Product vs Marketing Lead SEO — Jeff Preston // Move.com

Quotes

• “At Realtor, SEO is part of the product team rather than marketing or growth. Its interesting and Ive never done it that way before. As I have gotten used to it and after the culture shock from marketing to product, there are definitely some advantages working with the engineering team.” -Jeff

• “So it makes sense that having your team centered around product basically focuses your SEO efforts more on the inputs than the outputs.“I think the way a lot of product people think is shipping things that make the product better and when we think about SEO, we think about it like a race car analogy. We just want to make the car a little bit faster and handed a little bit better or have more horsepower so we can think about the SEO task that we have to make our website perform better.” -Jeff

• “It seems like the focus is, hey were going to focus on building a better car as a product team as opposed to, were going to focus on either selling more cars or building cars that more horsepower or that go faster is a marketing KPI.” -Ben

• “Definitely I have that background where we are going to look at numbers every day and were looking at rankings, raw traffic numbers. We still have an eye on those numbers but now we think about how we organize our work and getting things done that is more based on meeting user needs.” -Jeff

• “It seems like, as a marketing SEO team you are constantly horse-trading, begging, borrowing, stealing from your engineering resources and thats a relationship that is not in the same organization so you are constantly relationship building there.” -Ben

• “It definitely gets easier and if I think about my days at Disney, they are more of a relationship company where work is done because of your personal relationship with people across the company. With realtor.com, the product leadership org is based in the Bay Area so its more of a Silicon Valley OKR kind of thought process there.” The product has leadership over what gets done on the site and they work strongly with engineering with sketch and marketing is doing something that is not under the hood as much as the product and engineering team.” -Jeff

• “For the product team, its about building a faster car, building a car that works better, or a car thats more efficient and marketing tends to be more like just hitting traffic and conversion goals and as long as traffic is growing thats probably good enough but for the product team, they think about how the site has become better over time.” -Jeff “

• Within the real estate, theres a whole bunch of different people and you want to make sure that all the products that they are interacting with are top-notch and also from SEO point of view, I want to make sure that whatever keywords those different groups are searching for, I will be able to lead them to the right experience.” -Jeff

• “It seems like the devil is always in the details. Having worked in content businesses for a long time, I think of SEO as being a content-first channel and maybe thats me having a marketing background.” -Ben

• “It seems like your team strategy has been a focus on the technical with the marketing and content creators living on separate teams so you still have to manage those cross-functional relationships. It used to be managing the engineering team relationships, getting all of your product resources and now youre still managing external resources theyre just on the creative and content side.” -Ben