SEO product manager role is a future of SEO

It's especially true for SaaS and enterprise SEO. There are 2 reasons for that.

I believe that the demand for SEO product management skills will increase. When searching for employees, companies may call the position by the old title of “SEO manager”, but they will stipulate that candidates must have new skills.

This statement has been born based on doing SEO for various B2B SaaS products including well-known Sitechecker and Favikon. There are 2 reasons for that.

1/ Products are built to fit with channels. Channels do not mold to products.

I found this quote from Brian Balfour 2 years ago and kept coming back to it.

For a long time, we were promoting Sitechecker incorrectly. We created pages and tried to promote them only through experiments with content and backlinks.

Although these factors are important, after getting into the top 10, they fade into the background.

Further, only user satisfaction makes it possible to move to the first place in SERP.

In SaaS products, this most often means giving the user some value for free before requiring creating an account.

Once we realized it and started to implement this rule to each page we had (70% of our traffic are many extra tools like h1 checker, title checker, hreflang checker, etc.), we overcame the plateau in organic search traffic.

It also works for competitive keywords with a high search volume. This approach helped us defeat even market leaders Semrush and Ahrefs by keyword SEO checker. Here is the full story behind this battle.

After many experiments, for me it becomes clear.

In most SaaS products for non-blog traffic, to get the #1 position SEOs should have the power to change the user funnel.

It means that during the SERP analysis, you have to compare not only backlinks, titles, and the number of words on the page, but also the user experience.

No SERP analysis tool will show you this! You have to do it manually or build an AI assistant for this purpose.

This sounds simple. But often the problem is precisely in the division of power in the team. Who is responsible for the final result in the form of revenue from organic search? The SEO or the product manager?

In most cases, the SEO product manager is an evolution of an SEO manager who focuses on results and is ready to force product changes that will help it rank higher.

There is one important fact you as an SEO have to communicate with your marketing and product team when get the power to design a user funnel.

Better user experience = better rankings = but in 90% of cases it means less conversion to create an account or start a free trial.

I published an example of this contradiction based on real data.

We had to decide what was more important to us: 2000 new users and 500 registrations or 4000 new users and 500 registrations

Conversion to registration has become worse 2x times, but in absolute terms, the number of registrations remained the same.

So, if products are built to fit with channels, only an SEO product manager can help you build a product that will fit with Google.

2/ Becoming an SEO product manager gives a competitive advantage

This reason is a continuation of the previous one.

1. Google understands user intent better and better.

2. Google is increasingly prioritizing user satisfaction in its ranking algorithms.

3. More and more brands understand the rules I mentioned above and change their pages to give at least part of the value for free.

4. It’s harder to get traffic to your website by informational keywords because of AI overviews.

So, the old rules work less and less. You still need good content, you still need good backlinks. However, at some point, they become less important, and only changes in the product can increase your traffic and visibility in organic search.

SEOs without a product approach will show worse results and will lose credibility.

It means an opportunity for you to gain trust and become more competitive:

• Explain these pitfalls of investing in SEO to your clients.

• Be honest — not all businesses need SEO, or at least not at the first stage, while they are looking for product-market fit.

• Don't promise results without giving you the authority to change the product.

Do you agree with my statement?

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