Project Management for SEO? Or… How To Get It Done!

Before we get into How, let’s begin with why. 

Why am I writing this?

To share how my SEO team & I consistently put us on the first page of Google, lifted company revenue by millions, and did it with only 7 people.

As Abraham Maslow in 1966 said, "I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."

I bet when you read “Project Management in SEO” you immediately knew what I meant. Or rather, you thought you knew what I meant. In reality, YOU knew what YOU meant if you had written it. You reached for your hammer. We all reach for our hammers, it’s the nature of being human. We solve problems using what we’ve learned. But hammers are not always the best solution.  

It’s easy to jump to solutions, and the older we get the faster we jump immediately to solution mode. However, truly smart people discipline themselves to spend more time on the Problem. Because as we used to say in the Navy/Forces “assumption is the mother of all f-ups”. It takes discipline and focus to drill deeper into a problem when everyone thinks they know the solution. However, this separates the leaders from fast-followers.

I have never been a fast follower. Neither have my team.

So, when we were presented with increasing organic SEO revenue, we took time to challenge all our assumptions. We looked at the kind of knowledge work SEO involved, and we looked at how our company was ‘doing Agile’.

It was as agile as a rock. Far too slow for the SEO space.

So, we created a way of working tailored to the work we were doing. In doing so, we didn’t just relentlessly win, increase SEO revenue for the company (to the tune of many millions), we accidentally kicked off a small revolution.

So, what is the real problem?

Let’s have a look at our work: SEO is complex, there are a lot of unknowns, and the SEO landscape is highly variable and always changing. The market is continually trying new ways to game SEO, and Search Engine providers are continually trying to protect their organic search results. What was accurate last month, is less accurate this month.

There is an arms race of intelligence happening in the SEO space.

Our company had decided to ‘go Agile’, the decision was made to roll out Scrum to every team. Our Scrum Master was given the task of making us do Scrum. It did not matter what kind of work that team did, Scrum was already decided.

Scrum is a great framework, with a lot of strengths. It is well suited for large feature work, progressive planning & refinement, and delivering small increments of value regularly. However, it was not uncommon for teams in our company to spend up to 2 days every week in meetings. As one of my engineers put it “that’s a lot of time talking about your feelings”.

Thankfully, our Scrum Master had the good sense and humility to ask us questions, and avoided a Scrum rebellion. 

Agile is a term for a large suite of different frameworks and techniques which have arisen to solve agility problems in product development and delivery. There are many different tools in the ‘Agile’ toolbox. Agile is not Scrum. Scrum, when done religiously, is not Agile. 

Tools must be fit for purpose. The right tool for the job is better than the wrong tool adapted to work.

We knew we needed to be agile (not Capital A ‘Agile’) as an expert SEO team must be highly responsive to the results of their SEO tests. However, as Benjamin Franklin said “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail”. It’s important to plan, but it is important to plan to the appropriate level. We do need goals, planning, and a long term direction.

So, what was the right way of working for our SEO team?

We wanted to maximize our time and effort, and minimize the cost of change. We wanted to be a platoon of equals, able to respond to any change at any time. I have always treated everyone on my team like a peer but I owned the failures and the team owned the wins.

So, we compared the 2 main Agile frameworks put forward to us, those being Scrum and Kanban.

What is Kanban?

Kanban is all about visualizing your work, limiting work in progress, and maximizing efficiency (or value stream flow). Kanban teams focus on reducing the work in progress they take on, and using the times when WIP limits are hit to do root cause analysis of why they can’t complete their WIP. The team discovers the root cause of why they their WIP is blocked, fixes it, and implements those improvements moving forward. They tool they use is a kanban board, where they visualize all the stages work goes through, which shows which stages of delivering work are the most troublesome. This visualization surfaces the areas for continuously improving their flow of work. I love Kanban, because the tight WIP limits allow you to pivot at anytime. As an SEO you have to understand that the defecation sometimes hit the oscillation and you need to be able to pivot for that. So, having small pieces of work, and very tight WIP limits allows quick, cost-effective pivoting.

What is Scrum?

Scrum teams commit to ship working software through set intervals called sprints. Their goal is to create learning loops at the end of their sprints to gather and integrate customer feedback. The original Scrum framework (according to Simon Benett) used Sprints of 1 month. These were product discovery timeboxes, where teams would see how much of a problem they could solve for within that month. Scrum teams adopt specific roles, create special artifacts, and hold regular ceremonies to keep things moving forward. Scrum is best defined in The Scrum Guide. I am not a fan of Scrum for SEO as the commitment increment periods are too large for rapid pivoting. The amount of times we would have ‘flushed’ a sprint or half a sprint’s worth of planned work was high. Spending all the hours in the Scrum ceremonies, only to then pivot and change is wasteful. Once you plan out your ‘Sprint’, you are locked into your work. If Google traffic tanks, you are expected by management to finish your ‘Sprint Commitment’ work before you pivot. I want the freedom to move and to be able to change the work plan mid stream.

Overall if you cannot select the right tools for your incoming work, so that your team can be successful then you have to ask yourself what you’re doing managing a team. As a leader you should understand the tools available to you, and correctly assess and deploy the right tools for the kind of work you’re doing. I strongly recommend using Kanban for SEO as I have found that to be the most efficient in enabling SEO engineering efforts. For how I work, Kanban not only reduced the cost of change and pivoting, it allowed for a highly flexible and adaptive way of responding to the SEO space.

I want to thank Joe Stewart (https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/joe-stewart-1102603/) for helping with this article, he is an amazing Scrum Master who helped me at a very difficult time with Scrum. If you have questions on how to elevate your Scrum game, contact him. If you have thoughts, questions and or concerns, leave a comment below.