What is Product-Led SEO?
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by the Digital PR agency Search Intelligence and North Star Inbound. See their case studies linked in the newsletter.
Product-led SEO is SEO efforts built into the product around a user rather than a search engine. This ideally should be the focus of all SEO efforts, but in reality, most SEO pays only lip service to the end user while building the entire experience around a search engine algorithm. Product-led SEO requires building the entire experience, which I refer to as the “product” around the user.
(For the most detailed explanation of Product-Led SEO, check out my book on Amazon.)
The user is the primary audience, with search engine best practices layered on top rather than search engine best practices built around a user conversion.
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Expressing your thoughts clearly is crucial for effective communication. The same goes for on-page SEO content. Every word should earn its place so readers immediately grasp the message.
Here are six tips I recently shared to help SEO writers communicate clearly and concisely:
1. Avoid starting sentences with vague pronouns like "it" or "this." Jump straight into the action by leading with a strong verb instead.
2. Cut wordy phrasing. Sometimes writers "stall" when readers are in a rush. Replace wordy phrases with active verbs.
3. Use the active voice rather than passive. Put the focus on the topic by making it the sentence subject when possible.
Read on to discover how to sharpen your writing and get graphs like these.
Content-led SEO - the classic playbook
In most SEO campaigns, SEO begins with just a group of keywords developed by the marketing team or founders based on their knowledge of the product. The keywords then become the stems of keyword research. They are input into any keyword research tool, and related words are output.
The new, longer list becomes the seed for content ideas that will be written and posted on the website. The problem? The keyword list becomes a checklist and content roadmap, which doesn’t change much over time and possibly isn’t even a part of an overall strategy.
There are more than a few issues with this approach:
Nothing about this is unique, and the seed keyword list is available to anyone with similar access to the same keyword tools. Budget is not a barrier since most keyword tools are free or very cheap.
The KPI for a content-led approach is typically search engine visibility, which is measured by where the content “ranks” on search results. While a ranking on a search engine could eventually lead to a revenue-related conversion, it is a long, winding path.
Many assumptions are built into this model, and if these assumptions below are wrong, the budget is wasted.
The ideal user will actually use these words in a search
The content will be deemed to be relevant for the targeted keyword
The ideal ranking will be achieved
The user will convert through this content.
Most importantly, keyword-based content is limited and expensive and might even become obsolete with generative AI.
Product-Led SEO
Instead of using SEO to market the product (when I refer to “product,” I am discussing the offering to the user, whether that is a service, subscription, content, or physical widget), the product should become the SEO driver.
Rather than constructing a website around what will “rank” on Google, the entire site is constructed around the user arriving from a search engine.
The questions the product team asks as they build the product are:
Who are the users?
What will they be seeking in their journey?
What are they expecting to see when they click?
Will this user convert into a business result?
These are the typical questions product managers ask when they build anything.
Many of the most successful websites on the internet have achieved organic dominance through this product-led approach, and you might not have even noticed.
To really understand the difference, here’s a quick example that might deserve a post on its own. Please answer the poll at the end of this example.
Amazon vs eBay
Many people might be surprised to know that eBay, despite being known as an auction site, derives most of its revenue from fixed-price e-commerce, more akin to Amazon’s model.
Many years ago, while Amazon and eBay were still relatively competitive, they both made significant SEO choices, which resulted in their current competitive search positioning.
eBay invested in content marketing efforts to educate their customers about their buying choices. Some of these pages are still alive. Like all content-led efforts, they hoped a user would arrive from a search engine and click through to their revenue-driving pages.
In making this SEO investment decision, they neglected to put efforts into the actual position of the product pages for search engines. The biggest miss still in effect today is that each LISTING has a unique URL, which expires once the listing expires.
Contrast this approach with Amazon, which spent very little effort on content positioning but instead put all of its SEO efforts into the technical architecture of the website and the programmatic content decisions for each of its product and category pages.
Amazon did product-led SEO by investing SEO effort into the product that users expected to find when they did an e-commerce search. They possibly even put user decisions over SEO decisions.
The results are evident. Amazon dominates nearly every e-commerce search in the world with pages they invested very little individual effort into, while eBay’s SEO efforts have been outranked years ago by bloggers.
Product-Led SEO drives traffic and revenue
Product-led SEO is the concept of building a valuable product specifically for users. It’s not creating content because a keyword research tool tells you to; you're telling a story about a product users want.
The difference is you're creating content people want to read because you know they want it, not because you want rankings. The idea is to create something that helps users learn after clicking on your website. Beyond driving keywords, you're building something of value.
Even content can be product-led
Instead of jumping straight into content creation, start by asking these "Why" questions:
Why should this blog post exist?
Why should I write content for that keyword?
Why does this content help my users?
Shift your focus to users, not just metrics. In an upcoming post, I will detail how to understand more about users FROM users so you aren’t just relying on research.
Last tips on Product-Led SEO
Since the focus is on users and conversion with product-led SEO, brand search might be the lowest-hanging fruit to begin any SEO effort.
If people are searching for your brand's price or contact information, don't ignore that query because the volume is low. This is where you could potentially lose a customer to a competitor. For many marketers, branded content isn't considered very sexy because of the low search volume. However, conversion rates tend to be much higher, which should be all that matters.Product-led SEO doesn’t have to be programmatic; manual content can also be product-led. In that respect, programmatic content isn’t automatically product-led SEO, as many sites with millions of pages are created without any user in mind.
Most critically, product-led SEO has some level of immunity to algorithm changes because while algorithms can change overnight, users don’t.
Focus on the end user with product-led SEO, and the search traffic will follow.
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