After working with PLG (product-led growth) companies like Dropbox, Calixa, and Twingate, I’ve seen how important it is for companies to have a growth strategy that aligns with their business goals and leverages the full potential of their products. In this article, I’ll delve into product-led Growth (PLG) and how product-led SEO can help companies with a product led growth strategy.
What is PLG (product-led growth)?
Product-Led Growth is a growth strategy that puts the customer experience at the forefront, using it as the primary driver for customer acquisition and retention.
The goal of PLG (product led growth) marketing
The goal of PLG (product-led growth) for product managers is to create a product that an end user love so much that they naturally tell their friends, family, and colleagues about it, leading to organic growth. This approach differs from a sales-team-led growth strategy, which relies on the sales team to drive growth and often requires heavy sales and marketing efforts to acquire new customers.
PLG companies and data-driven growth marketing
PLG (product-led growth) companies use data to understand their customers and improve the product experience. Analytics and tracking are utilized to gather insights into user behavior, and this information is used to inform the product management roadmap and drive growth. Companies that focus on PLG (product-led growth) believe in the power of their products to drive growth, and they use data to ensure that their products meet the needs and desires of their customers.
The PLG flywheel marketing for customers
The PLG (product-led growth) Flywheel is a model that illustrates how the customer experience drives growth. When users have a positive experience with a product, they naturally tell others about it, leading to more users and more positive experiences. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle of organic growth.
Companies focusing on PLG marketing
Companies focusing on PLG strive to create a product their users love so much that it drives growth through word-of-mouth recommendations.
The value of SEO in PLG marketing
So what does PLG (product-led growth) have to do with SEO? SEO is an essential component of a PLG (product-led growth) strategy as it helps companies to drive organic traffic to their website and improve the discoverability of their product. By optimizing their website for search engines, companies can increase their visibility, reach a wider audience, and drive more traffic to their product. The result is a more engaged user base and a higher likelihood of word-of-mouth recommendations.
Essential enterprise SEO marketing for PLG companies
There are several key SEO strategies that PLG (product-led growth) companies can use to drive growth, including:
- PLG Keyword research: Understanding the keywords users search for and optimizing the website to rank well for those keywords.
- PLG On-page optimization: Ensuring the website is optimized for search engines through meta descriptions, title tags, and other on-page elements.
- PLG Link building: Building high-quality links from other websites to improve the website’s authority and visibility.
The end-user experience and PLG marketing
For PLG (product-led growth) companies, the end-users experience is everything. The goal is to create a product that users love so much that they naturally tell their friends, family, and colleagues about it. Companies must create a great user experience, ensure the product is easy to use, and provide excellent customer support. By focusing on the end-user experience, PLG (product-led growth) companies can drive growth and create a self-reinforcing organic growth cycle.
PLG growth marketing strategy
PLG (product-led growth) is a growth strategy that puts the customer experience at the forefront, using it as the primary driver for customer acquisition and retention. Companies that focus on PLG (product-led growth) believe in the power of their products to drive growth, and they use data to ensure that their products meet the needs and desires of their customers. SEO is an essential component of a PLG (product-led growth) strategy, as it helps companies to drive organic traffic to their website and improve the discoverability of their product.
Here comes Product-led-SEO
Product-led SEO is looking for ways to improve your product from a search engine’s point of view is a popular strategy for startups and enterprise companies. The goal is to get more natural traffic by creating content segments closely related to your main product. If you do it right, you’ll boost your company’s performance in search engines.
Product-led SEO is one type of aggregator strategy. An aggregator strategy, product-led SEO can take many forms. Some businesses encourage user-created content, while others use APIs or mobile apps.
What is Product-led SEO?
Eli Schwartz’s term “product-led SEO” (from his famous book of the same name) refers to a strategy that prioritizes improving your site’s organic visibility. Customers, not search engines, drive these website improvements.
Product-led SEO prioritizes customer needs during product development by using search behavior research. Combined, they are an effective tool for attracting more of your target demographic to your site.
Product-driven SEO and the importance of search engines
Product-led SEO treats search engines as content marketing tools that direct users to the product they need. Providing a fantastic user experience is the primary purpose of product-led SEO, so it’s essential to focus on search engine rankings and usability.
It’s important to know what search engines use to rank products so you can make a product that complies with their standards. When developing an enterprise-wide search engine marketing strategy, focusing on product-led SEO is essential.
Traditional SEO vs. product-led SEO
Traditional SEO marketing
The goal of traditional SEO is to increase a website’s visibility in search engine results and its amount of visitors. People are more likely to visit a site if it appears high in Google search results for frequently searched-for words.
Using keywords from your keyword research in titles and meta descriptions, creating a user-friendly interface, and releasing high-quality content are all tried-and-true methods of improving search engine rankings. It’s also essential to keep your site up-to-date and get backlinks from other trustworthy sites.
There are entire departments devoted to search engine optimization. Many companies employ teams of specialists or hire consultants whose main task is to raise the visibility of their website in organic search results.
Anyone responsible for increasing website traffic should familiarize themselves with the basics of content SEO, even if their organization lacks a user experience team.
Product-led SEO marketing
Product-Led SEO uses content and keywords to its full advantage by letting a product tell a story. This type of SEO puts the user first rather than the keywords.
Success in sales and promotion comes naturally when a product is well-received by its users. It’s unique because it focuses on learning about end users and tailoring software to their needs.
Product-led search engine optimization is about meeting consumers’ needs and providing them with valuable and exciting content.
How to tell the difference between traditional SEO and product-led SEO
Product-led SEO is where SEO and the product meet, but some parts of SEO have nothing to do with the product. I’ll explain what product-led SEO is and isn’t by reviewing some key differences.
Changes to your SEO that have nothing to do with your product
- Changes to robots.txt or structured data markup have nothing to do with the product itself and are irrelevant to product-led SEO.
- This strategy is aimed at a market that isn’t looking for products or solutions yet. Most of the time, editorial SEO focuses on pages and content.
SEO changes that are relevant to your products
- Product-led SEO usually builds out pages and whole scalable sections of a site based on how the core product works and its features.
- Product-led SEO is where the product and SEO meet. You need to think about organic SEO when making changes to a product, and there should be specific steps in the process geared toward SEO results.
Product-led SEO: key factors
Factor 1: A good product is the basis of everything else.
If you don’t have a good product, SEO won’t provide much value. People need to want and need what you’re selling, not stumbling across you from the Google algorithm.
Factor 2: Figuring out what people are looking for.
A great product doesn’t automatically attract customers. Knowing exactly what people are looking for will help you fine-tune your product’s SEO strategy.
Factor 3: The strategy you’ll use to introduce your product to consumers.
Even if your product is fantastic, that won’t guarantee that people will find it. Making the right people see sure your product at the right time requires careful planning that will provide value.
As part of this strategy, you might want to write informative blog posts, optimize your website for specific keywords, compile helpful content, or run advertisements.
Factor 4: Success metrics
Product-Led SEO is focused on increasing website visits and sales, so you’ll want to track these metrics to see how well your efforts are paying off. Site traffic, product signups, product retention after a set period, and revenue are all examples of valuable metrics that could be used for this purpose.
Factor 5: Attention-grabbing platforms
Once you have a fantastic product, you’ll need a platform that facilitates its value, discovery, utilization, and distribution. This channel could be a website, mobile app, blog, or social media page.
The first step in product-led SEO is developing a solid foundation that facilitates product discovery and advocacy.
Factor 6: Promotional content
You need advertising content that highlights the best features of your product and drives more to your platform. This material might include blog posts, infographics, or videos that provide information about your product and encourages users to visit your platform.
Factor 7: Link-building strategies
When you have a fantastic offering, a solid infrastructure, and engaging content to promote, it’s time to develop a plan for bringing external links to your site.
SEO fits in with this content strategy. The best way to ensure that customers can find your platform in search engines is to have them link back to it.
Product-led SEO sites with PLG teams
Zapier
Zapier, a tool for automating repetitive tasks, has built a reputation for its innovative search engine optimization (SEO) approach, which incorporates editorial content with app integrations. An excellent example of aggregation is Zapier, which allows users to automate workflows by combining the functions of various apps.
Currently, 13% of Zapier’s organic traffic does not originate from the company’s brand. This traffic comes from the app marketplace. This blog is still the primary source of traffic.
Developing a large user base for an app or integration that ranks well for a competitor’s brand name is incredibly challenging. I recommend focusing on specific use cases with category pages that integrate relevant keywords.
Cameo
Cameo’s celebrity inventory is a scaling mechanism for the company’s search engine optimization practices. The vast majority of its organic, non-branded traffic comes from its browse directory.
It’s market between famous people who want to make money from their fame and those who want fresh content with a strong “signaling factor.” Marketplaces can use their inventory to scale SEO.
Sensor Tower
Sensor Tower, an organization that collects data from mobile apps, scales SEO by using landing pages based on app data. The strategy is identical to marketplaces, except that Sensor Tower collects the data rather than having users make profiles.
Why do product-led companies need product-led content?
Product-led SEO attracts more users and sales.
Most potential customers need to learn how your product works or how it can help them solve their problems. This is a big problem.
This problem is made worse when businesses don’t discuss their products in their content. So, even though potential customers read content, they still need to learn about the company’s products.
Customers will become interested in your products if you create product-led content that sits high on Google search rankings.
This way, they can decide quickly if they want to collaborate with you. There’s also a high chance they will remember product-led companies.
Product-led SEO keeps your customers happy.
Even if customers buy your product, they might not use it to its full potential. Product-focused content keeps your customers educated and ensures they get the most out of your product.
Product-led SEO uses word-of-mouth marketing to generate sales.
Your product is your most valuable marketing asset. Product-led SEO content is a great way to introduce your product to a new audience and get them interested in giving it a try. If your users are happy with your product, they are likelier to tell their friends about it.
Product-led SEO boosts traffic and sales revenue.
Product-led SEO helps you make a product that users will find helpful. You don’t make content because a keyword research tool tells you to. Instead, you tell a story about a product that people want.
Instead of writing a keyword-stuffed product description, you’ll be writing one that helps customers want to buy your product.
The goal is to have users walk away from your website has gained some knowledge. You’re creating something of worth beyond just driving keywords.
Ways to build product-led SEO into your product strategy
Brainstorming
First, when you’re just starting to brainstorm potential new features for your product. There is plenty of SEO potential, especially when considering search volume and Google Trends data to verify current trends.
You can also import data from your search console and analytics to determine which parts of your site are getting the most organic traffic and sales.
More demand data lets you improve the product-focused parts of the process and weigh the pros and cons of building scalable sections of the site with high-traffic pages.
Specification
The process then moves into a checklist-like phase where you prioritize said ideas. You have several potential plans in mind and are trying to assess how challenging and essential each one will be.
Your team can answer the following questions to figure out how to rank your ideas:
- Can this affect search engine optimization? Do you have any ideas for new landing pages or sections of the site?
- How significant is it in terms of search engine optimization?
- What is the difficulty level of capturing additional SEO impact with this specific modification?
- Would this new feature give each piece of relevant content its URL?
- Is there a chance that search engines will find and index the content you create?
SEO Metrics
You need to evaluate your decisions from an SEO metric’s point of view to ensure they’re progressing business metrics in the right direction. Can these updates increase organic search metrics? Can you say that organic search is contributing increasingly to our revenue growth?
By sticking to these steps, you can be sure that search engine optimization will be part of your initial product conception, product specification, and evaluation.
Remember: The product drives SEO, not the other way around
A successful product results from a product-led SEO strategy.
When customers are pleased with a product, they are more likely to talk about it favorably and share their experiences with others via social media and review sites. There is no better way to boost sales, leads, and pageviews, as well as obtain high-quality inbound links, than with this promotion.
Everyone involved in the product should be consulted during the design process. You can fix any problems before launching the product by having them participate.
Product-led search engine optimization priority
Product-led search engine optimization prioritizes the user’s overall satisfaction over merely ranking for specific keywords. The goal is to decipher user intent and deliver results that will be most useful and informative.
Try to think of every possible application for your product rather than just searching for keywords. Keywords should flow easily.
The content you produce has to be exciting and straightforward to digest. The increased conversion rates are a direct result of the improved user experience with the help of product-led SEO.
When done right, product-led SEO can be an influential way to drive traffic and sales. So, to improve your SEO, you should focus on giving users a great experience and making good content.
Success stories from companies that used product-led SEO
Amazon
If you want to see how a large PLG company can use a product-led growth strategy, look no further than Amazon. Their products have been optimized so thoroughly for SERPs that they frequently rank first.
Thanks to this exposure, Amazon has received millions of monthly hits.
For product-led SEO, no one does it better than Amazon. Search terms used by customers to find the product they want are included in the page’s optimization. And they don’t stop there; they also tweak the images and videos associated with the products to match better what customers are looking for when they search for a product.
Amazon ranks first in organic search results because this process optimizes the keyword Product Page.
TripAdvisor
TripAdvisor has used product-led SEO to dominate SERPs for many travel-related searches. The website publishes many user reviews. These reviews and user curation are integrated into users’ existing behavior.
An increase in TripAdvisor bookings for hotels and restaurants is predicted as a result of the hundreds of thousands of positive reviews currently available on the site.
TripAdvisor’s content structure also demonstrates a solid grasp of user search intent. You can quickly find the information you need by searching for a combination of keywords such as “hotel + city + price,” which will bring up relevant results matching your criteria.
WebMD
WebMD is a service that lists relevant websites and information for specific medical topics.
The goal is to improve users’ experiences by providing content that specifically answers their questions. WebMD has achieved successful product-led SEO results thanks to its high-quality content and simple navigation.
Slack
Slack was able to expand thanks to positive reviews and word-of-mouth marketing. They also eliminated an early need for content marketing by letting users help spread the word. Another creative way for SEO to grow was not to force people to switch from free to paid accounts.
The free option works perfectly well. It limits how much you can use it, so switching is easy. When this simple upgrade is needed, a 10-person team is used to the product and more likely to continue using it.
Improved user experience: Product-led SEOs focus on improving the user experience by optimizing the product or service, which can lead to increased engagement, higher retention rates, and better customer satisfaction.
Hire a product-les SEO consultant
Better alignment with business goals:
Product-led SEOs work closely with product teams to ensure that SEO goals are aligned with PLG companies’ goals. This helps to ensure that SEO efforts are focused on driving revenue and other key business metrics.
Increased traffic and conversions:
By optimizing the product or service, a product-led SEO can help drive more traffic and conversions. This is because users are more likely to engage with a product or service that has been optimized for their needs.
More efficient use of resources:
Product-led SEOs often work closely with product teams to identify opportunities for optimization. This helps to ensure that resources are focused on high-impact areas and can lead to more efficient use of resources.
Competitive advantage:
A product-led SEO approach can help PLG companies stand out from the competition by providing a better user experience, more relevant content, and a more optimized product or service.
Overall, hiring a product-led SEO can help companies achieve their business goals by improving the user experience, increasing traffic and conversions, and providing a competitive advantage.
Do you need help with your PLG (product-led growth) strategy? Hire a product-led consultant today! Schedule a free discovery session and receive a complimentary site audit.
Sources:
- Ong, Si Quan. “Product-Led Content: What It Is, Why Use It, and How to Get Started.” SEO Blog by Ahrefs, 15 Aug. 2022, ahrefs.com/blog/product-led-content.
- “How to Accelerate Your Marketing Strategy With Product-Led SEO.” SearchPilot, 2 Jan. 2006, www.searchpilot.com/resources/blog/product-led-seo.
- Indig, Kevin. “5 Examples of Product-led SEO.” Kevin Indig, 29 Aug. 2022, www.kevin-indig.com/5-examples-of-product-led-seo.
- Schwartz, Eli. “The Magic of a Product-led SEO Strategy.” TechRadar, 3 Feb. 2022, www.techradar.com/features/the-magic-of-a-product-led-seo-strategy.
- Uhlir, Kurt. “Product-Led SEO: How Product-Driven SEO Led to the Success of Companies Like Amazon and What Your Company Needs to Know.” KurtUhlir.com, 22 Aug. 2022, kurtuhlir.com/product-led-seo.
