SEO Cross-Team Training and Information - Home Depot

My Role

Product Manager leading a scrum team dedicated to Search Engine Optimization on HomeDepot.com

Background

My role at Home Depot was a highly cross-functional one requiring collaboration across tens of other product teams, stakeholder groups, and management.

My team was accountable for SEO across HomeDepot.com, where we owned site components (e.g. content and cross-link components, metadata etc.), landing page types (including the local SEO strategy), and internal tools.

One of the biggest challenges was the fact that almost all of our work had a dependency on another team. The page types that we did not own as a product (e.g. product listing and product pages) were the main drivers of organic traffic to the site, so any change we made on these — even if we built the change ourselves — required the owning team to integrate the update and push it into production.

Another common issue was teams inadvertently breaking SEO elements. Sometimes teams weren’t aware of the importance of an element to SEO or didn’t understand the best practices. In these cases, my team would either instruct the owning team on the fix or create it ourselves for them to pick up.

It could be a challenge getting another team to prioritize this work on their roadmap, especially given the many priorities and objectives a team typically had already committed to.

After working with several such teams on projects, it became clear to me that as a product organization, many of us were not clear on the what and why of SEO:

• What SEO was

  • How search engines work

  • Best practices

  • Do’s and Don’t’s

• Why SEO was important to the business

  • Overall, SEO was the 2nd largest source of traffic but the largest source of revenue

  • Some teams were unaware that SEO was the largest traffic and revenue source for their area of product ownership

Project

In order to better educate the product organization on SEO, its value to our business, and why they should prioritize our dependencies, I created a deck covering these topics and went on a ‘Road Show’ presenting to other PMs and their engineering and UX teams.

This work was outside of my specific responsibilities but ended up paying dividends in helping to get SEO projects prioritized. You can see the deck below: