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

by Eli Schwartz

Typically, homepages rank organically on brand queries, but paid can create specific brand pages that meet a brand intent. An example would be “brand X has the best customer...

With more efficient spend, the Paid team will have more budget to go after strategies and keywords that are currently unattainable. Similarly, the Organic team can focus their efforts on converting more people who are just too expensive to chase with paid advertising.

Unlike other performance channels, which are designed to go direct to conversion, SEO is a hybrid between branding and performance traffic.

By its very nature, SEO will typically live a lot higher in the buyer funnel, and in many cases, users will not have any buying intent whatsoever.

simple analytics report on pages per visit (or bounce rate) will show if visitors to the website are engaged with your site or if they just leave without doing anything.

I’ll explain how I think about SEO performance. There are three levels.

Impressions are the first level of SEO growth. Each eyeball on a URL in Google search is considered an impression. Obviously, at higher search positions, the impression number on a keyword will be higher.

Impressions are an indication that a website or page is in a consideration set for search. Simply put, growth in this number is positive, and declines are very negative.

Google measures how many clicks there were on a specific listing regardless of whether the webpage even loads. Short visits will not be picked up by script-based tracking systems. The click number may not always match visit data in analytics.

Clicks are a factor of impressions as well as click-through rate. As a click-through rate from search improves, the users and clicks will grow without any subsequent change in impressions.

Conversions are the final and most important result of SEO traffic. Conversion is how SEO campaigns should be judged. If clicks are arriving at a website from search but not converting, they will not produce revenue. This is when a conversion-rate optimization effort would be beneficial.

Impressions mean a website is on the field, eligible, and ready to play. Clicks are hits and progress toward an ultimate goal, but what really counts is the winning that happens from conversions. Google Search Console can give you a clear view into at least the first two metrics, which will make planning for and measuring marketing campaigns much easier.

here are the best practices for developing personas specifically for SEO.

Knowing who your users are, gives you a good foundation for what kind of content and keywords to focus on. For example, an e-commerce website might want to target people with a specific need, and the focus of SEO should be solving that need

Users very high in a funnel will be searching for a solution to a problem, while users at the very bottom will be looking for the brand plus pricing info.

What type of content is most helpful for your user at this part of their research?

The user’s location in a buying funnel should determine the appropriate call to action (CTA) for the content.

Too often, SEO strategies begin with keyword research and an approach for how much traffic the site will get by ranking on these keywords. The keyword ideas will typically come from one of the popular keyword-research tools on the market, tools available to anyone.

The focus of Red Ocean SEO isn’t really on the user, even though everyone claims to be user-centric. The goal of a Red Ocean SEO strategy is to be valued by Google. The content-creation process begins and ends with keyword research.

A Blue Ocean-type SEO strategy would begin with a hypothesis about users and their potential demand.

The content is then created completely with the user in mind because the Marketing team knows the users will find the content and appreciate it. The content creation can be written manually, targeting a keyword, or, better yet, built into the product in what I call Product-Led SEO.

In this model, successful SEO begins with customer interviews and whiteboards, not on a spreadsheet with search volumes and click curves.

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.

If you don’t yet know the answers to these questions, talk to your customers or your potential customers. Ask them what is missing in the current offerings for your product or service and how you might be able to fill that void.

If you don’t have customers to talk to, go to Quora and Reddit and read the questions people are asking and answering in your business category. Run a survey with a list in your business category, and if you don’t have a list, pay people to respond on social media.

Your business and products were created to be different. Embrace that in the way you market them online and the content you create. Create the content that you, and only you, now know there is untapped demand for. Google will reward you and will direct users to you with search-query suggestions. You yourself will actively build the search demand for your offering.

With a BERT (Google’s neural-learning algorithm) search goal in mind, Google uses a few very visible tools:

“Did you mean” When Google believes you meant to search for something other than what you typed into the browser, it will suggest another query.

2. Google Suggest As a user types a query, Google will be one step ahead of the user and try to determine what the user is seeking.

Related queries Very similar to Suggest, Google helps people discover new queries that might better help them find what they seek. Instead of doing Suggest in real time, Google links to other queries that will kick off a new search.

4. “People also ask” “People also ask” is a new feature in Google’s results that both kicks off a new search and (many times) displays a featured snippet response to the question. This is a particularly interesting feature in Google search and highlights the answering feature of search that Google might prefer.

Given this reality, rather than trying to rank on head terms, websites should focus on understanding their users and target the keywords they would search for in reality.

A keyword, even one that is assumed to be high volume, will not help you with revenue if your users don’t search with

While websites might think of their competitors as those that have similar product offerings to them, make no mistake, for SEO, the competitor is any site targeting the same search terms.

I recommend learning from competitors. If there is something that is working for them, learn how to do it better. If a competitor is generating traffic from a specific query set, but not effectively, you can answer the query’s intent and serve the user better than they are. Answering the query’s intent is an opportunity to create better content.

In the same vein, if a competitor has created content within a specific topic but left large open gaps in their coverage of the topic, this is an opportunity to do it better.

Observing how and why a competitor receives links is another great strategy for growth. Provided a competitor is accruing links in an above-board fashion, trying to understand the intent behind why someone might link to them can lead to even better ideas on where to find new links for your own site. (Note:

Real user growth happens from doing the unsexy acts of connecting with customers and telling the story of how the product improves the lives of its users. Many customers who are persuaded to buy will buy more/subscribe/pay higher year after year. In addition, these customers will tell others they had a positive experience.

The primary signal Google uses to determine quality is the value of the links that point to a specific page or website. The value passed by those inbound links is calculated by the value of their own links. From Google’s perspective, the internet is a true web of pages linking and connecting to each other.

The most effective way to generate backlinks is to not focus on them at all. Rather than think about creating links from a technical perspective, instead build quality content and products that other websites will want to link to.

Most social media links (Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc.) do not count as quality SEO backlinks; however, if you can attract social media shares, it is likely your content is resonating and might also be able to score inbound links.

The solution is simple and, actually, one Google recommends: build a brand and take a PR approach. Brands don’t build links; they get links.

If you are not in a position to hire a PR agency, you can still be successful at generating links. Just do what a PR agency would. Build relationships with journalists, understand what they like to write, and pitch stories.

Journalists might not respond to the barrage of requests for links, but they will engage with something that appears to be newsworthy or in line with stories they currently write. If you know someone has written about your competition more than once, you can safely assume they might be interested in your product, too. Your request for attention should come across directly and personally as an attempt to share a story idea with them—not a self-serving attempt to generate a backlink.

In layman’s terms, this is just saying each page begins with a score of 1, and its final score is a function of all its outbound links added to the score of all its inbound links.

Additionally, the homepage will never be the only page that receives authoritative external links. If an internal page is the recipient of a powerful external link but doesn’t link to other pages, that external link is essentially wasted. When pages link to each other, the authority of all external links is funneled around a site to the overall benefit of all pages.

Build related page modules on each page that have algorithms that search across all pages with similar content and display related links.

Add a set of random links into the algorithm and either hard code these random offerings into the page or refresh the set of random pages whenever the cache updates. Updating this random list of links every time the page is requested might be resource-intensive, so you can achieve this outcome by just refreshing this list once per day.

In addition to related pages, include a linking module for “interesting” content—which is driven by pure randomization—refreshed as in the first recommendation.

Include a module on every page for the most recent content that ensures older pages are...