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Originally Posted On: https://kurtuhlir.com/product-led-seo/
When you think of search engine optimization, you may think of keywords, backlinks, and other factors that help your site rank higher in search engines. However, all the traffic on Earth will not translate to revenue without a stellar product that meets users’ needs, and the scale of Enterprise SEO needs far exceeds what is possible with manual work and automations used in traditional SEO.
Product-Led SEO is an organic traffic strategy that works for some of the biggest sites in the world and one that your company needs to know about if you want a competitive advantage
Introduction
SEO started in the 1990s when search engines emerged on the internet. The only way to rank websites was to submit a list of keywords to the search engine, add them to your website, and hope that your website would show up in the results.
This practice and theory of SEO was known as keyword stuffing, and it was a popular technique back then. You could add a keyword dozens of times, even hiding it in sections with a font color similar to the background. However, it didn’t take long for search engines to catch on and penalize websites that used this technique.
In the early 2000s, Google emerged as the leading search engine, and it quickly became the standard by which people judged all other search engines. Google introduced several new ranking factors, such as links and PageRank, that changed the landscape of SEO.
These new ranking factors made it possible to rank websites without keyword stuffing, and they also made it possible to rank for more than just a handful of keywords.
The SEO landscape is constantly changing. Google makes algorithm changes approximately 500-600 times per year, or about 2-3 times per day. While most of these changes are small and go unnoticed by the average person, some of them can have a major impact on your website’s ranking.
Types of SEO
Traditional SEO
Traditional SEO is optimizing a website for Google search to earn higher web traffic levels and improve the online visibility of the site. The higher a site ranks in Google for keywords and phrases with search volume, the more likely people are to visit that site.
Some traditional SEO best practices include using keywords in your titles and descriptions, making sure your site is easy to navigate, and publishing high-quality content. It’s also important to keep your site updated regularly and build backlinks to your site from other reputable sources.
Many businesses dedicate entire departments to their SEO efforts, with an SEO team of experts who spend all day working on nothing but improving the search engine ranking of their employer’s website. Even if you don’t have a dedicated product team focused on user experience, understanding how content SEO works is important for anyone responsible for driving traffic to a website.
On-Page vs Off-Page Optimization
SEO breaks down into on-page optimization and off-page optimization. On-page optimization is what you can do on your website to make it more visible to Google, such as adding keywords to your page titles and meta tags. While technical SEO can be broken out, it can also be consolidated into on-page as it involves the aspects of how the page/site loads and other technical aspects of the experience.
On the other hand, off-page optimization is all about getting links from other websites back to yours, building the brand, and improving the overall influence of the site across the internet. Still today, the more high-quality links you have pointing back to your site, the higher your site will rank on Google.
Enterprise SEO
Enterprise SEO takes these efforts seen in traditional SEO and applies them to large-scale sites with thousands and sometimes even millions of individual pages. It involves the targeting of hundreds, thousands, and even hundreds of thousands of keywords. See this article for a detailed walk through of Enterprise SEO. One key piece of most Enterprise SEO efforts are building the product, the platform, and or the application that delivers the content visitors experience.
Product-Led SEO
Product-Led SEO leverages content by allowing a product to tell a story. Instead of focusing on keywords, Product-Led SEO places the user first. Meeting user demand creates organic marketing and product success. Product-Led SEO is different because it emphasizes understanding the customer and building the software to deliver the experience for them.
Successful companies use Product-Led SEO to increase their organic search visibility and build an emotional connection with their customers. Product-Led SEO is a new way of thinking about how products are marketed and sold. It’s about understanding what customers want and delivering it both helpfully and engagingly.
But what exactly is Product-Led SEO? And why should your company start using it now?
What Is Product-Led SEO?
The fundamental difference between Product-Led SEO and other types of SEO is that the product is the star of the show. Product-Led SEO focuses on ensuring that your product is discoverable and that search users can easily find what they are seeking when they search for it online. In many cases, the sheer scale of the website is not possible without involving software engineers to create a (technology) product/website that integrates numerous data sources and types of content into a cohesive end-user experience.
Product-Led SEO focuses on making a product so good that users will seek it out. It involves both the creation of the product/website itself and the potential viral nature of the product experience. Typically focus is placed on marketing after a product is ready to sell. When customers love your product, their recommendations become the marketing strategy with Product-Led SEO.
The Role of Search Engines in Product-Led SEO
In Product-Led SEO, search engines are content marketing tools that help customers find the product they are looking for. Product-Led SEO is not just about ranking high in search results but rather about providing a great user experience at a massive scale.
It is essential to understand what search engines are looking for when ranking products so you can be sure to create a product that meets those criteria. Product-Led SEO is a long-term strategy that should be part of an overall Enterprise search engine marketing plan.
Keywords and Backlinks
Intent-driven keyword research will continue to gain popularity as the focus shifts from keywords to user experience.
Do not put effort into courting backlinks alone, and realize that at a certain scale content and pages cannot be created and updated manually, no matter the budget. Focus on creating quality, helpful content and experiences. If people enjoy your content, the links will appear. Content without building backlinks frees up resources to design a product based on customer desires. This Product-Led SEO approach puts the customer first and naturally draws links and traffic to your website.
Build a meaningful product experience, producing a proprietary content management system that pulls from dozens (or even thousands) of sources, and going after off-site SEO (in addition to other aspects of Enterprise SEO and your company) has the possibility of redefining the market and increasing the value of your company by 10x, or even 50x. Apply these in combination across the world, and let’s just say that investors may smile when they hear your company’s name.
Product-Led Content Marketing Key Factors
Product-Led SEO is all about the product. The focus is on creating a great product that people will want to use and share, rather than optimizing for keywords or other ranking factors.
There are a few key factors that make Product-Led SEO different from traditional SEO:
- A great product: This is the foundation of everything. If you don’t have a great product, no amount of content SEO will matter. Your product needs to be something people want and need.
- Understanding what people are searching for: You can’t just create a great product and expect people to find it. You need to clearly understand what people are searching for and make sure to optimize your product for those keywords.
- A plan for getting your product in front of people: Just because you have a great product doesn’t mean people will automatically find it. You need to have a plan for getting your product in front of the right people at the right time. This plan could include creating helpful blog posts, optimizing your website for specific keywords, creating an amalgamation of valuable content, or running ads.
- A way to measure success: Product-Led SEO is all about driving traffic and conversions, so you need to have a way to measure your success. This measurement could include tracking the number of visitors to your site, the number of people who sign up for your product, the number of users still using your product after some number of weeks, or the number of sales you generate.
- An engaging platform: Once you have a great product, you need a platform that makes it easy for people to discover, use, and share your product. This platform could be a website, app, blog, or social media channel. Product-Led SEO starts with creating a great platform that makes it easy for people to find your product and spread the word.
- Promotional content: In addition to having a great product and platform, you also need promotional content types that highlight the best qualities of your product and drive traffic back to your platform. This content could be company blog posts, infographics, videos, or anything else that tells people about your product and drives them back to your platform.
- A link-building strategy: Once you have a great product, platform, and promotional content, you need to build links. This content strategy is where SEO comes in. You need to create links that point back to your platform so people can find it easily in search engines.
Product-Led SEO aims to create a great product that people want to use and share. By creating an irresistible product and promoting it where potential customers already are, you can drive traffic and links to your site. This will help you rank higher in search engines.
More About Product-Led SEO Strategies
Product-Led SEO is a methodology for driving traffic and conversions through product creation and optimization.
It focuses on using the product as the primary marketing means, rather than relying more on traditional SEO tactics like link building and keyword stuffing. Product-Led SEO aims to improve the user experience by making the content visible and easy to use to both search engines and visitors.
Product-Led SEO is all about future demand. It is not only about what people are searching for right now, but rather what they will be searching for in the future. It also emphasizes creating content designed to be helpful and informative rather than simply keyword-rich, as well as continually allocating resources for capacity building for when traffic and usage begin to kick in.
Businesses can improve their organic search rankings, drive more traffic, and increase conversions by following a product-led approach. Product-Led SEO is an essential part of any digital marketing strategy.
The future of SEO is focused on quality over quantity. This means that you need to focus on creating high-quality content and improving your overall website architecture if you want to rank well on Google.
Product-Led SEO is a crucial part of any modern Enterprise SEO objective. Businesses can drive traffic and conversions by focusing on creating a great product and promoting it on a great platform.
Executive leadership often create roadblocks to success of these efforts because they include Product-Led SEO and Enterprise SEO into the same buckets as traditional SEO and brand building. While these are related, it is rare for a successful Product-Led strategy to be run from by the company’s overall Chief Marketing Officer. Successful Product-Led and Enterprise SEO efforts are almost always run from within an innovation or product effort that works closely with traditional marketing, separate but related.
Origins of Product-Led SEO
The origins of Product-Led SEO go back to the early days of eCommerce. In the early 2000s, online shopping was still in its infancy, and many companies were struggling to find ways to drive traffic to their websites. One of the first companies to successfully use products to drive traffic was Amazon.
Amazon’s Impact
In the early days of ecommerce, most companies focused on driving traffic to their website through traditional marketing channels such as print advertising, radio, and TV. On the other hand, Amazon focused on making its product visible and easy to find. SEO works well for eCommerce sites because it is easy to track conversions through the marketing channel.
Amazon achieved this by optimizing their website for search engines and ensuring that their product listings were highly relevant to the keywords people were searching. This focus on the product led to Amazon becoming one of the most successful online retailers globally.
Amazon’s approach was simple but effective: they built a massive catalog of products and then used that catalog to draw people to their website. People came to Amazon not just to buy things but also to browse and discover new products. This leadership approach proved so successful that other companies soon began adopting it.
Eli Schwartz’ Impact
Over time, the Product-Led SEO approach changed and developed. Today, it’s worth adopting as a part of any digital marketing strategy, not only large corporations.
Product-Led SEO is constantly evolving. One of the leading figures is Eli Schwartz, working in the SEO space for over a decade. Schwartz’s work has focused on helping companies better understand how search engines work and how they can use this knowledge to improve their products and rankings.
Eli Schwartz, a best-selling author, ran SEO for SurveyMonkey and was an advisor to Zendesk and Quora. His book on SEO, Product-Led SEO, has quickly risen to the list of top SEO books and serves as one primer on the subject. Schwartz feels that companies should focus on creating products desired by consumers rather than on how to satisfy search engine algorithms.
The idea is to prioritize users over the content and realize that an SEO product team experience should be part of product departments instead of marketing departments. This focuses on how almost all high-growth multi-billion dollar (valuation) companies have approached building products and Enterprise SEO for more than a decade.
Eli’s work has helped shape how Product-Led SEO works today, and he is a strong SEO expert in his field.
Product-Led SEO Today
SEO should be a part of the entire development process, not just at the end when most marketing activity occurs. While Eli may have coined the term, the concept of Product-Led SEO has been around for years. It may be better, in fact, to label much of what Eli discusses in his book as “Product-Led Growth” or virality. Products should be built to focus on the user first, and in a way that makes them fall in love with the experience to the point that they want to tell others about it.
The key differentiator for Product-Led SEO, as I and many others in the industry define it, is that the scale of the experience that users and search engines see requires code (software) to combine large volumes of content, from many datasets, with disparate technologies, into the end experience. Product-Led SEO fits best as a subcategory and specialty within Enterprise SEO for reasons you’ll learn in this article.
Why AI Just Doesn’t Cut It
As search complexity and a focus on search intent increases, SEO’s value will increase as well.
SEO will always depend on human input to determine what users want. People can never fully automate SEO. Humans will always perform searches, so Product-Led SEO will always require a human touch.
AI (Artificial Intelligence) cannot provide the personal experience that SEO and a user-focused experience adds. Great products don’t need much advertising, and SEO doesn’t need a ton of fluff. SEO success requires focusing on what the user wants to buy or the action they want to experience (e.g. visiting a specific destination, etc.).
Why Does Product-Led SEO Matter
Product-Led SEO matters because it is a more effective way to drive traffic to your product. Studies have shown that prospective customers are more likely to purchase a product that they can easily find and is relevant to their needs.
Product-Led SEO is a fresh approach that also allows you to bypass the traditional marketing channels, which can be costly and time-consuming to the point of making them impossible for certain growth targets.
Product-Led SEO is more about how SEO impacts revenue and new customer acquisition, whereas standard SEO focuses more on rankings and traffic.
Product-Led SEO is all about developing a product that is so stellar that it drives an experience. By creating an exceptional and world-class product, you can attract the attention of media and influencers who will help promote your product and drive traffic to your website.
In addition, a great product will inspire customers to leave positive reviews and testimonials online, which can also help boost your SEO. Use social media and word-of-mouth to generate interest in the product.
So if you’re looking to take your SEO to the next level, focus on developing an outstanding product that people will love. With some dedication and the right team that has proven practical experience, you can make Product-Led SEO work for you and your business.
Product-Led SEO builds the platform that assembles the pages and content Google and visitors interact with. For example, eCommerce platforms or large publication sites like WebMD.
Product-Led SEO focuses on making sure that these platforms are easy to use and navigate so that users can find what they’re seeking quickly and easily. In addition, Product-Led SEO also emphasizes the importance of creating quality content that is relevant and engaging.
Spending priorities are also an essential part of Product-Led SEO. Rather than focusing on paid advertising, Product-Led SEO companies invest their resources in developing a great product. By doing so, they can organically attract visitors and customers, saving them a lot of money in the long run.
Product-Led SEO is quickly becoming the preferred approach for many companies. If you want to take your business to the next level, it’s time to start focusing on developing a world-class product.
What Makes Product-Led SEO Different?
Product-Led SEO matters because it is a more effective way to drive traffic to your product. Studies have shown that potential customers are more likely to make business purchases that they can easily find and are relevant to their needs.
Product-Led SEO also allows you to bypass the traditional marketing channels, which can be costly and time-consuming. It generally focuses on larger companies with innovative products and well-known or growing brands. It is not as applicable to small business owners or eCommerce startups.
The benefits of SEO build slowly, and they compound. Product-Led SEO is a long-term strategy that brand new companies should avoid. The returns may not appear soon enough to be helpful.
Product-Led SEO creates content designed to sell a product or service by focusing on customer desires over content marketing engine manipulations. This focus means looking beyond keyword-rich titles and descriptions tied to the products and customer services offered.
It also involves creating compelling calls to action (CTAs) that encourage potential customers to buy through solving a problem, or answering a question. I often see product managers of SEO working alongside product managers focused on user experience and other areas of the product
Creating high-quality content means writing articles, blog posts, or informative and useful videos for your target audience. The more helpful and relevant your content is, the more likely people are to find it when searching for information.
You can use Product-Led SEO for any product, but it is most effective when the product is something new or different. Make sure the product is good. Product-Led SEO will not make a lousy product successful, because it would require rebuilding the entire product.
Product-Led SEO is a powerful all-in-one content marketing toolkit that can help drive sales through a website. Product-Led SEO will improve website visibility and attract more potential customers by adopting a user-first model.
Current search engine ranking is easy to gauge traffic value, but it’s not the best way. Focus on how many customers use your product and whether their experience is positive. Are their parts of the experience they are looking for but either not experiencing from your product or that they are having to do themselves?The Product Drives SEO
Product-Led SEO creates a great product that people want to buy and discuss.
If an excellent product satisfies customer demand, the customer will discuss the product positively and leave comments online recommending the product to others. This promotion is a perfect way to increase consumer/buyer/visitor conversions and obtain quality backlinks.
Involve everyone impacted by a product in the design of that product. This involvement will provide insight into potential issues that can be fixed during setup instead of noticed after launch.
The first step in SEO is to appear in search results, and people must click on those listings. However, the metrics that truly matter for most businesses are conversions.
Focuses on the User Experience, Not Just Cranking Out and Ranking For Keywords
Product-Led SEO focuses on the user experience, not just researching keywords. It’s about understanding what users are searching for and providing them with the most relevant and helpful results.
Instead of a keyword research approach, try to list all the ways consumers could use a product. Keywords should come naturally.
It’s also about creating content that is engaging and easy to consume. Product-Led SEO creates a seamless user experience that leads to higher conversion rates.
Product-Led SEO can be a powerful tool for driving traffic and conversions when done correctly. So if you’re looking to improve your SEO, focus on creating a great user experience and producing quality content.
Optimized for Traffic and Conversions
Product-Led SEO is a type of optimization focused on driving traffic and conversions. It is different from traditional SEO, which focuses on keywords and algorithm tweaking to get rankings traffic from search engines. It typically falls within Enterprise SEO where there is a focus on thousands and generally millions of keywords and pages.
Product-Led SEO focuses on creating high-quality content optimized for positive customer experiences. A Product-Led Growth strategy must first understand the customer’s needs and then approach product development to meet those needs.
Product-Led SEO teams must also be able to track and analyze their content’s performance to improve their results continually. It requires specialized tools and approaches not seen in traditional SEO or traditional product development. Product-Led SEO is an essential part of any large-scale, online marketing strategy and can be the difference between success and failure.
Looks Beyond Just the Competition
Competition research is not the sole focus of Product-Led SEO. It also looks at what’s popular in the market, what users are searching for, and what users are attempting to do. Product-Led Growth is about understanding the target audience’s needs and creating content that meets those needs.
It’s also about designing a better user experience than the competition. By focusing on the needs of your users, you can make a product that is unique and will stand out from the competition.
Product-Led SEO is an essential part of any online content marketing strategy and should be a top priority for any business looking to succeed online.
Examples of Companies That Successfully Used Product-Led SEO
Product-Led SEO works to attract customers and boost sales. It’s a relatively new concept, but it’s already led to increased growth success for several companies. Here are six examples of companies that leveraged Product-Led SEO to achieve success:
Amazon’s SEO Growth
Amazon is an excellent example of a company size that used a Product-Led Growth strategy to succeed. Amazon’s products are so well-optimized for search engines that they often appear at the top of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). This visibility has helped Amazon attract hundreds of millions of visitors to its website.
Amazon is a master at Product-Led SEO. Their product pages are optimized for the keywords people search for when they want that product. And they don’t just optimize their titles and descriptions – they also optimize their product images and videos to satisfy user search intent.
This process creates an incredibly well-optimized Product Page for the keyword, which leads to Amazon ranking at the top of the organic search results.
Walmart’s SEO Growth
Walmart is another company that has attempted to used Product-Led SEO to achieve success.
Walmart requires detailed descriptions of each available item. This complex product information helps Walmart shoppers quickly find what they need, which should lead to increased traffic and sales.
After investing millions in attempting to build an incredible online experience over the previous decade, Walmart purchased the online marketplace Jet.com in 2016 for $3.3 billion to compete with Amazon in the eCommerce arena. Walmart’s focus on stores over online warehouses led to significant losses and the controversial decision to discontinue Jet.com in 2020.
Some claim that Walmart did not route investment to this eCommerce product because they misjudged consumers’ strong preference for online shopping and focused on in-store experiences instead. From talking to many within and around the teams, I believe Walmart squandered the Jet.com acquisition and later organic growth efforts around Walmart.com due to:
- Their leadership’s old-style, traditional approach to waterfall product development.
- Traditional SEO techniques and marketing around it’s online marketplace.
- Failure to make the needed ongoing investments in the product, believing that the acquisition would “solve” their problems.
- Not supporting internal leaders that spoke up and provided a different path of organic growth for the company.
After acquiring Jet.com, a focus on user intent and a shift to an Enterprise SEO model, including Product-Led SEO could have boosted Walmart’s online performance. This later approach to supporting true Enterprise SEO experts has allowed Walmart to find success against Amazon by performing well in search engine results and handing the fulfillment to the team working closely with local stores on a new type of delivery model.
WebMD’s SEO Growth
WebMD is a company that provides health information and product pages for various health-related keywords.
The focus is on making users’ lives better through detailed pages targeting user search intent. High-quality content and ease of locating the desired medical information have resulted in good Product-Led SEO results for WebMD.
One of my mentors and friends, the late Reggie Bradford, was their CMO during their launch and high-growth phases. He is one of the few examples where the company’s traditional marketing efforts have successfully led much of the Product-Led Growth initiatives.
TripAdvisor’s SEO Growth
TripAdvisor has leveraged Product-Led SEO to remain at the top of SERPs for many travel-related search queries.
One crucial element is that TripAdvisor posts large numbers of user reviews. Soliciting these reviews and encouraging user curation is built in a way that is naturally part of what users are already doing. This review focus is an excellent example of how positive word-of-mouth increases sales. Hundreds of thousands of positive reviews will increase hotel and restaurant bookings through TripAdvisor.
Content structure on TripAdvisor shows a good understanding of user search intent as well. Pages are structured into categories like hotel + city + price to give users fast results encompassing everything they need to know.
Slack’s SEO Growth
Slack utilized word-of-mouth advertising to grow its messaging app so quickly. They also avoided a content marketing need early on and let users spread the word. Another innovative SEO growth method was to not push people to upgrade from a free account to a paid option.
The free option is fully functional. It just has usage limits, so it’s seamless to transition. By the time this simple upgrade is required, an entire 10-person team has become accustomed to using the product, and more likely to want to keep using it.
SurveyMonkey’s SEO Growth
SurveyMonkey is a company with an international focus. Obtaining global success required researching regulatory requirements for different countries and adapting the company model to suit each location. This focus also involved translations and currency considerations.
By performing this work upfront, users worldwide could use SurveyMonkey without hassles. A less product-led approach could have involved having everyone access the US site and deal with any roadblocks themselves. Instead, the company invested in understanding the legal nuances and user desires across countries and built that into the product experience itself.
For more examples in multiple industries, see my article on Enterprise SEO.What Your Company (and Leadership) Needs to Know About Product-Led SEO
If you want to stay ahead of the competition, your company needs to understand Product-Led SEO. Here are some tips to get started:
- Know your audience: Product-Led SEO starts with understanding your target customer. What do they need and want? What are their pain points? What are their buying triggers? After you know these things, you can design Content-Led SEO that speaks to their needs.
- Think like a media outlet: B2C companies have relied on advertising to get the word out about their products. With Product-Led SEO, your company becomes its best media outlet. This focus means creating quality content that is interesting and informative and then promoting it through social media, email, and other channels.
- Get involved in the conversation: Product-Led SEO isn’t a one-way street. You need to be part of your customers’ discussions about your product to gain success. This process means being active on social media, forums, and other online spaces.
- Be patient: Product-Led SEO takes time to build momentum and see compound growth. Don’t expect overnight results and do not stop the investment too early. Instead, focus on creating quality content and establishing your company as a thought leader in your industry. With time, effort, and the right team, you will see the results you’re looking for. It can become a powerful growth engine and channel for growth leading to significant business value contributions leading to new multi-billion dollar businesses.
- Product-Led SEO is not a silver bullet: It’s just one piece of the puzzle. To be successful, you must have a robust business strategy and execute it exceptionally well.
- Product-Led SEO is an exciting and effective way to market your products: By understanding your audience and delivering a quality experience, you can build trust and credibility with your customers. If you’re looking to stay ahead of the competition, Product-Led SEO is a growth strategy you can’t afford to ignore.
Product-Led SEO emphasizes making the content as visible and attractive to potential customers as possible, rather than relying on traditional marketing or sales tactics to drive traffic to the product.
Product-Led SEO can be a practical element of any company’s growth strategy. By understanding how it works, you can ensure that your products are visible to potential customers when they search for relevant keywords.
This visibility means creating high-quality, keyword-rich product descriptions, blog posts, and social media posts to help your products rank highly on content engine results pages, as well as creating the content and experience within the product itself. In addition to creating great content, you also need to ensure that your website has the following features:
- Mobile-Friendly: As searches from mobile phones, or any mobile device, continue to dominate, large organizations may want to pursue a separate mobile strategy.
- Voice Search: Voice search continues to become more popular, but not to the degree that many people predicted. It appears that many users simply do not like searching this way, so it remains to be seen how voice search fares with customers and therefore how your product strategy should be tailored for it.
- Easy Navigation: If people can’t find what they’re looking for on your site, they’re likely to move to another site that’s easier to use. That’s why it’s crucial to have a clear and logical business structure to your website and adequately designed navigation.
With a well-optimized website and high-quality content, you can attract more organic traffic and boost your sales. Product-Led SEO is an essential part of many companies’ marketing strategy, so make sure you use it to its full potential.
It All Begins With a Product
Product-Led SEO begins with the product. The product is the foundation of everything that comes after it in the product development process. Product-Led SEO requires a deep understanding of how users think, what they need, and how they use search engines. This is why it ties so closely and is often used alongside Product-Led Growth strategies. While different, they are highly related.
It’s about creating a product that meets their needs and provides them with a great user experience. Product-Led SEO also means understanding how the search engines work and how to optimize your product for them.
Once you know what search engines look for, take that information and give it to designers to incorporate into product development. Increasingly, successful teams have people with a strong knowledge about product marketing
This understanding includes keyword research, on-page optimization, and off-page optimization. Product-Led SEO is an essential part of any successful online marketing strategy, and without it, your chances of success decline. If you want to gain success online, you should think about integrating Product-Led SEO. Just keep in mind the billions of dollars invested by companies like Walmart, and remember that SEO and understanding search engines is much more difficult than most people believe. The brutal truth is that most SEO managers, and even many with the title of “longtime industry veteran”, do not have the background needed to effectively lead an Enterprise SEO or Product-Led SEO initiative.
The User Is King
Product-Led SEO is all about ensuring that your product delivers the best possible experience to users. That means developing products that are easy to use and navigate, and offer relevant and valuable information. It also means making sure that your products are well-ranked in search engines so users can easily find them.
In short, Product-Led SEO is all about putting the user first. And when it comes to SEO, there’s no one more important than the user. So if you’re looking to improve your SEO, start by focusing on your product. Make sure it’s the best it can be for the users’ intent, and make sure it’s easy for users to find. The rest will follow.
Understand Search Intent and Meet It
Product-Led SEO is all about understanding search intent and meeting it. You can’t just stuff many keywords into your product descriptions and hope for the best. The same can be seen in not being able to rely solely or too much on AI content, as seen by the massive sites that took a major hit in May and June of 2022 when Google released a core update widely believed to identify and devalue AI created content.
You need to comprehend what people are searching for and why, and ensure your products reflect that.
A keyword research approach is gradually becoming obsolete as a primary research technique for Product-Led SEO. The focus is shifting from optimizing for keywords to optimizing for user experience.
Use keyword research to understand what people are searching for, but don’t obsess over ranking for a short list of keywords.
Think about all the different stages of the customer’s journey and how your product can help at each stage. The goal of Product-Led SEO is to create a product that is so great people will want to share it with people they know.
By providing relevant, accurate, and helpful information, you’ll be able to attract the right kind of traffic to your site and convert more of them into customers. Product-Led SEO is an essential part of any Enterprise SEO strategy, so make sure you invest the time and effort into getting it right.
Provide Unique Content (Not Easily Found)
Unique content is essential for Product-Led SEO success. That means creating content relevant to the products that you can’t easily find elsewhere. It’s good to remember that not all content is created equal. Just because it has a distinctive blend doesn’t mean it’s good.
A lot of content is just superficial content. If you want your product to succeed, you need to create truly unique and exciting content that will get the attention of users and search engines alike. Product-Led SEO is all about creating unique and relevant content, and focusing on quality over quantity.
If included as part of an Enterprise SEO strategy, Product-Led SEO will require a large and consistent effort over many years. However, this investment will also create a moat around your company’s success. This approach to SEO will compound over time to provide an invaluable resource for prospective customers too. A few examples of the level of investment include:
- CoStar (owns Apartments.com): They’ve had a team of 20+ full-time, in-house writers, in addition to a large freelance team, creating unique content for the website and product experience.
- NerdWallet: This personal finance company grew with a team of 130+ editors, writers, and content marketers.
Both of these examples are in addition to their large product and software engineering teams.
By providing relevant, accurate, and helpful information with a great reading experience, you’ll be able to attract the right kind of traffic to your site and convert more of them into customers. If you want to have a successful eCommerce business, you need to invest time and effort into Product-Led SEO.
Do you want to be a big fish in a small pond or the only fish in a massive pond?
To survive and thrive in today’s market, you need to be able to adapt quickly and change your comprehensive approach, including both large-scale investments and innovative marketing approaches to digital growth. Product-Led SEO is a novel content strategy that helps you stand a class apart from the competition.
It is a customer-centric approach designed to improve the overall user experience. Product-Led SEO helps you create better products, resulting in more traffic and conversions. So if you’re looking to take your business to the next level, start with Product-Led SEO.
It is a new way of thinking about SEO that puts your product at the forefront and uses it as a means to an end, rather than traditional keyword focus and standalone backlinking methods.
SEO can be a complex and ever-changing field, but it’s crucial to stay up-to-date on the latest trends and practices if you want your website to succeed. By following some simple Product-Led SEO tips, you can make sure your site is visible to potential customers and help your business grow.
By providing relevant, accurate, and valuable information, you’ll be able to attract the right kind of traffic to your site and convert more of them into customers. Product-Led SEO is an essential part of any Enterprise SEO strategy and many explosive growth strategies for newer companies, so make sure you invest the time and effort into getting it right.
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