Do you have "search market fit" for your SEO strategy?
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Every business, not just startups, is aware that product-market fit is a requirement for business success. If a business wants customers to spend their money and time on a product, physical or digital, the customer needs to have a utility for it. The more the product matches the market fit, the more potential for conversion increases. When a customer doesn’t just want but also NEEDS that product, they will continue to pay for it and even tell others to pay for it too.
As a recent example, CNN’s attempt at offering a paid streaming service failed quickly while other media companies were successful at acquiring subscribers for a seemingly similar product.
The fit with the market for a product is at the heart of why some are successful and others are not. (I admit to oversimplifying this as there are many other considerations too besides just product-market-fit, but this is a critical requirement.)
Product-market-fit for new products
Product-market fit doesn’t necessarily mean that a customer is in the market looking for that product, it just means that when a customer becomes aware of the product, they realize that it solves a need they didn’t realize they had. As an example of this, think of Uber (or Lyft).
Prior to the introduction of Uber, the average person wasn’t aware of how useful it might be to have someone else drive them to an important meeting to help them avoid wasted time in traffic or take them to an airport to avoid parking, or simply allow them to go out for a night of drinking without worrying about a designated driver. Once they tried Uber, they were hooked on this idea and Uber (and similar services) took off.
If Uber, the company, were to disappear a number of options would be created to fill this gap because the market now has this need.
One way of identifying product fit is to survey users; however, this would not be a fit for every product as Henry Ford may or may not have quipped “If I would have asked the customer what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse”. The key is knowing when to fold and when to double down.
Products that never find product-market fit either fail or the company pivots to markets that have a fit.
Search-Market Fit
With this background on product-market fit, I want to introduce a new concept I always share with my clients called “search market fit.” It has the same principles as product-market fit, however, it applies to search and building SEO strategies.
Before embarking on a financially and resource-intensive SEO effort, a company should be certain that there is a search-market fit. Like product-market fit, it means that there are going to be users searching for that product or keyword if the company were to be successful at achieving organic visibility.
Search-market fit applies to all three stakeholders in SEO:
Company/Business.
Does the company make and sell a matching offering that would be beneficial to the company if it were to achieve the rankings on search engines it desired? It serves no economic purpose to be visible on a search engine for visibility alone, there needs to be a business KPI.
I once worked with a company in a two-sided marketplace where they monetized with the sell side of the marketplace, but their SEO traffic was on the buy side. They could have deindexed most of their website without making a dent in revenue.Search engines.
I have worked with many companies whose initial SEO efforts were targeted at specific queries without considering the types of genres the search engines already chose to show for those queries. Tools like Clearscope and MarketMuse are useful for doing this at scale. In those scenarios, no amount of additional links, content, or keywords in the text would move the needle.To illustrate this concept, I have been using the term “search market fit” for a long time, and I hope that this post will be visible for the term, but more than likely it won’t given that Google doesn’t think this term exists.
It’s possible that I could obtain a significant number of citations and links to this post, and I might change Google’s “mind”, but if I were my own client, I would not recommend putting too much effort behind this strategy and go after something that doesn’t require inventing a brand-new term I think should exist.Users.
This is really the most important but the least obvious for most of the companies I meet. Are users searching for this keyword on search engines in the hopes of finding what this company is offering? When companies build an SEO strategy using any of the well-known keyword research tools, this is where the strategy starts and ends.
There isn’t enough consideration paid to the users’ needs when they go to a search engine to find a solution. When the user’s needs are paramount search volume doesn’t matter nearly as much. If the company offers exactly what the user desires even if they didn’t know it existed, there will be tremendous economic upside. Some call this zero search volume keywords, I just think of it as finding search-market fit.
Just like product-market fit, if there isn’t search-market fit the potential for success will be limited. As an additional parallel, the same way products finally fail after months and even years of effort and investment, SEO efforts without search-market fit will do the same on a long, slow, painful timeline.
Paid search has an advantage that if the campaign thesis is wrong it will fail very quickly and the company will know to pivot. With SEO only time will tell the outcome of an SEO strategy, and if the campaign is wrong, the time will never come.
You may not always be able to determine search-market fit at the outset, but it is prudent to at least try.
(In breaking down this concept, I typically use a quadrant that takes into account competition, demand, and effort in deciding an ideal SEO strategy. Please reach out if you are interested in seeing it.)
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