Grégory says: “I believe it's going to be important to shift toward a more agile and faster SEO.”

An agile, faster SEO. What does working in an agile way for SEO actually mean?

“First, we have to change the mindset – but not only the mindset, also the tools and the methods.

I believe that, by challenging any aspect of SEO as we knew it until now, we should identify what’s worth sticking with and what’s worth pursuing in 2025, eventually, with an optimised approach and optimised tools. But, we should look at everything as if it's a new job starting over.”

Changing the mindset is intriguing. What aspects of the existing mindset/the previous mindset do you think won't cut it in 2025?

“Well, I'd like to challenge the belief in gurus and well-known facts/common sense. I think it's important to adopt another mindset, so we can challenge all of the beliefs we had around SEO and make sure that, when we build our knowledge in SEO, or we work on it in 2025, we build it upon not beliefs but experience and measurements.

Concretely, what does that mean? Let's measure duplication, let's measure internal linking, let's measure external linking and link building strategies so we make sure that it has a real impact.

That leads to the question of measurement, and methodologies of measurement. I believe we also have to challenge that – and it's a big part of being more agile in 2025.”

Got you, okay. So, just because something's worked in the past doesn't necessarily mean it's going to work in the future. Just because you've heard someone else say, ‘That's a brilliant idea, you should go ahead and do that’, don't go upon gut instinct.

Do a scientific test-and-learn approach, see if it has a positive impact on an aspect of what you're doing and, if it does, then you can roll it out after that.

“Absolutely. I believe that, until now, we tended to practice SEO with maybe 80% - the Pareto rule of 80-20%. 80% was the common sense of SEO: a know-how that was actually shared across the community. I've heard a lot about the Google leaks recently, for example, and we are falling into a consensus that data has been leaked, and I actually have seen discussion about this just today.

Let's challenge that and hear from other perspectives. Let's measure it. If there are leaks, where does it come from? Where does it go? If there are leaks from Chrome data to Google, where can it be tracked? How can we measure it? Can we prove that?

To me, until it's proven, it's a belief. Therefore, I wouldn't build my strategy on beliefs. I have heard perspectives that were challenging the consensus, and I think those should be granted respect, time, and assessment.”

How do you go about proving something, and how do you know what metrics to focus on to get that understanding that something does actually work and is worth rolling out?

“That's the big challenge of SEO, but that’s also what has fed the industry for decades: the fact that it's very hard to prove impact.

I've been very interested in the topic of causality. There are a few frameworks, and we've been discussing that with SEOs, engineers, and data scientists in the different organisations I've been working in – recently at L'Oreal and, before that, at Zalando where we had a top-notch team of SEO experts there to discuss the causal inference of SEO.

We have built a framework of measurement to measure the business impact of each of our SEO actions. I wouldn't say it was perfect (still, at L’Oreal, we need to improve our framework for measurement). I still find a lot of challenges in doing so, but I believe it's the way.

If we can find or build the right framework for causality measurements between one type of improvement, in terms of SEO, and incremental impact – spared from noise, spared from seasonality, and spared from black magic or other phenomenon – then, we have a gold standard for measuring SEO truth, and this is what should lead our SEO product approach.

It's the way to go. We're not there yet, but we're building that. I need to mention CausalImpact from Google, which is a causal impact framework. It's an R framework that helps us measure that. There are a few experts in the industry using this framework. I would like to double down on this.”

Can you measure the impact of every single SEO activity on different stages of the buyer journey, even starting with awareness?

“The challenge is in crafting the right experiment. That's literally science. Broadly, I would say no, not everything is measurable. This is when, sometimes, you might have to rely on qualitative approaches versus quantitative approaches – when we don't have access to the best or the perfect design experiment or there is no design that would fit or answer the question from the quantitative side.

We might turn to other approaches, but every time these approaches should be sound and robust, so we are more building our strategies on facts and measurements rather than beliefs.”

You talk about working in an agile way. Is this working in Scrum Sprints? Is this working over a short period of time? Or are you simply just using the word agile and saying that you need to be adaptable?

“No, I'm literally talking about the agile methodology – so, whatever works for your organisation. But, what I've been in the last few years in my different roles was that the product setup – where SEO is a product and we have set up a product team with all the ceremonies that go together – was the best setup.

To set hypotheses, test them, confirm them, eventually deploy them at scale, or double down in testing deeper on other aspects of the problem. Yes, this is exactly what I call agile.”

How does an organisation move from a more traditional approach to an agile approach?

“Well, I've seen 2 cases. 1 case was where this agile methodology was by design from the very beginning. Zalando was a 13-year-old company when I joined. From a very early stage, the product approach was baked into the experience of working at Zalando – whatever the product was or whatever the métier (pursuit) was – and it was working as such for SEO.

I am currently working at L'Oreal, which is a much older organisation, and a broader organisation too. However, the agile mindset product methodology is not really at the core of the company. Therefore, we need to find the scope where we can start the journey.

I hope I found it. We are currently building the internal tooling that aims at steering SEO at the scale of 780 websites in the world, in multiple languages, with different technological stacks and different teams. To build that suite of products, we have set up a product team, with the product ceremony and agility.

That's the narrow scope. I don't pretend that we have fully adopted the agile approach at L'Oreal, we're far from that, but we started from here.”

Are there any downsides to being more agile?

“Yeah, maybe in adoption and understanding from other stakeholders. It comes with a prioritisation. It comes with setting up North Stars and using the right metrics. So, the downside could be a friction.

When you work on this alignment that is the preset of adopting an agile methodology, you need to align with others on what are the expectations, what are their goals, and your goals, so we make sure that we're looking in the same direction. At this moment, friction might appear.

It's a downside because we pointed out inconsistencies in the vision or in the final goal of different stakeholders. However, if we don't see that, we cannot fix it. So, these frictions are also good because they point out what can be aligned. It participates in granting a better alignment for a common understanding of what the SEO product is.”

Does working in a more agile way change the way that you decide upon your SEO strategy and decide what your priorities should be?

“Yeah, absolutely. Prioritising would be an important step in every sprint, basically. We make sure that – in this ever-changing, evolving landscape of search where every second day there is a new study, a new leak, a new discovery, or a new progress in large language models or the generative search experience – we need to be able to refocus on what is important today, and it might be different than last week.

So yes, it does.”

If a head of SEO is listening to this and thinking, ‘This sounds interesting. I'd like to explore this approach a little bit more in 2025.’ what are a few first practical steps that they need to do to get started?

“I would say, to go with the right mindset, you need the right people and the right tools. I've always counted on great product managers who have a deep knowledge of search and SEO. By combining both knowledge of search and expertise in product management, you have the perfect role to accelerate towards that ‘SEO as a product’ mindset.

So, the first step is to find good partners in your organisation. Sometimes you don’t have the scale to integrate more partners or to find a new hire for that. Therefore, you need to become that product manager. Then come the tools to help you become that product manager – kanban boards, for example, testing tools, recordings, etc.

A lot of tools come in to complete the toolset of good product managers, and should help you make the first step.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“I’ll try to make it practical. However, it’s been a few years that I’ve been in a role where I don't really touch my hands on SEO every day anymore. But I would suggest to stop doing what we used to do so far.

Stop counting the number of characters, stop building links for the sake of building links, and stop producing content for the sake of producing content. Stop doing the hygiene SEO that you have been doing so far.

Start challenging each of the tasks you have been doing until now. Measure if it's worth keeping it in your 2025 methodology and approach.”

Grégory Dominé is Global Head of SEO at L'Oreal, and you can find him over at LOreal.com.