Citify SEO @ Kordami

SEO-Led Product Strategy & Market Prioritization

Role: SEO & Product Strategy Lead

Product: Citify.app

Product Type: Municipal Web Monitoring & Alerting Platform

Core Capabilities: Web scraping, keyword tracking, legislative monitoring, email alerts

Overview

Citify.app is a sophisticated web platform that actively monitors city and municipality websites, tracking documents, legislation, agendas, and public notices based on user-defined keywords and issues. When relevant content is published by City Hall or municipal bodies, Citify alerts users in real time via email.

I led the development of a comprehensive SEO strategy that served two purposes simultaneously:

1. Drive organic traffic and demand
2. Direct product development decisions by identifying which municipalities and datasets mattered most to users

In this project, SEO was not a downstream marketing tactic—it was the primary input shaping the product itself.

The Strategic Context

Citify’s value increases with:

• The relevance of municipalities monitored
• The completeness of legislative and document coverage
• The ability to surface issues that matter to businesses, advocates, and professionals

Scraping everything was neither technically nor economically viable. The platform needed a clear, data-driven way to decide what to build first.

The Problem

The team faced several core challenges:

• Limited initial scraping coverage across thousands of municipalities
• No clear prioritization framework for which cities to onboard first
• Risk of building technically impressive features that lacked demand
• Traditional product sequencing (build first, market later) would be slow and inefficient

The question became:

How do we let real-world search demand decide what the product should care about?

My Role & Responsibilities

I owned SEO strategy as a product input, not just a growth channel.

Responsibilities included:

• Designing an SEO framework tied directly to product scope
• Conducting keyword and intent research across municipal topics
• Mapping keyword demand to municipality-level opportunity
• Defining which cities and issues should be scraped first
• Translating SEO insights into actionable product and data priorities

Strategy & Execution

1. SEO as a Product Discovery Engine

Instead of treating SEO as content optimization, I used it as a market signal system:

• Identified keywords related to legislation, city council actions, permits, zoning, and compliance
• Grouped queries by industry use case and municipal relevance
• Analyzed search volume and keyword difficulty at scale

This allowed us to understand where user pain already existed—before building anything.

2. Municipality Prioritization Framework

Using keyword volume and competitiveness, I built a framework to:

• Rank municipalities by aggregate keyword demand
• Identify cities with high legislative visibility and search interest
• Balance high-volume opportunities with achievable ranking potential

This directly informed:

• Which cities to scrape first
• Which document types to prioritize
• Where Citify would deliver immediate user value

3. SEO-Driven Development Sequencing

Unlike traditional workflows, development followed SEO insights:

• Scraping targets were chosen based on search demand
• Product coverage expanded in parallel with ranking opportunity
• SEO dictated what data was most valuable, not just how it would be marketed

This reduced wasted engineering effort and aligned the roadmap with real-world interest.

4. Organic Growth Foundations

In parallel, I defined best practices to ensure Citify could:

• Rank for municipality- and issue-specific queries
• Build scalable landing pages tied to city + keyword combinations
• Capture long-tail, high-intent searches related to compliance and legislation
• Grow authority naturally as coverage expanded

SEO became a flywheel, not a one-time push.

Results & Impact

While still evolving, the strategy delivered:

• A clear, defensible roadmap for municipal expansion
• Strong alignment between user demand and scraped data
• Reduced risk of building low-value coverage
• An SEO foundation capable of scaling alongside the product
• A differentiated approach where search demand shaped product value