In the tech industry, and especially in Silicon Valley, there is a notion of “product-led growth.” What this means is not obsessive marketing, (opens in new tab) In order to perfect a product, a company invests resources and effort into perfecting it.
About the author
Eli Schwartz (opens in new tab) Growth Advisor and SEO Strategy Consultant.
In this model, satisfied customers are your biggest marketers. They love the product so much and pass it on to others. They leave reviews on their website. Such. They will be your most important spokesperson.
This model flips the whole premise of marketing products to drive adoption. Instead, the focus shifts to getting great products into the hands of users, who excitedly become product marketers.
Unfortunately, most modern SEO efforts ignore this incredibly innovative approach.Instead of focusing on the quality of the user’s search experience, we often focus on keywords (opens in new tab) It almost completely ignores user preferences.
I think there’s a better way, and it’s called product-driven SEO. Let’s take a look at what can go wrong with a keyword-centric strategy and how you can improve your efforts by looking through your customers’ eyes.
More than just a keyword-driven approach
All too often, SEO (opens in new tab) It starts with a set of keywords developed by the marketing team or the founders based on their own knowledge of the product. Keywords are the core of keyword research. They are input into any keyword research tool and related words are output.
The new long list will be seeded with content ideas and posted on the website. problem? Your keyword list becomes a checklist and content roadmap that doesn’t change much over time.
Whatever your actual performance or real-time metrics, the words from your original keyword checklist will be used to create more and more content. There is no room for user feedback loops in this SEO paradigm.
Keyword-based on-page SEO (opens in new tab) is limited and inadequate, and there are better ways to do it.
Focus on the user instead
Instead of using SEO to market your product (when we say “product”, we’re talking about what you offer your users, whether it’s a service, subscription, content, or a physical widget) , the product must be an SEO driver.
Many of the Internet’s most successful websites gain organic advantage through this product-driven approach.
Like many concepts, product-driven SEO is easier to understand through examples than in general terms. Let’s take a detailed example to illustrate how product-driven SEO can outperform traditional SEO thinking in a highly competitive field.
Product-Driven SEO Case Study: Drops
I saw a great example of this when I worked with a company called Drops, Google Play App of the Year 2018. The company wanted to build the world’s easiest website for learning a new language.
The app’s explosive growth (over 1 million users) was purely organic, and the team wanted to replicate this success online through SEO.
From the outside, it might have seemed silly to use search to raise awareness of dictionary products. Google occupies almost all above-the-fold parts of their ‘Google Translate’ product, so it’s always hard to get clicks.
However, this is exactly the scenario where product-driven SEO shines.
Rather than developing simple dictionary products that target one-to-one word definitions (including Google) like other online translation libraries and stuffing pages with as many keywords as possible, Drops Pages puts the user experience first. Built with one in mind.
Like the app product, the web version focuses on making learning easier. Using extra words just for SEO confuses users.
It took some patience, but the impression growth that Drops began generating in search results was stratospheric. At the time of this writing, just over a year after his SEO strategy was implemented, the website is generating close to 30 million monthly impressions on his Google, and the click-through rate for these impressions is Very good.
Everyone Has a Product-Driven Strategy
A product-driven SEO strategy not only helps you build strong relationships with loyal users, but it also helps create a competitive moat. For example, while other dictionary sites follow Google’s algorithms, Drops follows users. Even if Google no longer exists, these users will continue to search for brands that provide exactly what they need.
If Drops had followed a traditional SEO strategy, they would have put all their effort into popular keywords and stayed ahead of their competitors. Instead, the company’s product-driven SEO strategy allowed him to focus on all keywords in all languages in a programmatic, large-scale process.
Product-driven SEO efforts don’t just work for one company. Rather, it is a process that every website committed to SEO should adopt. Her clarity of creating only what users ask for makes her product-driven SEO always a clear winner. Instead of building his SEO assets for search algorithms and keywords, SEO is built on what the user wants.
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