Vanda Pókecz says: “My Additional Insight is to focus on the users and their needs, but also solve problems worth solving. What do I mean? You will not be able to solve everything, nor should you. So, do not even try. Be smart about it and focus on solutions for user problems and that will also contribute to your objectives as well.”

How do you determine the most important problems that you need to solve?

“There are a number of ways, but first you need to make sure that you identify the problems or user needs. Problems also have a negative connotation, but it's not always a problem. It might be something that helps your users gain something. In my opinion, you can follow a product discovery approach. Now, I like to talk about product discovery because my team moved to the product and engineering department a while back instead of sitting in marketing, but it doesn't matter where you sit. The main idea is to talk to or at least interact with users. You can do that through deep interviews, through surveys or by talking to your customer-facing customer service representatives who can understand your users’ needs and problems. But you can also look at data or conduct competitor research to add additional insights.

The first start in identifying the problems worth solving is identifying those problems or user needs. Then, it would be best if you defined them. The important part is that you will also need to validate those worth solving, because not everything is worth solving. Maybe it's because your users ask for something, but they don't truly want it. But it can also be not worth solving because it will not contribute to your company's cause.”

Is that how you validate it? By determining if it is essential to your company's bottom line?

“Well, that's part of it. You need to check whether it's worth it for your bottom line. Will it bring that revenue, or whatever your goal is, maybe your goal is to get more brand awareness? But of course, an important part of validation is whether it is something that your users would use. Is this something they need because they can ask for anything, but if they don't put their money where their mouth is, then it's maybe not worth solving. Of course, it doesn't need to be physical money, but at least some deep interviews where they truly explain to you why it's important for them.”

So, what makes an interview deep? What are you trying to find out, and what kind of questions do you need to ask?

“First of all, it's important that you don't ask closed-ended questions. You should have a starting point for yourself, a direction, but then you actually want to find out what the opening questions are, basically for a start, and then you can lead them a little bit, but make sure you don't ask them leading questions. I'm reading a book from Purna Virji called ‘High-Impact Content Marketing’, and she has a lot of excellent insights about how to formulate user interviews and carry out a user needs analysis. You should allocate at least 45 minutes to an hour for deep interviews, and make sure you do this one-on-one, because as an interviewer, you should always ensure that you have one or two more people in the room video who can take notes and truly listen. After all, if the interviewer had to be you, you could not waste your time taking notes. Something else you need to understand is that the user needs to be able to ask follow-up questions.”

So, can you do this online via video, or do you have to face to face?

“I've done a few in-person interviews, but you can also do it online. Nowadays, there are all these excellent tools. Maybe if you would do something like a focus group, it would be more beneficial to do it in person. But if you do it with one person, you can do it online. And maybe one more thing is that the best is to interview your existing users. However, I had carried out interviews before, where we sourced interviewees through an online platform which is still better than not interacting with your users.”

How do you know you're selecting the right users to interview because a business could have thousands of users? How do you approach them and encourage them to take part?

“It's very beneficial, for the first part of your question, to always have personas and you should make sure that there are segments in your audience. For example, it is enough to interview five people at the end of a design sprint, and I like to use the longer product discovery process, and that will give you the majority of the insights. However, we have done this in the past, and we have interviewed five people, but when it should be five people per segment or persona, so for a start, pick the right segments that you want to target.”

And what about conversations with customer service reps? How are they different? What kind of conversations are you having with them?

“I haven't personally done that before, but I have had some conversations with our sales team, etc. The reason is that Ladenzeile is a product comparison platform, so we are not selling our products and are enhancing our customer services, mostly based on feedback forms, etc. What we have done in the past is analyze the questions, suggestions, and complaints in these feedback forms. But, I haven't personally carried out interviews with customer representatives or customer service representatives. But if your company is wired like that, that you have this true B2C touch point, then that's an additional insight you can gain.”

For competitor research, how do you select the competitors, and how do you benchmark your clients' business against them?

“I think it's very clear for SEOs that we have two types of competitors. We have our direct competitors, in our case, other products or price comparison sites, but we strongly compete with certain e-commerce sites, and then we have our SERP competitors. So, how do we benchmark them when coming out to competitor research ourselves? So, Ladenzeile, is a product comparison site a platform against others? Well, it depends on the problem we are trying to solve and the solution we are looking at. So often, our competitor research is going to that other platform and looking at their product cards, how are their products represented, and what information do they share with the user? This was a recent project that I have been working on. We're looking at the names they give to their items. Is it keyword reach, for example? Or is it mostly the images that they are focusing on? We are still looking at how they represent themselves in the SERP. We are planning to test some meta titles, adjustments, etc. In that case, it's also beneficial to go to your competitors but then experiment a little bit. So it's like how we benchmark ourselves against, and what we are looking at will, of course, depend on what type of feature or solution we are looking at, but generally, it is quite manual.”

How often are you doing this and how often do you try to identify the problems within your website and how to improve and benchmark them, or this the interview process that you're talking about? Is it an ongoing process, or is it something you do maybe once a quarter or every six or so?

“I would love to tell you that this is an ongoing process because I firmly believe that continuous product discovery should be taking place where you're constantly defining your problems and looking at the solution space. But unfortunately for us, this is not yet the case. So we are taking it often on a project basis, maybe once a quarter, let's say we are revising our vision or strategy a little bit. But optimally, continuous effort should be what you should be aiming for. And this is what we are also aiming for. But we didn't yet crack the code to build it into our DNA.”

This sounds like a bit of a hybrid activity. It sounds like activities that could be done are managed by CRO or product teams. So, do you think SEOs should lead this type of activity?

“Good question. I would say yes, but I might be a little bit biased because my team is sitting in the product team, and part of my team is SEO product managers. But you coat that very well with the word hybrid because even our SEO product managers are a little bit of a hybrid between a PM and an on-page SEO. Optimally, you would have one or two, depending on the size of your team. An SEO product manager focusing only on this product discovery process would talk to users. They might work with a UX team, such as a UX researcher, which would be ideal, but of course, not every company has all the resources in the world. This is why SEOs or SEO product managers need to be able to drive such initiatives. And it is not easy. It's not an easy switch. It's also difficult for developers and other teams to accept SEOs into this role. But it is possible.”

You shared what SEOs should be doing in 2023. So now, let's talk about what SEOs shouldn't be doing. So what's seductive in terms of time but, ultimately, counterproductive? What's something that SEOs shouldn't be doing in 2023?

“I think I can tie that a little with my tip. Currently, all of us SEOs are grinding because there are so many different innovations, new technologies, and new tools, whether AI-based or otherwise, and it's exciting. Honestly, it's truly exciting, but it is also very overwhelming, and it can be a little bit exhausting. So I think we shouldn’t be just jumping on trends. We should 100% follow up on innovations regarding AI and so on. We shouldn't base the opportunity there. But then we should always look at our company's objectives. What are we trying to achieve? Does it fit with what we are trying to achieve? Be smart and selective about what tools you are using and the innovations you are incorporating into your work.”

Vanda Pókecz is Team Lead SEO at Ladenzeile, and you can find her over at ladenzeile.de.