Summary: Product-Led SEO: The Why Behind Building Your Organic Growth Strategy by Eli Schwartz

• SEO is one of the most effective and sustainable ways to grow your online presence and reach your target audience. However, SEO is not a one-size-fits-all solution or a magic bullet. It requires a deep understanding of your product, your market, and your customers. In this article, I will summarize and review the book Product-Led SEO by Eli Schwartz, a leading expert and practitioner of SEO. I will also share some of the key takeaways and insights from the book that can help you improve your SEO strategy and results.
• If you are interested in learning more about SEO and how to apply it to your business, I highly recommend you to read the book Product-Led SEO by Eli Schwartz. The book will teach you how to think and act like a product manager when it comes to SEO and how to create a product-led SEO strategy that aligns with your business goals and delivers value to your customers. Whether you are a beginner or an expert, you will find the book informative, insightful, and inspiring.

Recommendation

It’s time for a dramatic mind-set shift concerning SEO, urges Eli Schwartz. Stop treating SEO like a marketing function and focusing efforts on keywords. Forward-thinking companies that understand today’s platforms, search engines and consumers manage SEO as they would a product in itself. Such organizations don’t prioritize meeting the requirements of search engines to drive traffic. They work to create value for users and, as a result, users find them in increasing numbers. The days of trying to outsmart Google are over. Sites must earn engagement with quality content and experiences.

Take-Aways

• Update and supercharge your SEO strategy by prioritizing human needs over search engine requirements.
• Robots cannot replace humans when designing SEO experiences.
• Convert users into customers with paid and organic efforts.
• Strategically assess your competitors and learn from their successes and failures.
• Don’t try to outsmart Google.
• Consider the broad categories of SEO and adjust your efforts to serve each.
• The productization of SEO demands a project management approach.
• Implement your SEO strategy and optimize your product.

Summary

Update and supercharge your SEO strategy by prioritizing human needs over search engine requirements.

Marketing leaders seeking to ensure SEO growth must bridge any divide between their marketing and engineering teams. Product-led SEO prioritizes building users a great product first and optimizing for search algorithms and engines second. Relying on keyword-based SEO isn’t always effective, as demand for your product may not yet exist or be low. Thus, your team’s keyword research efforts might not reflect your target user’s desires. Product-driven SEO efforts differ from keyword-research-driven ones because they aspire to reflect product-market fit. Use your product itself as your SEO channel. Doing so attracts engaged users, not traffic from users who have little interest in your product.

“Keyword-based SEO is limited and inadequate, and there is a better way.”

When you focus on building a product that customers love, users become evangelists and direct traffic to your business. Companies such as Tripadvisor and Wikipedia, for example, didn’t build their products to respond to SEO research or existing data. They created desirable experiences for users, who responded accordingly. Treat your content as a powerful tool, designed to serve users, not to trick them into clicking on irrelevant content. Search engines use AI; if you build a compelling user experience, the search engines will reward you with higher Google rankings.

Robots cannot replace humans when designing SEO experiences.

While software of the future may generate keyword ideas and content, the human element will remain crucial. People understand the emotion and creativity that resonates with customers far better than machines are capable of doing. As long as humans are making buying decisions, engage users with human input. Don’t rely on software to adequately diagnose SEO problems – or even to identify them. Work with people to maintain an accurate perspective. When conducting SEO audits, hire an expert or find someone internally with the expertise to identify issues affecting your visibility. Don’t rely solely on automated analysis.

“People need to be able to engage with that content. They need to resonate with it; they need to feel.”

When hiring an SEO person, reflect on which of the following functional areas you require expertise: product management – someone to develop value-added features for organic users and coordinate teams that build them; copywriting; technical issues – someone who understands coding and can work with engineers conveying requests and recognizing issues; and/or public relations.

Be specific in your job description, clarifying your goal in hiring the SEO practitioner, such as organic visibility, and the steps they may need to take to reach this goal. Compensate the practitioner appropriately, but don’t link pay to key performance indicators (KPIs). This creates incentives that can negatively affect work quality. Pay your SEO person as you would pay a contractor or consultant. Create a product-led SEO strategy that’s more than a marketing plan: It should be a product itself, branding your company in Google results.

Convert users into customers with paid and organic efforts.

While search results used to be the success metric for SEO, page rankings no longer accurately indicate the effect of a given SEO strategy on your business. Instead, use the metrics of leads, visitors and revenue your SEO strategy generates to measure success. If you have issues measuring revenue, measure the clicks you see from search engine users. Use tracking software or Google Analytics to monitor user engagement, bounce rate, the time users spend on your site and the number of pages they visit. Your organic and paid SEO efforts should function together to convert users into paying customers.

SEO growth occurs in three stages: Users form impressions by viewing results in Google Search URLs; users click your link and visit your site; and you convert visitors into customers – the most important and final result of your SEO efforts.

“Conversion is how SEO campaigns should be judged. If clicks are arriving at a website from search but not converting, they will not produce revenue.”

Your SEO efforts can attract users who have not yet reached the buying stage of their customer journeys. Reflect on your own desires and needs when searching to better understand those of your potential customers. For example, if you were planning a vacation, you would likely search first for ideas of where to travel or activities you could do in a specific location, while comparing costs. Next, you would refine the search, exploring transportation and hotel options and visiting various appropriate sites, without making a purchase. Once you decided on a purchase, you would search for the site offering the best deal, and click either a paid ad or an organic listing, depending on which appeared first.

To measure the effects of your SEO, use a “multi-touch attribution model” that tracks the conversions that occur when users take a series of steps before making a purchase, and determines the impact of each touchpoint. Alternately, monitor your Google Analytics to assess visitor engagement.

Strategically assess your competitors and learn from their successes and failures.

While it’s great to have valuable content, users may not find it without the right SEO strategy. Consider your company and the original purpose your business aimed to serve. Why should users choose you over your competitors? Conduct customer interviews to better design an SEO experience to serve any unmet consumer needs.

When building your strategy, don’t try to rank high on head terms, such as “hotels”; instead, focus on understanding your users and the keywords they use. Develop personas for your SEO by reflecting on factors such as the culture cues or language users will expect – an essential step if you have international users.

“The best hope for anyone who ignores SEO is that their competitors ignore it, too, because, just like in the financial markets, it’s very hard to catch up to those who started earlier unless you are just lucky.”

Learn from your competitors. If they use a specific query to drive traffic, but aren’t effectively reflecting user intent, improve upon their tactics. Likewise, if you notice your competitors have created content that doesn’t fully cater to target users’ interests, create your own content on the topic and fill in the gaps they neglect.

Companies shouldn’t always prioritize SEO in their early stages though, as they typically face resource constraints and lack the time to achieve their milestones. When your company becomes more stable, however, use SEO to create compounding growth. This entails attracting users who will subscribe or buy more each year, rather than searching for a “magic bullet” to drive growth at an unreasonably fast pace. SEO can compound as well: Sites generate more traffic over time as they accumulate engaged user experiences and natural links that boost search visibility and create deeper indexing.

Don’t try to outsmart Google.

Google has grown dramatically smarter over the last decade, so learn how its AI will affect your SEO. Google has its own methods for giving value to links, and “knows,” for example, that it should value “whitehouse.gov” over other websites pertaining to the US government – not because that’s a government link, but due to the quality of the incoming links it garners. While webmasters used to try to beat Google’s algorithms by creating spam links to boost their rankings, Google now identifies links it doesn’t trust, or “nofollow” links.

“Links are and always will be a part of the ranking algorithm. However, it’s best to think of the algorithm like the smart human Google intends it to one day be.”

Counterintuitively, if you want to generate backlinks, avoid focusing on doing so. Prioritize creating quality content to attract them organically. Use PR methods to create links, such as reaching out to journalists who’ll link to your product if it interests them, or if they view it as newsworthy. Ensure that any pages that receive high-value external links don’t go to waste; link them to other pages within your site.

Consider the broad categories of SEO and adjust your efforts to serve each.

Familiarize yourself with these SEO categories:

• Business to business (B2B) – Whether you direct marketing efforts at other businesses or at individuals, you have the same goal: maximizing organic visibility. But the means you take to achieve that visibility will differ as they reflect user differences. For example, people searching for B2B products are often nearer in their customer journey to making a purchase than other users. Craft content slightly differently for business users, who may require more information before making a purchase than typical consumers demand.
• Mobile SEO – Google uses a mobile-first index; it ranks content higher when it’s visible to mobile users. Take the necessary steps to ensure mobile users can easily see your content.
• Voice search – Voice search won’t replace traditional search any time soon. That said, do consider how Google might process users searching for your site via voice.
• International SEO – If you target users in other countries, be mindful of whether your marketing materials will resonate in their cultures. For example, KFC accidentally marketed to Chinese customers with a slogan that translated as “Eat Your Fingers.” Avoid stereotyping international users or their cultural contexts.

The productization of SEO demands a project management approach.

SEO teams or individuals frequently work in silos and lack resources because organizations don’t properly manage SEO as a product, as opposed to as a function, like marketing. Companies such as NerdWallet and Amazon, for example, beat competitors because they integrated SEO within their companies and products.

SEO success can depend on whether you advocate properly for SEO during your annual planning meetings. When your SEO team makes requests of engineers, they shouldn’t ask for updates that meet SEO requirements, but rather, for specific product features for SEO.

“Rather than hide in the opaque space in which SEO typically operates, bring it out in the open and advocate for resources the same way every other team does.”

Your SEO team should follow the same pitching guidelines as your marketing or product teams when requesting resources. They must avoid SEO jargon that might prevent executives from understanding their pitch. To win needed resources, show data demonstrating that your SEO team’s efforts boost the company’s bottom line.

Implement your SEO strategy and optimize your product.

To implement your SEO strategy, take the following steps:

1. Build your SEO team – Hire everyone from content creators to data scientists who will do everything from designing user experiences to designing structure and layout.
2. Present your case to leadership – Achieve buy-in from executives by proving your SEO initiative is beneficial to the success of the organization through concrete examples of its potential.
3. Remain flexible – Prepare to adjust course when user behaviors change and technology evolves.
4. Measure – Set up Bing Search and Google consoles on your site to ensure you access the right data. Assess how much search traffic you generate and how you benefit from this traffic.
5. Test – Check to see if there are search queries you haven’t found ways to address, and test different layouts to boost conversion rates. Make continuous improvements to your SEO to unlock its potential as you strive to find the most optimal version of your product.
6. Keep it human – While data and machine-powered analytics may inundate you, don’t forget that human creativity, intellect and empathy remain your most powerful tools.

About the Author

Consultant and SEO expert Eli Schwartz has worked with clients ranging from WordPress to Shutterstock to actualize growth and SEO efforts.

Genres

Business, Nonfiction, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Digital Marketing, SEO, Web Development, E-commerce, Online Business, Growth Hacking

Review

The book Product-Led SEO is a guide for marketers, executives, and entrepreneurs who want to leverage the power of search engine optimization (SEO) to grow their business. The author, Eli Schwartz, is a former director of growth and SEO at SurveyMonkey and an international SEO consultant. He shares his insights and experience on how to build a successful SEO strategy that aligns with the product, the audience, and the business goals.

The book covers the following topics:

• The fundamentals of SEO and how it works
• The common myths and misconceptions about SEO
• The importance of product-led SEO and how to implement it
• The best practices and frameworks for keyword research, content creation, technical SEO, and link building
• The challenges and opportunities of SEO in different markets and languages
• The metrics and tools to measure and optimize SEO performance
• The future trends and innovations of SEO

The book Product-Led SEO is a valuable resource for anyone who wants to learn more about SEO and how to use it effectively. The author provides a clear and comprehensive explanation of the concepts and principles of SEO, as well as practical examples and case studies from his own experience and other successful companies. The book is well-written, engaging, and easy to follow. The author also challenges some of the conventional wisdom and outdated practices of SEO and offers a fresh and innovative perspective on how to approach SEO as a product-led process. The book is not a step-by-step guide or a checklist of tactics, but rather a strategic and holistic framework that can be adapted and applied to any business and industry. The book is suitable for both beginners and experts, as it covers both the basics and the advanced topics of SEO.