Learnings from building a new product as an SEO

I’m currently working to build a new product with a new engineering team. While I can’t disclose what it is, I can share a lot about the learnings behind building something from scratch.

Here are some learnings about building a new digital product:

• No matter how sure you’re about how to do something, you’ll have revelations along the way. I initially wanted to use “unique” content to avoid pages being too similar, but it turns out there were plenty of other elements to make each page relevant, regardless of unique text. I was 100% sure we’d use AI at scale, when in reality, the use is smaller and not central to the page.

• Keep researching multiple ways to execute a plan. Initially, I wanted to use “out of the box” data from internal databases, just to realize they were far from ideal for my use case. Talking to the team that manages our taxonomy, they were happy to provide us with an artefact exactly as I needed. I spent days trying to figure it out the best way to make it work, but when I spent time talking to them, I was offered a solution better than anything I could have done myself. This happened multiple times with different teams.

• Create a common nomenclature for your own team. For me, the page title was what SEOs call a page title. For my colleagues, that was the H1. We also had multiple names for “category” - job groups, job families, job category. Defining names, with screenshots and using the most popular choice saved us from multiple confusing conversations.

• Be ready to argue in favour of your ideas: we treat some things in SEO as a given, but I still had to justify why we needed links in different places or why I wanted to add one type of information instead or another.

• Focus on the MVP: there are plenty of things I removed from the initial plan because they’d take too long. How can I deliver this in three months? Start with a lean product and build from there. There was an element I thought was brilliant but had to remove from the first version - now the product has already turned into a new direction, and this initial element will likely be dropped out completely.