Case Study
A Place for Mom: the problem was the platform
Douglas Cirillo was Vice President of Digital Product Management at A Place for Mom from 2020 to 2021. Search was the company’s growth engine, and it was losing share. He diagnosed the decline as a platform and governance problem and led the rebuild of the content platform and its governance, growing the team from 3 to more than 20 across internal and external staff, running a $6M annual portfolio. SEO market share rose from 26% to 68%.
The situation
A Place for Mom helps families find senior care, and most of those families start with a search. Organic search was the growth engine. When I arrived, that engine was losing power: SEO market share sat at 26%. The obvious answer was more content: more pages, more effort.
The diagnosis
It was not a content problem. The platform underneath could not hold what the team was trying to publish. The front end fought the content model, and governance over schema and structure was inconsistent, so quality varied from page to page and search engines read the inconsistency. Effort was not the constraint. The foundation was.
What I rebuilt
I led the rebuild of the platform and the operating model around it: the CMS, the front end, the content model, and governance over schema and structure. User testing informed the navigation and content decisions. The technology stack included WordPress for content management, Segment for customer data, Databricks for the data foundation, Conductor for organic search intelligence, Algolia for on-site search and recommendations, Optimizely for experimentation, and Amplitude for analytics.
I also had to build the team to run it. We went from 3 to more than 20 people in a year, internal and external, under one centralized delivery model, running a $6M annual portfolio.
The results
SEO market share rose from 26% to 68%. The model and the stack still stand and have evolved since I left.