Today's SEO landscape is full of uncertainty and is characterized by:
Continuing to tie your website strategy to traditional concepts like keyword research based on search volume is a recipe for slow but sure death.
But what options do we have?
One possible escape route is product-driven SEO, which focuses your strategy on your customers' needs, pains, and desires.
This article will help you transition from a keyword-focused SEO strategy to a customer-focused SEO strategy, and provide practical tips for effectively integrating both approaches.
5 steps to start a product-led SEO strategy
1. Identify your customers
One of the fundamental mistakes that many SEO professionals make is focusing on the website and forgetting about the customer.
Remember, keywords don't buy products. People do (at least for now). This is why focusing solely on keyword research or technical audits is ineffective. You need to know who your ideal customer is.
There are many ways to do this. The easiest way is to talk to your marketing colleagues to see if they already have this in place.
If you know colleagues in other departments who are likely to use your product, spend a day observing them or conducting an in-depth interview. Discover where they go online for information and learning, what factors they consider when making decisions, and their biggest daily challenges.
You can also access the GA4 Demographic Report to see information about age, country, and interests. Take that last with a grain of salt, as your website may be attracting the wrong audience.
Finally, create a profile of your ideal customer. Get started easily with HubSpot's Make My Persona tool.
Let’s dig deeper: Do personas really matter in content marketing?
2. Explore your data
SEO often overlooks valuable data collected by customer-facing departments like sales and support.
Platforms like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics provide rich insights into customer needs and behavior, making them essential tools for SEO. Accessing these platforms and their reports can greatly enhance your SEO strategy.
The challenge with these tools is that directly manipulating the data within them is very tedious. Therefore, the easiest way to get started is to create a report with important information within the tool and export it in CSV format.
Many organizations face restrictions on exporting CRM data due to privacy concerns. Always make sure that your reports do not include any personally identifying information such as email, phone number, name, or company details. Goals are information entered by your sales team, such as a conversation summary or a description of a lead's status.
After exporting, you have several options depending on the size.
- Please read it manually.
- Cluster using a Python script.
- Or let ChatGPT do the heavy lifting for you.
When looking for repeating patterns in the way your customers speak, you can also use a simple tool like TagCrowd to find the most frequently repeated words in your initial report.
The final result of this exercise should be a document containing three columns:
- User problems/challenges.
- Testimonials or how customers described this challenge.
- Information about the number of times each challenge was mentioned.
Or if you need to translate these three into a more SEO-friendly language:
- topic.
- Keywords related to the topic.
- search volume.
Unfortunately, data within CRM platforms is often insufficient.
In these cases, your investigation should extend beyond your company. One way to do this is through review platforms.
Learn more: SEO guide to audience research and content analysis
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3. Read customer reviews
If someone spends 30 minutes of their life writing a review for your product, they either love it or hate it. In either case, these users provide valuable information.
You can't do anything about people hating some features or features, but you can analyze the rest and why they believe in your product or the problem you solved in their lives. can.
Most platforms provide a way to export reviews in CSV format. The subsequent analysis process is likely to be similar to that of CRM data. You can also ask ChatGPT to do his SWOT analysis of your product to identify its strengths and weaknesses.
Review platforms do more than just give you access to customer feedback. These provide valuable insights and real-world examples for content creation. Additionally, you will be granted access to competitor reviews to enhance your competitive analysis.
Gathering initial data on your competitors may require additional budget for deeper knowledge of Python, third-party tools, browser extensions, or a lot of manual labor. Regardless of the method, the results provide valuable insight into how your customers perceive your competitors.
If you extract use cases or real-world situations from these reviews and your product covers them, be sure to display them in your content. Adhere to ethical standards and avoid making claims without verifiable evidence.
4. Expand your knowledge on forums
SEO experts recently expressed frustration with Google's prioritization of websites like Reddit and Quora. These platforms thrive on real user-generated content, making them valuable to Google's algorithms. Use this content to help his SEO strategy.
One way to start your analysis is to use traditional keyword research tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, etc. Just look at your domain and all the keywords it ranks for and look for keywords that are relevant to your content.
Using this approach, you will get a list of pages that rank for related keywords. There may be specific conversations, and there may be communities. You can then easily extend it manually.
Once the list is ready, you need to extract the information. This can be done like this:
- Web scraping browser extensions (various options available).
- Website crawlers (such as Screaming Frog) that have the ability to extract information.
- Or a tool like Sheetsmagic that inputs information directly into Google Sheets.
The analysis can be performed again using AI or Python, or manually. This time, you receive another additional level of information: suggested titles for future content.
Find a match with your ideal customer persona by integrating insights from customer conversations, proprietary data, and reviews. This integration forms the backbone of his customized SEO strategy, resulting in the creation of product-driven content in his calendar and his SEO plan.
Dig deeper: Advanced tactics to maximize the SEO value of user-generated content
5. Create content that answers customer questions
For this content to work, it must answer your customers' questions and provide solutions to their challenges while showing how your product/service fits into the bigger picture.
Your blog should not become a duplicate version of your documentation. Rather, you need to present your product's features and functionality in a more narrative way.
Turn your collected customer stories into compelling stories. Ideally, include quotes from actual customers. If quotation marks are not available, please use supporting statistics. Companies like PWC, EY, Deloitte, Accenture, and McKinsey publish a wealth of research that can serve as a source of inspiration.
Let's dig deeper: What Google considers useful content
Align SEO to product value proposition
Starting a product-led SEO journey isn't difficult. Learning why customers choose your product can be eye-opening.
Strategy should not be static. Once you've established the basics, you need to evolve as your audience's needs change.
Only by constantly learning and changing can you build lasting engagement and drive growth. Your customers are leading the way, but you need to commit to following them.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily those of Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.