Level Up Your SEO Strategy with a Product Mindset — Whiteboard Friday

The second ceremony that I want to talk about is discovery. This I find just fascinating to be in a meeting like this because it really helps me to get a lot of answers from engineers.

As a product person, you might see the memes and jokes around the product person is just demanding we want this, we're going to release that, and the engineers are the ones that are actually doing all the heavy lifting behind it.

If you're not aligned, then you're promising something that will not be delivered on time, or you're going to just put pressure on somebody because you made a promise somewhere else and they have to figure it out. 

So in the discovery meeting – that's when you meet with all your stakeholders. There might be an SEO, UX. You might have a content editor. And you're going to have your engineers. You're going to say, "Right, this is the next thing we want to build." 

I love to go to these meetings well-prepared. So maybe you can do an AI prototype of the next page you want to do. Or maybe you already have all the arguments to explain why you want to build this or that. You kind of get like a sense from the engineers – is this something that’s really easy? Because it looks easy to do, but they might see, and they will definitely see things that we, as SEOs, are not seeing.

So, for example, you say “oh, we just need to update a plug-in.” Well, actually, we need to update some other ones because there is a security threat. There are always more reasons than just the ones that we are seeing as SEOs. The engineers have to do all of this work. Even if it's sometimes invisible work, you'll see it if it's not done, if something is broken. Then you're pointing fingers. So they do have to work on a lot more things.

So talking with them and understanding how complex something is at this stage, before anything is built, gives you a sense of, oh, I really want to pursue this. Or maybe I have five of these in the air. They're all big. We can't do all five. At this point, before anything is built, you already have an idea of, okay, this is how we're going to filter this. Or maybe you just drop an idea completely because it's going to cost way too much, and there are other things that must be done first.

It definitely helps you to avoid a lot of surprises when two weeks later, something is in a sprint, and you're talking about this ticket and people are like, "Why is this?"

So the discovery kind of aligns everyone to say these are the next things we're going to do.

It's much smoother later, once things are being built and when the process is happening, and things are in action.