Resources
What’s the State of SEO Product Management?
A survey benchmarking SEO PM adoption, implementation, & sophistication across brands.
About the survey
SEO Product Management connects the dots between SEO and Engineering. It ensures alignment between teams, focus on high-value delivery, and that critical optimizations have an efficient journey from ideation to implementation.
So, how well is this valuable role implemented at different organizations? Answers from 60 respondents - including SEOs, PMs, and Marketing leaders - show a wide variance in how well SEO product management is carried out across the industry.
How do SEO product management programs across the industry stack up today?
Each respondent’s answers were tallied into an overall score gauging the proficiency of their brand’s SEO PM program. The results show that most brands are bought into and actively pursuing the work at some level. However, the majority fall in the middle of the spectrum and very few brands qualify as “advanced.” There’s still a lot of room for growth!
0% are beginners.
The company has not yet built a SEO Product Management proficiency, yet has an interest in working towards defining and prioritizing one.
7% are igniting.
The organization has started implementing some basic SEO Product Management elements, and has an opportunity to bring their strategy to market more quickly.
53% are growing.
SEO Product Management is well underway, and the setup is a great foundation for further integrating SEO into product development.
38% are maturing.
The organization has a solid foundation of SEO Product Management practices and workflows that ensure your SEO strategy is delivered.
2% are advanced.
The organization has built a strong SEO Product Management workflow with effective processes, documentation, and long-term strategic vision.
Most SEO teams are in a phase of active development and improvement, moving beyond early stages but still working toward full maturity. This suggests there is solid progress, but also ample opportunity, for growth and refinement to reach advanced proficiency. Supporting these teams with targeted training and process improvements could help accelerate their journey to advanced SEO capability.
Mihir Naik · Senior Product Manager, SEO — Loblaws
“An impressive 93% of respondents owned at least some SEO PM responsibilities. Naturally, having such a close relationship with this type of work - and being invested in the results - we expected to see results with some level of established product management. The outcome tells us the industry is still shifting towards the higher end of program establishment with big gains for those working towards moving SEO as quickly and efficiently to launch as the industry itself is changing.”
Heather Kaeowichien · Director of Product Management — Gray Dot Co
There's a big opportunity for organizations to move up this maturity curve. As companies face rapid changes from AI-driven search, the next phase of maturity will depend on how effectively SEO product management becomes embedded in core product and engineering processes.
Glen McMurry · Director, SEO — Upwork
The answers to this question reflect how SEO process activities have certainly evolved and integrated across organizations workflows! It's great to see so many are at the maturing level now.
Aleyda Solís · Founder & International SEO Consultant — Orainti
What stood out?
01
SEO buy-in is big, but far from a given.
How leadership perceives SEO value correlates with the technical value delivered — especially in terms of the SEO tickets that come to fruition.
81% of respondents who said tickets move through the engineering process “seamlessly” or with “a little hand-holding” also said that SEO PM was “fairly important” or “critical” at their organization.
On the flip side, 73% of those that have a “bumpy” experience with engineering said that SEO PM was “not important” or “somewhat important” at their companies.
50% say engineers are not knowledgeable or are only somewhat knowledgeable about SEO work.
“Somewhat knowledgeable” refers to cases where SEO tickets need to be very detailed in regard to the ideal solution and its implementation.
Two out of three report the QA team is “not knowledgeable” or is only “somewhat knowledgeable” about SEO considerations.
Meanwhile, one out of four respondents have no QA team at their organization. This reflects a growing trend of replacing traditional QA teams with monitoring tools.
Without QA, growth becomes harder because teams are often chasing fixes for new bugs and breaks.
43.3% of brands have an SEO PM at daily stand-ups, 51.7% have one in sprint planning, and 46.7% see their SEO PMs attend retros.
SEOs aren’t always invited to milestone meetings for Product planning and prioritization — even when SEO tickets are in the pipeline. Advocating for SEO tickets is a lot harder when there isn’t a voice in the room!
65% of respondents have a backlog of SEO tickets greater than three months.
- 40% of all respondents say SEO PM work is considered not important or only somewhat important to the brand.
- 88.3 % of all respondents report ungroomed tickets make up 50% or more of their backlog.
- 48.3% of all respondents note an equal or greater number of low-priority tickets vs. high-priority tickets in their backlogs.
02
SEO is often the wildcard within the org structure.
Approximately one out of every five SEO teams is shared across departments, rather than singularly nested under Marketing or Engineering.
This is a testament to the nature of SEO work. While SEO is a marketing channel, its success is deeply dependent on technical SEO and UX optimizations making their way through the engineering queue. Where SEO is shared across departments, it shows an understanding of its hybridity.
However, it opens up the door for confusion without a strong SEO PM program to align objectives between teams and translate the value of initiatives into universal terms.
03
There’s room for SEOs to support their programs by leveraging untapped success-sharing opportunities.
The Product life cycle begins before tickets are submitted and continues after their implementation.
Yet, SEO teams are often only involved in the submission through the completion of a ticket.
This presents an opportunity to better communicate the value of and need for work, generating buy-in that’s often hard to come by.
Since these milestones are baked into Product & Engineering processes, they allow SEOs to share context at the right times, in the right ways.
23.3% say that there is no SEO strategy, or if there is, it’s not very in depth.
Meanwhile, another 36.7% report that the strategy is only somewhat in depth.
While it's tempting to be reactive to industry & business changes, it's equally crucial that SEOs maintain a balanced and proactive approach — committing to their long-term strategy.
8.3% aren’t communicating performance metrics.
While this isn’t a huge percentage, it still stands out because performance monitoring is the foundation of understanding and sharing the value of SEO work.
64.7% aren’t using release notes.
Release notes are an often overlooked piece of the product life cycle where SEOs can champion important work and contextualize the value that technical SEO optimizations bring to the company.
04
SEO is rarely resourced to meet its full potential.
Half of our survey respondents reported lacking critical resources to support their strategic roadmaps.
Only 53.3% felt that there was a reasonable and committed budget to execute SEO work. In part, this is because paid marketing channels are often more directly and easily able to quantify ROI.
A huge piece of an SEO PM’s role is to quantify the value and impact of work, both before and after implementation. This is also imperative for winning roadmap buy-in from leadership, which nearly one out of three respondents said was missing at their organizations.
Even collaboration isn’t always a given: One out of every two respondents also said their SEO(s) lacked access to teams and tools central to collaborating on relevant initiatives.
Up next: Team structure
How is the greater team structured and resourced, and where does SEO Product Management fit into the picture?