Today’s SEO landscape is full of uncertainty, marked by:
Keeping your website strategy tied to traditional notions like keyword research based on search volume is a recipe for a slow but sure death.
But what are your options?
A possible escape route is Product-led SEOthat focuses your strategy on the needs, pains and desires of your customers.
This article will help you transition from a keyword-centric SEO strategy to a customer-centric SEO strategy, offering practical tips for effectively integrating both approaches.
5 steps to get your product-led SEO strategy off the ground
1. Identify your customer
A fundamental mistake that many SEO experts make is to focus on the website and forget about the customers.
Remember that keywords don’t make purchases; people do (or at least for now). That’s why focusing solely on keyword research or technical auditing won’t do the job. You need to know who your ideal customer is.
There are many ways to do this. The easiest thing is to talk to your colleagues in the marketing department and see if they already have it.
If you know a colleague in another department who would likely use your product, spend a day shadowing them or doing an in-depth interview. Find out where they go online for information and learning, what factors they consider when making decisions, and their biggest daily challenges.
You can also visit the GA4 demographic report to get information about age, country and interests. Take the last one with a grain of salt, as your website may have attracted the wrong users.
Finally, create a profile of your ideal customer. You can easily get started with HubSpot Make me my person tool
Dig deeper: Do people really matter in content marketing?
2. Dive into your data
SEO often overlooks valuable data collected by customer-facing departments such as sales and support.
Platforms like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics provide rich insights into customer needs and behaviors, making them essential tools for SEO. Access to these platforms and their reports can significantly improve SEO strategies.
The challenge with these tools is that navigating through the data directly in them could be a real pain. Therefore, the easiest way to get started is to create a report with the important information of the tool and then export it in CSV format.
Many organizations face restrictions when exporting CRM data due to privacy concerns. Always ensure that your reports exclude personally identifiable information such as emails, phone numbers, names and company details. Your goal is information entered by your sales team, such as a summary of the conversation or a description of the prospect’s situation.
After exporting, you have a few options depending on the size:
Read it manually. Bundle it with the help of a Python script. Or ask ChatGPT to do the heavy lifting.
As you look for repeating patterns in how your customers are talking, you can also use simple tools like TagCrowd and then search for the most repeated words in the initial report.
The final result of this exercise should be a document with three columns:
User pain point/challenge. Voice of the customers or how your customers have described this challenge. Information on how many times each challenge has been mentioned.
Or if we need to translate these three into a more SEO-friendly language:
Themes. Keywords related to the topics. Search volume
Unfortunately, the data in your CRM platforms can often be insufficient.
In these cases, you need to broaden your search beyond your company. One way to do this is through review platforms.
Dig Deeper: An SEO Guide to Audience Research and Content Analysis
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3. Read customer reviews
If someone spent 30 minutes of their life writing a review of your product, they either love it or really hate it. In any case, these users have given you valuable information.
While you can’t do much for those who hate some of the features and functionality, you can analyze the rest for reasons to believe in your product and the pains you’ve solved in their lives.
Most platforms offer ways to export your reviews in CSV format. The subsequent analysis process could be similar to that of your CRM data. You can even ask ChatGPT to do a SWOT analysis of your product and identify your strengths and weaknesses.
Review platforms offer more than just access to customer feedback. They provide valuable insights and real-life examples for content creation. In addition, they provide access to competitor reviews, enhancing competitive analysis.
Collecting initial data for your competitors may require deeper knowledge of Python, additional budget for a third-party tool, browser extension, or a lot of manual work. Regardless of the method, the result will provide valuable insight into how customers perceive your competitors.
Extract use cases and real-life situations from these reviews, and if your product covers them, be sure to show them in your content. Remember to uphold ethical standards and avoid making claims without verifiable evidence.
4. Expand your knowledge with forums
SEO professionals recently expressed their frustration with Google’s preference for websites like Reddit and Quora. These platforms thrive on real user-generated content, which makes them valuable to Google’s algorithms. Use this content to benefit your SEO strategy.
One way to start analyzing them is to use traditional keyword research tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, etc. Just check the domain and all the keywords it ranks for, then search for keywords related to your content.
With this approach, you’ll end up with a list of pages ranking for relevant keywords. Some may be specific conversations, others communities. You can then easily expand them manually.
When you are ready with your list, you need to extract the information. You can do it with:
A web scraping browser extension (there are many different options). A website crawler with the ability to extract information (such as Screaming Frog). Or a tool like Sheetsmagic that puts your information directly into Google Sheets.
The analysis can be redone with the help of AI or Python, or you can do it manually. This time, you’ll receive an additional level of information: potential titles for your future content.
Combine insights from customer conversations, your own data, and reviews to discover alignments with your ideal customer persona. This integration forms the backbone of your tailored SEO strategy, and the result will be your product-driven content calendar and SEO plan.
Dig deeper: advanced tactics to maximize the SEO value of user-generated content
5. Create content that answers your customers’ questions
For this content to work, you need to answer your customers’ questions and provide solutions to their challenges while showing how your product/service fits into the picture.
Your blog should not become a duplicate of your documentation; rather, it should present your product’s features and capabilities in a more narrative way.
Turn the customer examples you’ve collected into compelling stories. Ideally, include quotes from real customers. If quotes are not available, use supporting statistics. Companies like PWC, EY, Deloitte, Accenture, and McKinsey publish tons of research that you can use for inspiration.
Dig Deeper: What is useful content, according to Google
Aligning SEO with your product’s value proposition
Starting your product-led SEO journey isn’t difficult, and it could be revealing to know why customers choose your product.
Your strategy doesn’t have to be static. Once you’ve established the foundation, it should evolve with the changing needs of your audience.
Only by always learning and changing can you ensure that you build lasting engagement and drive growth. Your customers are leading the way, but you must dedicate yourself to following them.
The views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
