SEO often falls into a weird no man’s land in org charts — somewhere between marketing, product, and engineering. It’s not quite feature work, not quite growth, and often too slow-moving to compete with roadmap priorities. That’s why SEO projects, even when scoped with good intent, routinely fail to deliver.
From a product manager’s perspective, here’s why that happens:
1. No Single Thread of Ownership
SEO initiatives typically suffer from orphaned ownership. Marketing wants the traffic, engineers control the implementation, and product isn’t sure where it fits. That leads to broken accountability and half-baked execution.
✅ Fix: Assign a clear DRI (directly responsible individual). Ideally, it’s a PM or tech lead with enough context to navigate trade-offs between SEO requirements and roadmap priorities.
2. No Business Case That Maps to Product Goals
“More traffic” doesn’t get prioritised in sprint planning. PMs need metrics that tie directly to product OKRs — signups, engagement, activation, retention. Most SEO tickets fail here. They read like generic to-dos, not outcome-driven initiatives.
✅ Fix: Reframe SEO in terms of business impact:
- “Fix crawl budget inefficiency → improve indexation of converting pages”
- “Resolve JavaScript rendering issues → increase indexed PLPs → lift organic add-to-cart”
If it doesn’t map to the funnel, it won’t get resourced.
3. SEO Requirements Are Too Fuzzy for Engineers
SEO requests often come in as one-liners: “make this crawlable” or “add canonical tags.” That’s not a spec — that’s a Slack message. Engineers don’t ship from ambiguity. Product won’t prioritise it either.
✅ Fix: Translate SEO into structured, actionable tickets:
- Context (why this matters)
- Scope (which pages/sections)
- Dependencies
- Acceptance criteria
- Metrics for success
Treat SEO like tech debt: technical, quantifiable, and clearly defined.
4. Engineering Doesn’t See SEO as a Priority
If your dev team thinks SEO = meta tags, it won’t make the sprint. Especially not when you’re juggling bugs, feature launches, and infra work. And frankly, PMs don’t always push for it because it’s seen as “nice to have,” not “must ship.”
✅ Fix: Position SEO as product infrastructure.
No different from page speed, uptime, or accessibility. It impacts discoverability and conversion, and compounds over time. Bring data to the table: lost revenue due to poor indexation or visibility gaps.
5. SEO Is a Long Game, Product Works in Quarters
PMs ship in 6-week cycles. SEO typically needs 3–6 months to show traction. This mismatch makes it a hard sell. Execs want short feedback loops, and SEO often can’t deliver in that window.
✅ Fix:
Break SEO into “shippable units.” Don’t pitch a 6-month roadmap. Pitch a 2-sprint pilot.
E.g., “Let’s clean up internal linking for our top 100 converting pages → measure crawl path improvements + indexed page count in 30 days.”
Small bets = faster validation = easier stakeholder buy-in.
6. SEO Isn’t Integrated Into Product Decisions
Many visibility issues stem from product changes — URL migrations, infinite scroll, JS frameworks, and localisation logic. But SEO isn’t looped into those decisions until after things break. By then, it’s reactive.
✅ Fix:
Build SEO into your design and dev checklists.
- URL structures
- Content rendering paths
- Canonical strategy
- Pagination/infinite scroll behaviour
If it touches crawlability, indexability, or content visibility, SEO should have a seat at the table.
Final Word
From a product lens, SEO isn’t just a channel — it’s a constraint to manage, an opportunity to scale, and a source of compound growth. When it fails, it’s rarely due to technical skill gaps. It’s because it never got treated like product work in the first place.
If you’re a PM trying to build SEO into your roadmap or need help scoping initiatives that actually move the needle, I offer direct consulting for product-led teams across SaaS, e-commerce, and news platforms. Drop me a line — I speak product, not fluff.
