SEO Strategy with a Product Mindset

How to Develop a Product Mindset for Better SEO

As an SEO, sitting in a product team with UX and engineers changes everything. All of these agile ceremonies become part of your day-to-day work, helping you understand the universe that engineers and developers are in.

▸Leverage Agile Ceremonies for Better Communication

These are some of the agile ceremonies that should be part of your day-to-day:

• Daily standups
• Sprint planning
• Discovery meetings
• Backlog refinement
• Sprint review

▸Join Sprint Planning to Understand Impact vs Effort

Every two weeks (the typical sprint length), sit with the engineers and discuss which tickets will be done in the next two weeks. At this point, tickets are already organized and you know the velocity that your engineers have.

Pro tip: Engineers are doing things that are not just the tickets you requested. Ask the team lead: "How many points do you think you can give me next sprint?" This helps you look at impact versus effort.

Maybe there's something that has a higher impact and lower effort that really helps you decide what to do next. Honestly, there are a lot of things that we put on this list and later realize it's not worth doing.

▸Hold Discovery Meetings to Align on Priorities

Discovery meetings are fascinating because they help you get a lot of answers from engineers before anything is built.

In the discovery meeting, you meet with all your stakeholders: SEO, UX, content editors, and engineers. You say, "This is the next thing we want to build."

Come prepared:

• Create an AI prototype of the next page you want to build
• Have all the arguments to explain why you want to build this
• Get a sense from engineers about complexity

Engineers will see things that we, as SEOs, are not seeing. For example, you might say "we just need to update a plug-in," but actually there might be security updates needed too.

▸Think in Terms of Projects Instead of Tasks

Go away from just doing tasks to building topics, projects, or epics.

Examples:

• Instead of fixing 404s → Eliminate all non-200 status codes
• Instead of updating plug-ins → Tackle all security issues
• Instead of writing blog posts → Build a content hub
• Instead of adding CTAs → Launch a conversion rate program
• Instead of resizing images → Improve overall page speed

It's easier to say "this quarter we're going to do 4 things" instead of "we're going to do 200 tasks." It's easier to sell, easier to understand, and people are more committed.

▸Build an MVP and Iterate

MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is just enough to prove that something works.

Benefits of MVP approach:

• Delivers something faster
• Allows learning from it
• Gives confidence to invest more
• Helps discover new ideas halfway through

MVP examples:

• Release in one market first
• Reuse an existing design instead of creating a new one
• Do something manually first to validate, then automate

▸Output is Different from Outcome

Delivering a technical audit with a list of problems is just the output. Nothing was fixed. No extra traffic is coming through, no leads, no sales.

You still need to prove that something works and has an impact. That's when you start getting the outcome – when things start doing what they are meant to do and start getting real results.

Source: Adapted from Moz Whiteboard Friday by Gus Pelogia, SEO Product Manager