Start thinking more like a product manager

Gus says: “Think like a product manager.

For me, it's about following a process of discovery, testing, and seeing whether the things that you're doing actually have an impact or not. Let's say you believe that you can improve indexation on a website. That’s your hypothesis. Then, you're going to start with the discovery phase: what are the possible things you can do to solve this problem? There are many different ways that you can do this, depending on the size of your website and the resources that you have.

Start with a hypothesis and the ways that you can achieve this, and always put everything on paper. What is in your head is very different from what is in your CMO's head, your manager's head, or your client's head. Having all of those things documented makes what you want to do, why you’re doing it, and how you want to measure it a lot clearer.”

How do you start with a hypothesis and where does it come from?

“I usually start by browsing around. An easy place to start is when Google releases a new metric or a statement saying that something works or something else doesn't.

Let’s say you want to add more structured data to your website because you think that's going to help you rank better. Everybody knows that Google accepts some types of structured data and doesn’t read others. You might question that and say, ‘I believe that using Wikipedia links on my CMS is relevant’ or, ‘Adding links to pages using an ‘about’ field will be helpful’. That becomes your hypothesis.

As a simple example, we all know that internal links help with SEO. The links you give to a page and the anchor that you choose play a role in how Google reads that page. One link is probably not enough so do you need 50, 100, or a lot more? Your hypothesis might be that you need at least an additional 50 internal links to see if that page can move up. Then, you find ways to add those links, manually, programmatically, etc.

Start with a problem you want to solve, then you can come up with a hypothesis for how you can solve it based on the size of your company and the resources that you have.

Perhaps the trickiest aspect is the actual measuring of these results. If you are doing 10 things at the same time, any one of them could have had an impact. Before I started thinking like a product manager, I would just credit everything that we were doing. If we added internal links, improved page speed, added structured data, and released a PR campaign, then I would say that all of those things together were moving the needle. That is true to some extent but, once you start thinking like a PM, you will try to isolate each one of those things and determine whether it is really driving an increase in traffic or revenue, or not. At the end of the day, your hypothesis might be wrong.”

When you’re testing your hypothesis, how do you decide what elements to test and how do you come to a conclusion?

“Try to test one big thing at a time. You might be adding authors to a group of pages, and creating author pages detailing who those people are and why they are qualified to write about these topics. In a separate test, you could be adding tons of links to specific high-converting pages and, in another test, you’re adding pricing on titles to see if people will click and convert more if they see the price before they go to the website. Try to run one of those things at a time.

You could run different tests on different groups of pages but don't run everything with every page at the same time or you won’t be able to isolate.

We use an algorithm called Causal Impact, and there are many other SEO tools that can do similar things. You can create a task group, which could be the pages where you decided to add the price in the title, and a control group, which would be an equivalent group of pages that have historically performed similarly in terms of traffic. Once you have made the change, you can compare the two groups to see whether your change actually had an impact.

Both groups might grow at the same rate, which could indicate that the change did not make a difference. Playing with that kind of mentality and trying those types of things can really prove the impact of the tasks you are doing.”

How does thinking like a product manager make it easier to get buy-in for your ideas?

“Last year, I learned how to write product requirement documents. For me, that was a huge game-changer. Before that, if I wanted to explain something to a client, I would create some nice slides to explain what we wanted to do and spend a lot of time making them pretty. That wouldn’t necessarily offer a real hypothesis or methodology to test.

Most stakeholders want substance, like a fully written product requirement document (PRD). You might add some images to help explain the idea, but you have a clear problem, a clear hypothesis, you have estimations of what you can achieve, and you have a section for questions.

Have your CMO, director, manager, etc. come in while you’re still working through the idea on paper. They can ask questions and give feedback so that you start getting that buy-in before the idea starts moving. You might have a great idea to implement something, but your developers might say, ‘Actually, we cannot do this until we improve the platform.’ You need to bring everyone into the room. Physically, it can be tricky these days, but a PRD is a way to expand your idea and get that buy-in.

Before you start working, developers could let you know that you're oversimplifying or that there's a better way to do it. Getting that buy-in is very exciting and you get some clarity before you actually start building things.”

Are there any downsides to thinking like a product manager?

“It can depend on the size of the company and how difficult it is to sell certain things. Occasionally, when I'm writing one of these documents, I feel as though we could just really quickly release a feature. Before I was writing PRDs, I would sometimes release something on every page and then realise that we had no way to prove that any growth happened because of that change. The feature was there, and the traffic and conversions were there, but I couldn’t show that this had happened because of what I did.

If you work in a company where you don't need to prove this, or if your clients are just interested in the results, that's fine. However, you might get into a situation where you don't have the resources to do all the things that you want, or you might spend a lot of time doing something that is not really moving the needle.”

Can SEOs learn something from the market awareness of product managers?

“We can learn a lot. I recently released a feature through an A/B test. It was a traditional A/B test, so we were only showing it to a percentage of users so that we could compare how people were behaving on the page in our test group and in our control group. It turns out that they were doing almost the same thing. The hypothesis that we had wasn't really accurate. It’s an interesting way to look at things from a different angle.

We do internal linking because we want those pages to read better, but we might forget that real people are coming to these pages, and they might look at something and think it doesn't make sense. Then, they might lose trust in your website or your brand. Having that awareness and thinking more broadly, with an open mind, does help you to look at things in a different way.”

Should SEOs be harnessing the power of measurable goals?

“I think so. I try to treat every initiative as something that has an end. That end might just be working to the point where you know that it works and you know the potential impact behind it.

Once you prove that, then you can continue iterating and release your v2 or improvements to what you're doing. Each iteration can be its own measurable goal. In the end, we will always keep doing iterations of things. If we increase the conversion rate by 2%, we think about how we can do even better. To an extent, those projects never end because we want to keep doing more things or because we are chasing more results.

It’s important to ask yourself, though, whether you are actually making a difference for the company. Some things work for one specific niche but not for others. If you just take the same approach with everyone, it can be hit-and-miss.”

What are the first steps an SEO can take to start thinking more like a product manager?

“There are a few places where you can go to start learning. There's a great newsletter called The SEO Sprint by Adam Gent that talks about SEO and product teams working together. There is also a course from Pendo and Mind the Product that I'm doing right now and, even though I've been on this journey for a year and a half, I'm still learning a few things that I could have learned earlier.

For example, there’s a formal process that I learned on the go. Seeing a whole holistic view of the steps and how they are referred to has been really helpful. ‘Discovery’ is a normal term in the product management world but, for me, I would just write a requirements document for an idea and pitch it to my boss. I never thought that I was in the discovery phase, where I had to research a lot of different things and come up with a list of ideas before adding things to the roadmap. It's not just about the next idea, but how all of those different ideas stack together, how difficult they are to achieve, and what impact they could have.

Now, every difference that I see in a product – it could be a SaaS product, a website, or something else – I think about how someone was developing that one feature. It might be a small thing, but it makes the product a lot better.

I've been rehearsing for a talk, and they required us to send the final version in PowerPoint. I didn’t have it, but I wanted to make sure the slides looked good. I downloaded PowerPoint and it has a feature called Speaker Coach that looks at my voice, my pacing, my words-per-minute, any filler words that I'm adding, and whether I'm reading what is on the screen. It’s a small product feature but, because of this little feature, I’m all in with PowerPoint and I don’t want to rehearse with Google Slides anymore.

Once you start getting into the mindset of all the little product improvements you can make to hook the user up a bit more, you start seeing those things everywhere. Start studying and start paying attention to the things around you that can be framed as products or product improvements.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2024?

“Stop doing whatever people are saying is hot at the moment. There's a very big difference between something new and something that might have an impact. Something new might have an impact in six months, or it might have no impact at all.

Everybody was adding FAQ structured data for a long time, and now Google has said they don’t want it anymore. I don't know how many people actually tested whether they were getting higher CTR from it and how many were just adding it because Google gave us the option to.

Do a bit of testing and come up with a hypothesis so you can verify what you're doing and make sure that you aren’t spending too much time on things that won’t have an impact.”

Gus Pelogia is SEO Product Manager at Indeed, and you can find him over at Indeed.com.