Rebooting the SEO Strategy for HomeAdvisor (and hiring for a VP SEO)

What it means to reboot a search strategy and why SEO rarely gets a seat at the strategic table

I've been working with HomeAdvisor since the start of the year on a strategy to reboot their SEO. The culmination of that strategy is hiring a VP SEO to build a large team, oversee a product team and manage their own budgets. I'm going to walk through three things in this post:

1. How does SEO get neglected at the strategic layer?
2. What does rebooting an SEO strategy look like?
3. What are we looking for in a VP SEO candidate?

If you want to skip straight to the VP SEO job description apply for that role here.

1) How does SEO get neglected at the strategic layer?

The HomeAdvisor story is similar I think to many companies who got into SEO early. We know SEO has dramatically changed over the years - largely shifting from a technical optimization discipline to a broader user experience + product development discipline.

Organizations that became comfortable with SEO as a technical optimization problem often ended up with SEO team buried somewhere inside the marketing team, or buried somewhere inside the product team.

Either option leads to less than ideal outcomes - and being an input into a marketing strategy or being an input into a product strategy removes the strategic leverage that comes from being able to see the full picture across product strategy, content & editorial, data & analytics and marketing.

In short, the work of a good SEO team has shifted dramatically over the last decade and as such we have an industry of wildly varying specialism - with many SEO careers spent on activities that are no longer relevant or needed - and companies with misaligned expectations and idea of what an "SEO" team actually does.

Across the industry this has been compounded by and led to broad lack of executive-ready SEO practitioners.

SEO careers often focus on the technical aspects and often have little exposure to the executive layer - advice is commonly given to focus on the technical aspects of SEO and there are plenty of SEO blogs, writing, courses and so on that teach the business of SEO but fewer resources that help teach how SEO relates to business.

As a result - SEO rarely gets a seat at the senior executive layer of organizations. And this leads to many organizations facing a chicken-and-egg problem of building a modern SEO team without executive SEO leadership.

2) What does rebooting an SEO strategy look like?

At the strategic layer of organizations - the only way to frame SEO is through the language and vision of consumer experience.

If your SEO program is reporting to the C-suite through initiatives like sitemaps, schema, link building and keyword research then you're often going to face the strategic marginalization that I described above.

It's my personal perspective that the only way to set a strategic narrative, roadmap and vision for an SEO team is through understanding the consumer experience and consumer journey. This is language and framing that puts SEO at the same strategic layer as product, marketing and sales.

The technical details matter of course but there are ways to roll up this strategic thinking in ways that don't require the C-suite to be technical SEO practitioners (in the same way we wouldn't expect the C-suite to be product managers or brand marketing experts).

Thankfully - the raw materials for creating a search strategy are given to us by Google in their quality rater guidelines. There is plenty of user-centric specific guidance that you can orient your search strategy around. For example - for HomeAdvisor:

When dealing with the C-suite I'd rather talk about the strategic vision of leveraging expert voices and increasing trust in our content than discussing keyword research or word counts.

The SEO teams and strategy at HomeAdvisor today are not wrong - but the team has been under-resourced for the tasks that matter for a modern SEO strategy. So - the rebooting that's needed at HomeAdvisor is two-fold:

1. Reframing the SEO initiative at the executive layer around user needs & consumer experience and increasing the investment against SEO
2. Creating a roadmap that aligns product, SEO & content around high E-A-T experiences

3) What are we looking for in a VP SEO candidate?

We have a job posting up for the VP SEO position and broadly speaking we need someone to come in and help navigate this reboot.

In particular - some key things we're looking for:

• The ability to create a long-term vision and roadmap for SEO that aligns with both business objectives and the end consumer experience on the site
• Strong leadership to expand the current product, SEO and content teams through key hires
• Someone comfortable operating qualitatively and quantitatively - being data driven and owning the full P&L for the SEO program while also ensuring we're working towards out north star of high E-A-T consumer journeys

In return:

• This will be a strategic role capable of shaping the future growth of the company
• Oversight across both product and content teams to set the roadmap and resources directly
• Managing a large investment behind SEO

HomeAdvisor has HQ in Denver and ideally the role will be situated there but there is a satellite office in NYC and we're open to candidates based there also.

You can apply here or reach out to me directly.