The SEO Sprint Podcast

Lessons from Scribd | Abby Gleason

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This week I interviewed Abby Gleason, an SEO Product Manager at Scribd. Abby leads the organic search strategy for Scribd, a reading subscription service with millions of ebooks, audiobooks and more.

Abby has a wealth of experience working with content, business and technical teams working in agencies. As an SEO moving into a product role, Abby has learned to adapt and embrace many engineering practices to get things done.

In this podcast, we talked about:

  • Getting into SEO
  • Getting into product
  • Combining user and Google experience to drive results
  • Why Googlebot is a user
  • The full process of getting things done with developers
  • Working with designers and developers
  • Designers are a superpower
  • Meeting facilitation and product managers
  • Product manager = communication
  • Process of writing briefs for developers
  • Importance of collaboration anchor points
  • Conversation > Documentation
  • Communicating Problems > SEO Solutions
  • Devs asking for solutions vs Devs asking for problems
  • Why SEO specialists matter in development teams
  • Why SEO PMs need to prioritise ruthlessly
  • Why listening matters
  • Prioritising and SEO Product Roadmaps
  • Creating SEO Product Strategy
  • Four Types of SEO Strategy
  • Communicating to the management team
  • Forecasting process
  • How to say no in an internal team
  • Release planning process + ruthless prioritization
  • Retrospective

    • In this podcast, we talked about:

    Listen now on Apple, and Spotify.

    Recommended top three skills:

    Abby would recommend communication broken down into three parts:

    1. Clear written communication - Avoid a wall of text in Slack, email or documents, and use on-page SEO and readability best practices.
    2. Show your personality - You must show your personality at work in your communication as it helps people remember you.
    3. Internal networking - You need to meet with people, have one-on-ones and listen to get a better understanding of the business problems.
      4. ...more
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      The SEO Sprint PodcastBy Adam Gent