SEO Product Vision: Strategy, Goals, and Roadmap - Home Depot
My Role
Product Manager for SEO on HomeDepot.com.
Background
In Q4 2024 I began working with my team and stakeholders on a vision for 2025. There were three components to the vision:
Strategy - at a high level, what we would do and why we would do it.
Goals - the measurable results we expected to achieve by delivering on our initiatives (using the OKR framework).
Roadmap - a quarterly breakdown of major projects and ongoing themes that would drive us to our strategic goals.
After 4 months on the job adapting a 2024 vision inherited from my predecessor, there were some major changes I wanted to make in 2025. While the 2024 roadmap had been filled with important initiatives, it lacked an overall strategic definition to guide the prioritization process and in particular was missing clear and measurable goals / OKRs that represented the work we were doing. This lack of clarity had resulted in some friction for our team, namely:
Engineers not having a clear idea of what we were doing, why we were doing it, and the value of their contribution, which led to some dissatisfaction and the feeling that they were order-takers rather than collaborators.
Stakeholders not understanding the rubric of prioritization. Without clear goals guiding the prioritization process, stakeholders could become frustrated and argumentative.
Difficulties getting dependencies prioritized with other teams, or being able to coordinate when other teams had dependencies on us. Without aligned strategies and goals, it could be virtually impossible for us to get teams to commit to our dependencies and vice versa.
Confusion with upper management around what value our work had to the business and how we could measure it.
Project
Strategy
Our 2025 strategy would be focused on four pillars that more accurately described our team’s mission:
Protect Organic Traffic
Keep abreast of search engine algorithm updates and prevent issues/errors from harming traffic levels.
Grow Organic Traffic
Net-new SEO features that would improve rankings and drive more organic traffic.
Increase Revenue on SEO-owned Landing Pages
Improve the experience on SEO-owned landing pages via CRO to grow revenue.
SEO Team Efficiency
Build and maintain internal tools that allow the SEO Marketing team to efficiently optimize the site at scale, leading to long-term growth and stability
The above pillars were in order of importance. For example, while we of course wanted to grow traffic, we would always choose an initiative that preserves current traffic levels over one that might drive additional traffic (the distinction between grow and protect largely coming down to the certainty/uncertainty of the impact). And while it was important to build tooling that enabled our stakeholders in SEO Marketing to do their jobs more efficiently, this still took a back seat to revenue growth.
Goals
Each strategic pillar would have a specific and measurable result. These results were a roll-up of the expected impact of roadmap initiatives.
Protect Organic Traffic
Key Result: actual organic traffic remains within 5% of the 2025 projection (derived from YoY)
Grow Organic Traffic
Key Result: +41MM annual organic visit growth vs. projection.
Increase Revenue on SEO-owned Landing Pages
Key Result: +5% increase in YoY revenue on SEO pages
SEO Team Efficiency
Key Result: 2,500 hours saved by end of year from tooling & identifying/solving defects
Roadmap
Finally, using our strategy and OKRs as our prioritization rubric, we refined and re-prioritized our long-term roadmap. Each major initiative had to correlate to one of the strategic pillars, and had to have a defined expected impact that aligned with the OKRs. This allowed us to further break down annual OKRs into monthly/quarterly benchmarks based on when work would be delivered.
With a clear strategy and goals in place, the prioritization process become much smoother than it had been previously, a relatively simple matter of identifying which projects we could accomplish in the next year that would have the most impact on our strategic hierarchy. This also allowed us to be much more transparent with stakeholders regarding why some work was prioritized higher than others, and better-coordinate dependencies with our partner product teams.
You can find a deck of this vision below:
