Product-Led SEO: The Why Behind Building Your Organic Growth Strategy

by Eli Schwartz

I have looked back and realized my SEO success in a specific scenario was not because of what I did but how I did it. Strategic thinking was far more important than specific tactics. This book will show you how I think about many SEO topics using language that will be easily understood by internal teams to gain strategic alignment. It is my hope these ideas can help you achieve your growth goals and even further your career.

Maximizing SEO visibility requires taking the known rules about search engine best practices and applying a level of creativity and logic to develop a strategic approach.

When developing a Product-Led SEO strategy, planning takes precedence over individual tactics. Nonetheless, a deep understanding of tactics and best practices is crucial, as even the best-laid strategy will go to waste without effective execution.

A successful SEO effort will include strategies that address all the Google algorithm and ranking-score factors. We must ensure all content is discoverable, crawlable, and indexable, and the content provides an excellent user experience. Focusing efforts on technical SEO, on-page factors, or user-experience optimization alone cannot give us ideal SEO results. We must have all three.

However, this is the exact scenario where Product-Led SEO shines. In developing the plan for how we were going to build out the world’s best website for learning a new language, we did very little keyword research.

Rather than develop a straight dictionary product, like any other online translation library that targets one-to-one word definitions (Google included), and then jam as many keywords as possible onto the page, the Drops page was built with the user experience first. Just like the app product, the web version would focus on making learning easy. Extra words just for the sake of SEO would confuse the user.

It should be noted that keyword research wouldn’t have led us to this result. Some of the top queries driving clicks and impressions today, according to the popular keyword tools, supposedly should not have any search volume.

The key part of building a Product-Led SEO strategy is that it is a product (an offering of any sort) that is being built. This should be approached the same way any other product is: a product plan, a roadmap, project management of inputs and collaborators, and, most of all, incorporating user feedback.

The best way to get to product-market fit is to learn from users and really understand what they want. Even better would be to take this user empathy and build for personas that will be the most profitable for the business.

Now, with the buyers’ motivations and sentiments in hand, we can ideate on potential product options that would match what the users might be looking for.

Rather than create content and an SEO product designed to convince users to seek telehealth, let’s instead build content and a product that appeals to those looking to avoid medical visits. We don’t have to worry that we are going to sell people away from telehealth because we are positive your business provides a valuable service if people would just know it exists.

As anyone who has ever done medical-cost research online knows, there are many websites and datasets with pricing information online. However, you, in your research process, discover there is no source of data for total cost of care for any illness that includes transportation to doctor visits, hospitalizations, follow-up visits, pharmacy costs, and waiting time in a doctor’s office.

Now, with your deeper understanding of Product-Led SEO, we can take a look at examples of companies that have done a fantastic job of using this strategy as their recipe for exponential growth. Anyone can create content for search, but these companies created products for search users.

Success leads to success.

In our hypothetical telehealth example from earlier in the chapter, regardless of which product you decided to build, you would be creating that product category. (We are assuming no other comprehensive directory of every embarrassing condition or all-inclusive-pricing library exists.) By you creating either of these products, you will be tapping into demand that no one else knew existed. By the time any competitors notice you have invented a new acquisition source, you will be many months to years ahead of them.

Bill Gates is credited with coining the phrase “Content is King” in 1996.

Google is already using AI to understand and rank content. The way to “beat” Google’s AI will never be to duel with another AI tool. The way to succeed will be to put a human in the mix.

When deciding what to fix, prioritize based on impact. An SEO audit is a health checkup to generate a baseline of how a site measures up against SEO best practices; yet, having a site with a perfect SEO score does not mean the site is primed to unleash torrents of traffic.

The most important takeaway from any SEO audit is the “so what.” There’s no point in just declaring a site has a set architecture, for example, unless there’s an action that should be followed up on it.

Early-stage companies often hire a general marketer who does paid, social, and organic efforts as part of the same job, but this means they aren’t going to have particularly strong skills in any one arena. I personally advise against this, as it’s a lot of money to spend on mediocre decision-making.

Earlier-stage companies should ideally hire a jack-of-all-trades with varying skills across Marketing and Product. Younger companies likely don’t have enough SEO needs to keep a full-time employee busy, so having a number of functional areas for this hire to work on will work out best. Later-stage companies with many employees are better served by a person with deep experience in just SEO.

In later-stage companies where the new hire will only work on SEO projects, prioritizing skill sets is critical. It is highly unlikely to find someone who is perfect in every area.

Anyone with a modicum of SEO knowledge could conduct an SEO audit or build out a keyword list. However, it takes a unique person to be able to combine customer empathy with creativity layered in SEO knowledge. Success in SEO isn’t checking the boxes, and this is particularly true in Product-Led SEO. Look until you find someone with the uncommon traits that will lead to a product found worthy by both search users and search engine crawlers.

The primary success metric for SEO is and should always have been the same for every marketing channel: the amount of revenue, leads, visitors, etc., the business needs to be successful.

Within Marketing teams, the most attention (both good and bad) is paid to the initiatives that cost significant sums of money. Paid marketing results in frequent executive check-ins, quarterly reviews, detailed reporting, and, of course, an attribution system that can give detailed reporting on the funnel; SEO often doesn’t.

(Note: Many sites fall into a trap with internal linking where their algorithms only surface related pieces of content on a page. These algorithms have a tendency to just reinforce SEO efforts on whatever is popular and never give anything not yet popular a chance at the spotlight. Quora did have related links, but all of it was from popular pieces to other popular pieces.)

The Blue Ocean In contrast, Blue Oceans are wide open spaces where industries do not yet exist. In this space, demand is created by the companies that enter it first. There is always a substantial profit potential. Within a Blue Ocean, there is no competition, and the market belongs to a single player.

If your research does not find search volume for a particular category, this should not deter you but should rather excite your senses. This means there is an opportunity to create new demand for something in search, provided, of course, there’s product-market fit and an opportunity for you to be able to dominate the category.

SEO efforts are absolutely an investment, and there are no quick returns. You are building a product that will only begin to show a payoff at the end of a period of time, but once it breaks out, the upward trajectory will continue long into the future. From this aspect, I think there are a lot of parallels to financial investing.

Too often, Marketing leaders search for the magic bullet that will drive 100 percent growth in a single year and neglect improvements that would drive 10 to 20 percent growth in the same time. When they miss their 100 percent bet, they are still at the same base or even lower. If they’d do the unsexy, consistent work, they’d get much further over time.

While much of this book advocates for developing an overarching strategy for SEO and not just leaving it to chance, tactics play a huge role in reaching your goals. Strategy alone does not lead to success; it is the tactics that ladder up to the strategy that unlocks the full potential of SEO. Without the strategy, the tactics are just scattershot into a void, and without the tactics, the strategy is a lofty idea that will never be realized. Strategy is important, but so are tactics.

This is how a website should be structured. Pages should link to important pages but also to other pages that seem to be random. And those pages should link back to important pages and to other random pages. Wherever a crawler enters, it will eventually find that new page, as there many pathways to get there.