Stop Doing SEO to Your Product

By Will Soprano

Most people think of SEO as something you do to a product after it’s built. You optimize the page titles, chase keywords, build some links and iterate through testing. But that is not an SEO strategy. They’re tasks and an afterthought and most companies don’t realize the difference until there’s a problem.

I learned the difference through my own experiences, but a couple of years ago a CEO made an observation that I’ve always felt but had never said outloud before. She had spent years as a senior director at IBM before building her own company to $20 million in ARR. She was the kind of CEO who had already questioned everything you were about to say before you said it, and she was vetting me for a role on her team. Her opening question was this: what keywords should we be going after?

I told her I would get to that. But first I had some questions and they were not about keywords. I asked about the business and the vision. I asked about her customers: what they believed when they first found the company and what changed after working with it. Then I moved to the product, the jobs it was doing, the user stories behind it and what separated them from the competitor that looked nearly identical on paper. By the time we got to keywords we had built something worth doing keyword research for.

At the end of that conversation she made an observation I have thought about ever since. SEO is not a job to do so much as it is a seat to be filled. A company that wants an edge ought to put SEO in the room for high level conversations about the brand, the product and the direction of the business, because SEO connects customers to the business and very few companies treat it that way. She was not reacting to a pitch (I don’t really pitch anyhow), but she was realizing that businesses typically have these conversations without informing their team that optimizes for their customer. And that is what this article is about.

Disconnected by default

A fishing lure and a SaaS product have nothing obvious in common. One sits on a shelf in a tackle shop and the other in a browser tab – but I have done SEO for both and the conversation I end up having inside those organizations is near identical every time.

Software and physical products all have a common problem

I have worked on SEO for physical products in the music industry and the offshore fishing industry and also for software and SaaS companies. The challenges look different on the surface but the root problem tends to be the same.

There are more similarities between software and physical products than most people expect. When I worked with physical product companies I kept running into the same situation: the product was solid, the outcomes were real, but the builders, the customers and the marketing operation were all operating in separate worlds. In software we talk a lot about flattening organizations. In my experience the more important thing to flatten are the barriers between those three things, because those three things are what actually deliver on the bottom line.

Three things have to work together for a company to deliver on its promiseyes: the builders of the product, the customers, and marketing. When those three things are connected the whole system runs better and when they are walled off from each other the whole system leaks.

Software companies have learned to name this problem and they throw product managers and product marketers at it. Physical product SMBs often just live with the walls. In both cases the result for SEO is the same: a strategy built on keywords and assumptions pulled from thin air because the people doing the SEO have no access to the intelligence that already exists inside the organization.

What gets lost when SEO is locked out

The builders know what problems they solved and why they made the decisions they made. The customers know what language they used to search for a solution before they ever heard of the company. Marketing knows what messaging lands and what falls flat. SEO needs all three of those things to be useful and it rarely gets them.

When I worked with physical product companies I took on the roles I knew they were missing so we could rebuild the way they delivered their products. Not because I wanted more scope, but because you cannot build a useful SEO strategy for a company whose parts are not talking to each other. So I became the connective tissue temporarily and built toward a version where they did not need me in that role anymore. The SEO work that came out of that was completely different from anything a keyword tool would have produced.

What the seat actually means

Most SEO engagements begin at the end. The product already exists, a site is built, the brand is created, copy written… And now they want an SEO to do gymnastics to figure out where the customer is in Search and connect those potential customers to the product. Oh, and while they’re at it they should figure out how to get Google to serve the content to the right people at the right time.

Access and timing

Being in the room does not mean running the meeting. It means being present when language gets chosen, when the customer problem gets defined, when the team decides what the product is and is not. Those conversations happen once. By the time the product ships the decisions are already concrete and SEO is either woven into them or working around them.

The SEO seat is a listening seat as much as a contributing one. You are there to understand the product deeply enough to connect it to the people searching for it and to offer the market’s perspective when it is useful. Not to redirect the roadmap. Not to own the copy. Just to be close enough to the build that when it ships you are not starting from scratch.

The returns show up across the entire org

• The team builds its SEO strategy during the build rather than after it, which means it ships with the product instead of chasing it.
• The product’s copy and framing natively reflect how the market actually talks about the problem, not because SEO wrote it but because someone in the room knew the language.
• The SEO team gains enough product context to inform a marketing strategy grounded in what the product actually does and who it actually serves.
• As user feedback comes in, the SEO team can use it as raw material for both messaging and programmatic content, because they already understand the product well enough to know what it means.

Working backwards

Every SEO engagement has a starting point. Most practitioners open a keyword tool, putting high volume numbers into a spreadsheet, with the spreadsheet becoming a strategy, and the strategy then gets handed to creative and dev. That SEO team built something without ever being asked what problem they were actually solving. The process moves forward and regardless of the results there’s always missed opportunity left on the table.

Keywords are a downstream output

When I asked that CEO about her vision and her customers before I ever opened a keyword tool I was not being clever. I was doing the only thing that makes keyword research worth anything.

Keywords reflect what people are typing into a search bar but they do not tell you why, or what those people actually need, or whether your product is the right answer for them. The intelligence that answers those questions is already inside the organization. It lives in how the sales team describes the product to a skeptical buyer, in the complaints that keep surfacing in support tickets, and in the way the founder explains the problem they originally set out to solve.

SEO’s job is to find that intelligence and connect it to the people searching for it. You cannot do that job from the outside.

The whole cycle

Sprint by sprint does not mean a checklist of SEO tasks appended to each stage of development. It means the discipline of keeping the seat filled so that by the time a product ships the SEO strategy is already woven into it rather than waiting at the door hoping to be let in.

In discovery, search intent can inform how the team frames the problem they are solving without dictating which features get built. In design, URL structure and information architecture are decisions that affect both users and search engines, so the conversation should happen before anything is set in stone. Indexability is not optional polish in development. In QA and at launch, the SEO team has the context to ship a strategy alongside the product rather than reverse engineering one from it afterward.

And in the post-launch cycle, when user feedback starts coming in, that language is gold. It is how real people describe a real problem in their own words. That feeds back into the roadmap for the product team and into content and programmatic strategy for SEO. One seat in the room with returns across the entire organization.

Author Bio: Will Soprano helps companies build digital products that connect them with their customers. He has advised startups through exits and guided Fortune 500s into new markets. He mentors people in tech, has been sober for 6 years, and serves his community weekly. If he hasn’t seen it, done it, or measured it, he doesn’t share it.