Five Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tools for Product Managers
Improve product awareness and your roadmap.
No matter what kind of product you have, the first order issue you’ll need to address as a product manager is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). If your product related content isn’t optimized for Google search, it’s much harder for your potential customers to find you.
Fewer visitors to your site = fewer customers for your product.
One of the first things that I insist on for new product managers is a customer experience journey, where discovery is key — how does someone who doesn’t know your product exists actually find it? We need to know what job they are doing, what problem they are solving, and what words they use to describe those things… before they know that the solution is out there.
There are great tools for product managers to assist with this. Here are 5 tools for SEO and analytics that are easy to use. You don’t have to be a data scientist to decipher the results, and most of them are free or have free trials.
1. ahrefs
I absolutely love ahrefs. It’s one of the few tools I consider to be worth paying for. Its blog and studies have golden advice for enterpreneurs, engineers, and of course, product managers. My favorite areas are keyword research, where you can see the volume for specific and related keywords, allowing you to see both how often people search for your specific product by name, but also related terms where your product is ranked (or even, not ranked). This tool allowed me to see that our education offerings were sometimes not shown, because we’d mistakenly un-indexed a page! You can also find and fix broken links, unnecessary redirects, etc.
2. Google Search Console
How often does your product show up in Google Search? This is a minimized version of your most important question — use it to track organic growth over time, and what pages on your site are most popular. In addition, you can see trending search keywords, impressions vs clicks, and more. Free to use and requiring a quick install on your site, Google Search Console can also help you decide what problems your product has… I noticed early on that one of our highest trafficked search terms was an error message, leading to a JIRA ticket. For example, looking at search.google.com right now for jira.mongodb.org, the top most query is
deprecationwarning: there is no current event loop
this linked to https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/MOTOR-902, an issue we fixed earlier this year.
I look at the Google Search report monthly as a guide for prioritization of engineering work.
3. Similarweb
For a quick and dirty estimation of site traffic of your competition, other products, platforms, or really anything on the internet, similarweb.com is the place. Get a quick company overview, site traffic breakdown for the last 3 months, and site traffic by country. Can also be used to vet and fact check when someone says their site has ‘millions of users’ — do they really?
Similarweb can also tell you sites that are similar. For realpython.com, that’s towardsdatascience.com, w3schools.com, tutorialspoint.com, programiz.com.
4. StackOverflow Trends
This tool is also free and if you’re working in a product that requires knowledge of technology, look no further. You can easily see how technologies trend over time, viewing their growth and decline based on the number of questions asked on the most popular developer support forum. Since more than 90% of developers use Stack Overflow, their metrics are a great proxy for market trends.
5. Answer the Public
A nifty tool very unlike the others on this list. Answerthepublic.com allows you to search a keyword, and then see all the variants of questions that internet users ask about it, sorted by “why/how/when/which” etc. Searching “MongoDB Atlas” for instance yields this diagram:
This allows me to visually do the following:
- Identify that the majority of questions about are definition “what is it? what is it for?”
- That there’s confusion about pricing (“expensive?” “free?”)
- And that the major customer issue is connecting via certain programming languages (Java, NodeJS, and Python in particular).
I actually print these and go through with different colored highlighters, grouping the issues by topic/definition.
It’s a great, easy way to know what sort of content to generate immediately for a product or a feature. There’s also a Comparison section that lets you see searches with your keyword with the “vs” or “and” operators. It gives you a sense of who your potential customers think your competition is.
I hope these tools are as useful for you as they are for me. What are your favorite SEO and analysis tools as a product manager?
Special thanks to Tremis Skeete, Executive Editor at Product Coalition for the valuable input which contributed to the editing of this article.
