Clear Priorities, Tight Write-Ups: Product Management Lessons for SEO

When: Wednesday 4th February • 5 pm GMT / 12 pm ET / 9 am PT

Search is getting tougher. Clicks can decline even without ranking drops. And 'Google did it' is not a plan your leadership will accept.

In this session, Abby Gleason (Senior Product Manager for SEO at Upwork) joins Will Critchlow to share how she runs SEO like a product team: clear priorities, tight write-ups, and tests that show what worked.

Abby walks through how she finds strong ideas, how she chooses where to focus, and how she uses two kinds of tests:

SEO split tests: change one group of pages, hold another group back, compare results
User tests: show different page versions to different visitors, track what changes

She also shares real examples you can borrow, including a small date change that lifted click-through rate by 20%, and a title change that improved both traffic and conversions.

If you want a repeatable system for picking ideas, getting buy-in, and proving impact, this session gives you the templates and systems that make it easier.

Register Now

How Upwork decides what to work on first

A simple way to pick the pages and projects with the biggest payoff, without spreading your team too thin.

How to get better ideas than 'best practices'

A repeatable set of inputs: search results watching, competitor patterns, content gaps, quick audits, user feedback, and past wins.

How to keep growing when clicks drop

What to do when rankings stay stable but traffic falls, and how to shift focus to the part you can control: converting the traffic you still get.

How to talk about SEO in revenue language

How to explain technical work so leadership cares, using outcomes like qualified clicks, signups, and dollars.

Who Should Attend?

SVP Digital & Ecommerce
VP of Marketing / Global Head of Marketing
Head of SEO
Director of Ecommerce, Director of Digital Marketing
Head of Product
Anyone responsible for ambitious SEO targets who needs a practical, proven framework

Who's Abby Gleason?

Abby Gleason is a Senior Product Manager for SEO at Upwork. She has 8+ years of experience growing organic traffic through content, site improvements, and conversion testing. Abby started in marketing, then spent several years in agency SEO working with SaaS and ecommerce teams, before moving in-house.

Most recently she led SEO and acquisition work at Scribd (Everand, Scribd, and SlideShare), partnering closely with design and engineering. Now at Upwork, she focuses on the logged-out site experience, helping more people discover Upwork and take the next step once they land. She also shares what she learns publicly as a speaker and writer, with work featured by teams like Wix, Moz, and Search Engine Land.

Who's Will Critchlow?

Will Critchlow is the CEO and co-founder of SearchPilot, the SEO experimentation platform that helps enterprise websites, specifically large ecommerce, take search out of React Mode and put it into Control Mode.

After 15 years running Distilled, an agency he built into a global search powerhouse, Will founded SearchPilot out in 2020 to give marketing and engineering teams a way to run statistically-rigorous SEO A/B tests across thousands of pages and see uplift in weeks.

Today, the platform powers rapid-fire testing for $100M+ ecommerce, marketplace, and travel brands, preparing them for the next trillion searches. Will’s data-driven approach has helped hundreds of companies turn their biggest, least-understood channel into a controllable performance engine with provable ROI.