use to improve SEO’s foundational aspects.

• Internal linking
• The site’s content.
• Googlebot’s ability crawl and index the site.
• User experience.
• Speed and web vitality.

It’s like having a playbook that contains both offensive and defensive plays.

A product manager should have some initiatives that help (offensively grow) the business in a calendar year when engineering and product teams release updates to the site. They must also manage the realities of fundamental (defensive), things such as shoring up tech debt and committing a quarter to a platform update.

SEO is a complex field. There’s always the possibility of a code breaking site functionality. SEO PMs prioritize the SEO roadmap carefully and execute it with other PMs using what’s called agile scrum methodology. This project management system relies on incremental development.

The 10 pillars for SEO, created by Bowman at SEO Inhouse, is a useful framework for articulating SEO initiatives.

This framework is particularly useful at the enterprise level where SEO PMs often educate and advocate for technical SEO initiatives.

It demonstrates and compartmentalizes key concepts of SEO for other teams. It can be used to categorize priority initiatives.

However, SEO managers still refer to this framework but their role is ancillary to the core roles in agile scrum methodologies. Scrum has three roles.

• The product manager (or the owner).
• The scrum master.
• The members of the development team.

You can see that every role is involved in the website’s development, but there is no representative of SEO.

While an SEO manager may not be an integral part the agile process, a product manager for SEO is.

SEO managers face a challenge in putting SEO priorities on a roadmap. They are essentially looking in from the outside.

Ability to create requirements using SEO recommendations

As an SEO manager in the past, I documented a SEO problem and made recommendations to the marketing team.

It wasn’t until my role as a product manager, that I realized that I had to be in control of making sure SEO requirements were considered and that engineers use Jira tickets. They do not work from an SEO audit or exports from any SEO enterprise tools.

A PM in SEO is available to assist with grooming sessions, helping to document technical SEO recommendations and listening to areas that need it.

Product management is about creating clear requirements that other teams can follow. Each ticket the SEO PM creates outlines “what” the search engines need to consume. Engineering then determines “how” to fulfill those requirements.

Operational function

It’s easy to see it as this: An SEO manager may prioritize fixing 404 errors in a site, while an SEO PM might look at the same initiative and say, “Okay. What teams should I partner with to address the larger business issue that’s causing the errors?”

The other targets the source of the problem. One targets the issue. The other can target the source to stop the issue from continuing.

Sprint cycles are used to determine the development team’s schedule due to the agile framework.

Daily rituals such as team stand-ups and grooming sessions, retrospectives, and showcases are all part of a sprint, which can last one to two weeks.

It is important to be able to manage the day and work with others.

These duties alone make a big difference in how an SEO manager spends his day. (In future articles in this series, I will dive deeper into this aspect by comparing job descriptions between them, as I have also seen the terms “search products manager” and digital PM used to describe these roles.

What are the skills and qualities required to be a SEO PM?

You can move up to an SEO product manager if you are currently an SEO manager, product manager, or project manager.

You will need to perform a self-assessment in order to identify where and how to improve your skills.

These are the skills that you will need because SEO product management is a specialty of product management.

You’re either a product manager or an SEO who uses product management principles to accelerate your approach.

How does SEO product management define results?

While product managers might be focused on making customer improvements or delivering new features, SEO PMs focus on metrics.

My experience with enterprise SEO ecommerce has shown me that there are two key KPIs.

• Organic sales and revenue
• Visits or sessions organic.

SEO PMs focus on increasing organic traffic and revenue for businesses. As improvements are made to the website, incremental results are recorded.

Prioritization is the core of product management

Prioritizing is an important skill in SEO. This skill is a result of years of experience in auditing websites, prioritizing issues, implementing fixes, and measuring the results.

Technical SEO is categorized by most enterprise tools as errors, warnings, and notifications. If something is wrong or crawlers are unable to access your pages, errors are considered critical issues.

Seasoned SEOs combine business priorities with technical solutions that can be applied and will move the needle.

On the other hand, product managers aim to prioritise features and enhancements – essentially Ideas – using customer data, scope confidance level and business impact.

One misconception about SEO fixes is that all of them improve traffic. It is not true. Secondary KPIs are important in creating SEO improvements. These KPIs create operational efficiencies, rather than driving organic traffic.

Programmatically defining title tags should be less than 60 characters to avoid being cut off in the SERP. Is this a way to increase organic traffic? It doesn’t. It is more of a best practice.

It is important to realize that there is no single strategy that will bring you online success. If there was, everyone (and all affiliate sites) would do it.

SEO’s nature is organic. It happens naturally and over time .

SEO is an acquisition channel. The growth opportunity lies in making compounding improvements over the long-term. SEO’s attractive aspect is its ability to continue reaping the benefits year after year, provided that the improvements are made.

Contributing to the improvement of SEO foundations by helping other teams

Product management is about collaboration and teamwork. This helps to get things done. You can directly contribute as an SEO product manager because you advise, educate, and empower different teams regarding their contributions to SEO.

This could be feature documentation that outlines SEO requirements for search engines, or best practices for coding elements of a page that are search engine friendly. This also helps engineers to understand the tradeoffs involved in SEO when dealing with URL parameters and pagination.

The data that SEO PMs can provide can be used to inform decision-making. Ecommerce marketers can use search data to help them understand seasonality of their products. It can be used to help copy teams include words and phrases that were used in the discovery phase.

SEO data is about real people searching for what they are looking for. The SEO PMs have the unique ability to communicate that level of customer insight to internal teams, putting the customer at their core.

What is the role of the SEO product manager in the company?

It all depends on who hires you and where your team is located . Product management is still in its infancy. Therefore, structure and team size are constantly changing.

My experience includes being a product vertical PM and then an SEO team member. This team was responsible for providing the online customer experience.

It doesn’t matter what role it is, because product management (and even SEO) are cross-functional disciplines.

This means that SEO PMs can, like regular product managers and other product managers, have success in building cross-functional partnerships to achieve the end goal of getting things done.

Product management responsibilities change based on the size of the organization.

Product managers are often needed for smaller companies. They can handle many areas. Product management in large enterprises is more about learning how to navigate the company. Product managers are responsible for scaling and growing a specific area of the business.

Enterprise brands may have product managers who are responsible for the front-end website, internal searches and navigation, cart experience or “checkout” (especially for ecommerce brands), content assets and, most recently, SEO.

Itamar Gilad, a thought leader and practitioner with over 20 years of experience in product management, has identified three common PM roles. He many companies are still trying to figure out the basics of the PM role, including their reporting lines and relationships with other disciplines.

Education and influence

Product managers are often able to influence and collaborate even though they don’t have direct reports.

Particularly for SEO PMs, it is crucial to have mechanisms in place to train and empower their internal teams about the basics of SEO. This will help them understand how they can improve or hinder their SEO performance.

It is a common misconception that SEO teams do only SEO, and that SEO “just happens.”

Definitions and tools for the trade

You will need to know the nomenclature, rituals, and SEO for product management in order to become an SEO product manager.

These terms will help you get started on the product side.

• Agile – A method that allows teams to manage a process efficiently by breaking it into smaller parts. This is a method for project management and product development that is structured and iterative.
• Scrum (or agile scrum), is a type of framework which consists of meetings and roles. These are used to facilitate collaboration and better manage the workload of teams working on complex projects.
• Sprint planning – A meeting where product managers, engineers and business representatives meet to discuss tickets for upcoming sprints.
• Sprint – A defined time period where engineers pick up work in Jira tickets and are required to complete the work within the given timeframe. Efficiency is the key to success.
• Stand up: These are routines that enable to quickly inform all members of the team. They allow engineers and product delivery managers to check on any blockers, questions, or tasks they have been assigned.
• Demo: This is part of the agile ritual in which teams who have been working on a ticket show business stakeholders the finished product or other aspects.
• MVP – This stands for “minimum viable products”, which is the first version of a multiphased project you intend to publish in order to start the iterative feedback loop.
• Spike – Designed to provide quick investigation tickets with the goal of gathering more data points and feedback to improve the scope of the initiative.
• The size or level of effort (LOE): A cross-functional estimate (engineering and UX, for example) Estimates from cross-functional teams (engineering, UX, etc.) on the effort required to complete the task. Each company has a different sizing range. You can choose from a “t-shirt size”, small, medium, large, or a range (highly, medium, low).

Product managers use tools and resources

Below is a list of tools that product managers use and their value.

• Slack/WebEx/ Microsoft Teams: Internal communication, particularly for remote teams.
• Tickets and documentation for Jira or Confluence
• Trello, Asana – Keeping track and completing tasks.
• Adobe Analytics: Organization’s source for truthful data. This is also used by SEOs.
• Quantum Metric
• Roadmunk: Sharing product roadmaps and collaborating with others
• Miro: An online brainstorming and collaboration tool.
• Login to the admin area of the software platform where the enterprise website is located.
• AppsFollow or Firebase will be used by PMs who oversee an app.

These tools are not the only ones SEO PMs will be using:

• Google Analytics.
• Google Search Console (to see the Google information about your site)
• Google Trends is a free tool that provides insight into the most popular search terms and topics.
• Botify, Sitebulb, and other web crawlers.
• Monitor keyword trends and fluctuations with Semrush, Ahrefs STAT, Moz, and STAT.
• Tableau is used for data visualization and consolidation.
• SEO Radar is a monitoring tool that focuses on the specific needs of a business.

What they are reading:

• TechCrunch.
• Insider Intelligence (eMarketer).

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Managers of SEO products help to drive organic growth

Were we really best friends?

SEO PMs can help grow your business organically. They also make it easier for other SEO professionals to do their accounting. It requires dedication, teamwork, and investment.

Both the SEO PM and SEO Manager roles serve as advisors to cross-functional teams, building and working on websites by providing technical guidance.

However, it is the SEO product managers that are more involved in writing product specifications and documentation. This role is also different from that of an SEO manager.

Search Engine Land first published the post What’s an SEO Product Manager?