SEO meet product, product meet SEO — 5 reasons why SEOs are prime candidates for PM roles.
When you look under the hood, there are many parallels between product management and SEO and I’d like to make the case that experienced, senior SEO staff are great candidates for product management roles.
Traditionally SEO has always been viewed as part of online marketing — probably due to the fact that it’s generally perceived as an acquisition channel. This perception of SEO as “just a source of traffic” however puts strong limitations on what SEOs can contribute to a company.
So if you’re looking to expand your product organization, instead of going through the trouble of hiring a PM, it might make sense to look at your SEOs first — who knows, you might be looking at your next great product manager.
Reason #1: SEOs are autodidacts by nature and can pivot to new roles with ease
SEO — at least until recently — has been for the most part a self taught profession not unlike Product Management. In order to become proficient at SEO you had to read what industry experts were saying, listen to conference talks, comb through the twitter accounts of Google employees and dive into patents on search technology to better understand how Google search works on a fundamental level.
Since SEO is in large part an “inexact science”, there always was and always will be a lot of misinformation floating around and so SEOs have to develop a keen sense for filtering out bad information while scouring the web for useful new insights.
On top of that, as search engines keep evolving, so is SEO alongside it meaning that SEO professionals are used to expanding into completely new areas on a regular basis.
SEOs have an innate ability to autonomously and quickly soak up new skills and information — in other words they’re autodidacts. What I’m trying to say is, that they are very adept at pivoting into new skill sets and job roles. I personally know SEOs from all walks of life, ranging from teachers to journalists to people holding BAs in tourism or management… the one thing they all have in common, and one thing that is essential to become a great SEO, is their drive to continuously learn and evolve — in other words their autodidactic nature.
Reason #2: SEOs have a broad, interdisciplinary skill set
SEO work requires a very broad skill set consisting of strong communication and presentation skills, a strategic mindset and outcome driven approach, laser sharp prioritization, creativity and connected thinking, a deep understanding of the business its competitors and customers, data analytics and visualization, speaking developers’ language, project management and a collaboration mindset to name a few.
Replace the “SEO” above with “PM” and you’ll probably agree that the sentence still works. I think this helps to showcase that SEOs — at least the good ones — already have many of the same tools in their belt that are required to become a successful product manager.
Reason #3: SEOs live for their users
In order to be successful at SEO you need to be able to provide users with what they want — this fundamental tenet is why the term SXO (search experience optimisation) has gained traction in recent years as it more accurately describes what SEOs are actually doing.
Since one of the main jobs of SEOs is to deeply understand their users’ problems, behaviour and intent — usually without even having the opportunity to actually talk to them — they generally become pretty adept at deciphering what users need based on the limited data that is available to them.
I’d be willing to bet that most SEOs will champ at the bit to get the opportunity to talk to real users — which is what PMs do (or should do) regularly — and as such already come primed for continuous discovery work “out of the box”.
Reason #4: SEOs prioritize effectively and base their work on outcomes
In the “standard setup” (meaning when there are no dedicated product resources), SEO initiatives have to compete for implementation within already crowded product roadmaps and somehow find a place to squeeze-in. This means that oftentimes they’re under great scrutiny and ensuring that only truly relevant things are worked on is an absolute must.
Unfortunately prioritization for SEO is usually anything but straightforward because showing clear business value in advance is particularly difficult due to the lack of concrete facts surrounding the topic.
And since there is very little information regarding the outcomes of the tasks / initiatives SEOs are proposing, they need to get really good at taking what little information they have and organizing it in a way that allows them to prioritize different topics against each other.
As the old adage goes “with complete information prioritization is easy, without any information it’s impossible” — unfortunately SEOs are often closer to the “without any information” end of the spectrum hence the need to become strong at prioritization.
On top of that, SEOs will often find themselves under pressure to justify the validity of their position within the organization which makes picking the right topics to work on even more crucial.
Being able to prioritize initiatives with the highest likelihood of success to maximize the chance of positive outcomes is an essential part of any SEOs skillset. As such, many SEOs develop an iron focus for prioritization throughout their career that can be very beneficial when transitioning into product management, as it helps ensure the right things are tackled at the right times.
Reason #5: SEOs “build-measure-learn”
SEO by nature is part art, part science — just like how many product ideas fail to deliver expected results, so do many SEO initiatives. It’s not rare that SEOs will work to implement something that — according to industry consensus and multiple case studies — should have a significant impact, only to find that they didn’t move the needle remotely as much as they had hoped for.
As such the build-measure-learn methodology is knowingly or unknowingly engrained in many SEOs minds. They focus on rolling out the changes that are expected to have the biggest impact with as little effort as possible, measure the results (SEO A/B testing has become more relevant recently) and try to iterate on the initial implementation or pivot to something else.
This natural tendency towards build-measure-learn serves as an important cornerstone in the foundation of a modern product team and can help SEOs excel in the role as product managers.
Conclusion
Of course just because there are parallels in the skill sets and mode of working between SEOs and PMs doesn’t mean that you can just take any SEO and simply plop them into a PM role. But as I mentioned in the beginning, starting the search for your next PM inside your organization and especially considering your SEO professionals as well, could help you find your next great PM.
Bonus: Reason #6 SEOs understand the business side
SEOs need to understand the business deeply in order to be able to tailor their measures to the needs of the organization. Lacking this understanding will lead to an unfocused waste of resources by chasing random “best practices” with no real end-goal.
In this sense SEOs and PMs are very much alike and having an understanding of how the company operates and what it takes for it to be successful are great prerequisites when transitioning to product management.
