7 Ways SEO and Product Teams Can Collaborate to Ensure Success

My journey into product management started in a similar fashion to most of my SEO career: it just appeared in front of me. Upon taking the SEO manager role, I inherited the responsibility of liaising with engineers after my colleague departed. This shift granted me unprecedented access to a team of engineers, a scenario many tech SEOs dream of.

Yet, I quickly learned that my requests needed to be backed by solid reasoning to avoid clashing with product initiatives. This experience taught me the importance of adopting a product mindset to collaborate with engineers effectively.

In this article, I’ll share insights on bridging the gap between SEO and product teams. By embracing product team concepts, pitching ideas more convincingly, and weaving SEO into the product ecosystem, you ensure that the product team hears and implements your ideas, driving mutual success.

1. Working on sprints

Product and engineering teams tend to work in sprints, using agile methodologies. Borrowing a formal definition:

“Agile project management is a collaborative, iterative approach incorporating continuous testing and change responsiveness.”

A sprint, typically spanning two weeks, focuses on completing predetermined tasks, minimizing distractions, and ensuring that you only pursue planned activities during this period.

During sprint planning, you look at every ticket and collectively decide what can be done based on your resources, such as the team’s knowledge, time, and priorities.

I love applying sprints to SEO for a lot of reasons:

• It forces you to be organized: What’s not in a ticket won’t be picked up.
  

• It limits distractions: You can write a ticket for the latest shiny things, but it won’t be executed until it’s on a sprint.
  

• Provides clarity on deliverables: Knowing what will be tackled in the next two weeks alleviates common frustrations among SEO professionals about the uncertainty of task completion.
  

• Facilitates realistic workload planning: Tasks are assessed for time or complexity before being added to a sprint, helping teams understand the effort required and manage.

2. Daily stand-ups

Participating in daily stand-ups as part of a product team has improved my alignment with the dev team's workflow and priorities. Despite not being a coder, these meetings have sharpened my understanding of task complexities and the timing for presenting new ideas.

Also, attending daily stand-ups allows me to understand my team’s real capacity so I don’t feel frustrated or ignored. Many things I thought would be “simple” changes require a lot of work, even when it’s a small change, sometimes with little impact.

With time, I learned to choose my battles wisely and prepare in advance. Questions like, “What tickets do I really need done this sprint?” or “Given the team's availability, how can I emphasize the importance of certain tasks?” become easier to address.

I show up for sprint planning with well-prepared priorities, scenarios, and arguments, often initiating discussions in the preceding week through messages or during stand-ups.

3. Writing tickets

Arguably, SEOs aren’t the best at writing tickets. The details are clear in our minds but not adequately conveyed. Remember that developers are fixing and building things for everyone in the company, and poorly written tickets won’t pass triage or be accepted in a sprint.

Having too many questions or tickets done differently than expected forced me to step up my ticket-writing game to avoid frustration.

I had to:

• Understand how to write and improve tickets written for engineers

• Listen to feedback and address ticket issues

• Familiarize myself with the most common reasons tickets get ignored or deferred

Here are a few tips for SEOs to improve ticket writing for product teams:

Clarify the goal and rationale: They might propose a more efficient solution or raise considerations you hadn't contemplated.

Provide visual aids: Include screenshots, links to problematic pages, or a design template.

Define completion criteria: Specify when the ticket is considered complete. It's common to discover that what seemed like a straightforward task may encompass two or three actions to realize your initial vision.

4. Integrating SEO into product roadmaps

Incorporating SEO into product roadmaps is essential for harmonizing your marketing efforts with the company's broader objectives. Product teams often have roadmaps that outline upcoming features and anticipated release timelines, sometimes even sharing these plans publicly. A roadmap is a strategic document detailing key initiatives, their rationale, and expected impact, making it accessible to all stakeholders.

To effectively blend SEO with product development, consider these steps:

Merge plans into themes: Limit your roadmap to three to five major items to maintain focus. Integrating SEO into the broader company roadmap ensures SEO initiatives are aligned with overall business goals.

Collaborate across teams: Integrate ideas from different departments into a unified roadmap. For instance, if the UX team designs new page types, SEOs can contribute with keyword research. Similarly, SEO strategies can support promoting new product features to drive traffic.

Maintain a dynamic approach: Continually seek new initiatives for your roadmap. Keep a separate document for brainstorming and revisit these ideas when appropriate, allowing flexibility and responsiveness to market changes.

Engage with other teams: Once you’ve developed your ideas, share them with trusted colleagues from other departments. Expect scrutiny and embrace it as constructive feedback. This engagement ensures your plans are thoroughly vetted, increasing the likelihood of approval and successful implementation.

5. Writing Product Requirement Documents

Have you been in a situation where something was very clear in your head, but once you shared it, people got confused? It’s a frustration that you can avoid.

Creating a Product Requirement Document (PRD) is a vital step in conveying a project's necessity and potential impact to stakeholders. Here’s a screenshot of my PRD template, which you’ll find in this article.

Let's consider the example of developing author pages for a blog. At first glance, this may seem straightforward, but it involves multiple components and collaboration across teams:

• Page design (UX): The user experience team designs the layout, ensuring it's intuitive and aligns with the overall site aesthetic.

• Page coding (developer): Developers turn the design into a functional webpage.

• Define content elements: The author's name, education, biography, headshot, image, social media links, and how articles will be displayed must be considered.

• Integration points: Deciding where the author page links from and how it connects with the rest of the site.

• Structured data: Implementing a template for author structured data to enhance SEO and visibility.

Once you’ve got all the above, collect information about your authors. Their bios should highlight their expertise on the topic, enhancing the page's credibility.

The UX and development teams must align on the page's final look, including the placement of the bio module both within articles and on the author pages themselves.

The PRD should articulate the expected impact of the author pages, weighing the effort and impact against other potential initiatives. It should also outline when and how other stakeholders can contribute, fostering a collaborative environment.

6. Developing MVPs

Developing Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) is a strategic approach that allows for testing new features on a smaller scale before full implementation. This method reduces the risk of failure by validating concepts with minimal resources. For instance, if you're considering introducing an internal link feature, start by applying it to a single domain or category of pages. This restraint conserves resources and ensures your initiative doesn't sideline other valuable projects.

Let’s look at another example. You assume a certain structured data type will benefit your pages. Implementing your structured data type on a select group of pages provides the assurance to proceed confidently rather than making widespread changes based on assumptions.

When creating specific page types, such as subcategories, to enhance topic authority and user navigation, begin with underperforming categories. This focused approach allows for adjustments based on tangible outcomes, facilitating stakeholder buy-in for broader application.

Ultimately, MVPs enable you to demonstrate the effectiveness of new features or strategies, making it easier to justify their expansion across your site. This iterative process ensures continuous improvement and aligns with efficient resource allocation and strategic planning.

7. Feedback loops and iterative processes

Turning good into great is not just a challenge for product teams; it's something you, as an SEO, should also strive for. Suppose you've implemented structured data that showcases your company's pricing and reviews directly in the SERPs. Why not take it a step further?

Consider incentivizing more reviews, adding product availability, or appearing in merchant listing experiences.

These updates may happen step by step (remember, MVPs), and you will learn something new with each implementation. As you introduce updates and share your journey, you'll likely encounter teams with perspectives you hadn't considered and find allies eager to support your initiatives. This collaboration helps build trust within your team and enhances your brand.

Another great tip is to share feedback, results, and insights about your implementations to engage other teams more closely with your projects. For example, I’ve found partners from other teams after sharing a vision and realizing someone else was doing the same thing for different reasons.

SEO and product teams must work collaboratively to ensure success. Adopting a product manager mindset involves thorough strategy research, clear communication, testing, and openness to feedback and iteration. Recognize that solutions often depend on various factors, and you don’t always have the full picture.

Finally, promote a cooperative culture where SEO and other aligned teams share a joint roadmap to ensure higher product success.