SEO Product Management | August 2023 Update

View of downtown San Jose from LTV’s office in Costa Rica

In Person Meets, Prioritizing Tech Debt, Focusing Content

Had a very cool opportunity to meet the Costa Rica-based engineers of the SEO product team I’m on at LTV recently in their home country (among many other highly talented and interesting people on the larger LTV crew)—an experience I’m so grateful for and that I’ll always recall fondly.

The people in CR are so warm and welcoming. It’s strange to me how many major firms go offshore to other hemispheres for SEO and generalized dev needs when Central America seems to have an incredibly deep talent pool. Just to maybe save a little on the margin? The pros seem to vastly outweigh any drawbacks: similar timezones, high English language proficiencies, as if not more-driven and knowledgable tech workers, outstanding food, beautiful country. San Jose felt like a tropical, much larger, wetter Tucson. Costa Ricans go hard.

Incredible privilege to get some meaningful time together and get to know the people I get to work with. I love and overwhelmingly prefer being remote-first, but in-person time to run through ideas, exchange opinions, even knock out the usual Agile and health-check ceremonies seems to offer the chance for deeper insights.

So anyway, I thought I would pick something like this back up. As a discipline it doesn’t seem like SEO and product management have a lot of recognition or even definition as it relates to either running an organic strategy or combining this savvy into product. (Definitely not saying I’m an authority here by the way—the last year since I left Discount Tire/Tire Rack and moved into startup/SaaS has been an eduction in its own right.)

So I’m going to try to post here once a month. Or so. A collection of general thoughts and experiences with SEO product management—something that so far has been in equal measure rewarding and challenging. And my first takeaway:

Handle the tech debt first

I inherited a site with an arguably overlooked ecomm marketplace that had taken on a lot of water with a nasty combo off of Google’s Helpful Content Update and Core Update in late 2022. As we started spiking out opportunities and focal areas to try to instigate recovery, plainly some important technical debt was overlooked with the belief that creating helpful content would get us out of the basement after losing performance as a result of a Helpful Content Update. It was essentially an attempt to shoot our way out, which in principle does work but more as an aspect of trusting the process in a longer term growth capacity.

Think things like ecomm/PLP marketplace pagination/indexation, programmatic internal links, a staggering amount of seemingly random 404s being submitted in sitemaps due to data issues, query database optimizations, inefficient robots.txt directives, “product” schema discrepancies, among myriad other issues that you’d write tickets for. I had become pretty wired to focus on big content opportunities that borderline entailed their own content strategies, but getting technical and really going deep into the (human and search bot) user’s journey of navigating the site proved to be where the focus would have helped earlier in the planning process and that fixing now seems to be flipping the script on the site’s crawlability/indexation problems.

What I’m not certain of: is this a common pitfall? Again, I don’t think the word is out on how totally to “do” SEO product, this being an inherently subjective specialty even without the product management quality to it.

But I will say knocking out easy dubs (and fun ones for engineers to really sink their teeth into) like speed improvements targeting Core Web Vitals and loading times/Lighthouse Scores, improving functionality of CMS for rapid content changes and A/B testing, and content refreshes did drive some measurable results—but I’m wondering about the staying power of this work and if it’s semi Pyrrhic in the name of improving traffic quality—or whether this sets up longer-term growth via higher conversion rates as the larger holes continue to get plugged.

That’s where I’ll leave it for now, my lesson learned: focus on understanding and then addressing all forms of tech debt and prioritizing accordingly first when trying to take a site that went from zero to like eight, and then back to zero with Google updates in a matter of 12-16 months. Fast growth doesn’t seem to signify lasting growth with big G in the startup game when your site is usually young and typically on a zippy-sounding-albeit-unrelated domain name.

Content/product relevance

Gaining some interesting insights on this one, but coherent and highly-focused content creation that targets the searcher at the intersection of how they can use/convert on your product combined with where your brand’s perceived expertise, authority, trust is definitely seems to be the play when you’re punching above your weight class. So much so that I’m feeling like search volume is one of many things to keep in mind rather than The Thing To Keep In Mind compared to asking and answering the right questions—the product always being the answer.

In my application on Bumper.com, it’s not especially effective to be weighing in on big automotive industry topics/keywords, and this seems to be a part of where Google took a major swipe at our traffic/indexability. But the typical cliche on content remains: this will take months to prove out.

Will be interesting to see where things stand here after this most recent Core Update—humility being the operative word of SEO product if I’ve learned anything in the last years on the SEO PM job.

Also saw many dope 70 Series Land Cruisers in Costa Rica—not fair we don’t get these in the US.