Product-led SEO and why it matters in the age of AI

We’ve all heard the news: AI is killing search.

Pictures of evil robots and nuclear blasts dot the web as marketers around the globe tremble at the thought of their traffic plummeting.

Already the odds are grim. As it stands, 90% of content does not get any traffic from Google, and as the web grows more crowded (and AI-driven) those odds likely will not improve.

Should marketers throw in the towel on SEO? Or is there a path forward we can take to rise above the competition and continue to grow our traffic?

There is a path forward, but only if you evolve your approach to SEO. In this post, I'll dive into the newest wave in SEO: Product-Led SEO. I'll teach you to think strategically and creatively about SEO so that you can adapt to any change Google throws your way.

Why “Old School” SEO does not work

The reason so many folks in SEO are panicking is that the way most people approach SEO is dying out.

For years, since the dawn of SEO, the method has been straightforward:

• Open your favorite keyword research tool
• Plug in a seed keyword
• Write a blog post (first it was 500 words, then 800, then 1,000…)
• Ask for backlinks from webmasters
• Repeat.

In the early and mid-2000s, this approach worked wonders. It was the golden goose for many and was unquestionably successful. However, as we moved past the 2010s and now in the 2020s, the golden goose is aging and it’s no longer laying eggs.

Why? Because everyone does this now.

Everyone uses the same keyword research tools, plugs in the same seed keywords, follows the same suggestions, creates similar content, and ends up with SEO strategies that mirror their competitors.

In other words, they don't stand out in Google.

This scenario worsens in the age of AI, where content generation has sped up. The time to write several dozen blog posts has shrunk from months to minutes, thanks to AI tools. In this context, a cookie-cutter SEO strategy will no longer cut the mustard since so many more people will be doing this at scale.

So what are we to do?

Well, we can think differently about SEO. We can think product-led.

Product-led SEO: A new way of approaching SEO strategy

Product-led SEO is a fairly new term (coined, I think, by Eli Schwartz’s book of the same name), however, the principles of it are not entirely new.

I like to define product-led SEO as thinking about your website as a product as opposed to a collection of content.

When most people think about SEO, their mind immediately jumps to blogging. They think, "We need a blog” or “We'll put content on our blog." This has been the common perception of SEO for the past 20 years and it has led to many websites featuring blogs bloated with old content.

Instead of using SEO and keywords to market the product, let your product and customers drive your SEO strategy.

Just as good product managers know their users and this knowledge to inform a product roadmap, good SEO strategists need to know the target user, their challenges, and what their buyer’s journey looks like to inform a content roadmap.

What are the principles of good product management?

I’ve worked as a product manager for over 5 years at HubSpot as well as another tech startup, and over my time at those two companies, I have honed a product manager skillset that adapts surprisingly well to SEO.

“Product management” comes in a variety of flavors, but can usually be boiled down to “own the problem, and be the voice of the customer”. Good product managers have a deep understanding of the customer they solve for and can communicate that understanding to stakeholders. There are three things that I’ve seen product managers do very well:

• Understand their users
• Innovate
• Back up ideas with data

So let’s examine these in a bit more depth.

Understand your users

Good product management starts with a rock-solid understanding of your users.

I have yet to meet an effective product manager who did not regularly talk to customers. It’s just impossible to know what to build if you do not have a firm understanding of the problems you are solving. Knowing the customer is the first step of any product strategy. This involves knowing their preferences, needs, and wants, and translating this understanding into a product or feature that provides value.

Innovate

Good product managers don’t just look at what their competition is doing - they innovate.

Product managers seek out opportunities to innovate and carve out unique spaces in their customers' minds. This involves considering what competitors are doing and finding ways to improve on it, or better yet, identifying what competitors are not doing that can potentially be a unique offering.

Back up ideas with data

Good product managers always rely on data to validate their ideas. Using data-driven insights can show if what you're doing is successful and inform the direction you should take next.

In product management, we often talk about the concept of 'ship it' — regularly releasing features and getting them into users’ hands. This allows you to collect feedback, understand how users interact with the feature, and make iterative improvements.

Now let’s apply these to 5 principles that I believe define product-led SEO.

How product management principles can be applied to SEO

SEO is a heavily data-driven aspect of marketing, and when we look at SEO through a product management lens, we can approach it in innovative and highly effective ways.

Know who you are targeting

To successfully apply product management principles in SEO, we first need to understand who we're targeting. By developing detailed buyer personas, you can get a clear picture of who your audience is and what their pain points are. This will guide your SEO strategy, helping you create content that resonates with your target audience and solves their problems.

Align your SEO efforts to a business outcome

Just like product managers align their work with business goals, SEO should also be aligned with specific business outcomes. You're not just aiming for more traffic or checking off items on a content calendar. The goal is to help the company reach its business objectives. So, it's essential to start with the end in mind, considering what you want to achieve with your SEO efforts.

I’m a big fan of setting SMART SEO goals, these are goals that are specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time-bound.

Innovate in the SEO space

You should always be looking for opportunities to innovate within SEO. Instead of replicating what your competitors are doing, find ways to stand out. Consider what questions your competitors aren't answering or find new ways to address those questions.

You can also innovate through the type of content you create. If a video library or interactive quiz would serve your persona better, do that instead of writing the same blog posts as your competitors.

Use data to guide your SEO strategy

Data plays a critical role in a product-led SEO strategy. It can help you understand how your content is performing and how it's impacting your business. Pay attention to the data to be strategic in your approach, be unique, and differentiate yourself from your competition.

Where possible, track metrics that matter to the business (revenue, demos, leads, subscribers) and find ways to attribute movement in these metrics to the activities you are doing (writing content, earning backlinks).

Ship content relentlessly

In the same way that product managers ship features regularly, SEO professionals should be 'shipping' content regularly. Don't sit on drafts or wait for your content to be perfect. Publish it, see how it performs, and then optimize it based on user feedback and data insights.

Applying product management principles to SEO can bring about a fresh perspective and open up a world of opportunities. Understanding your users, aligning with business outcomes, innovating, using data to inform decisions, and relentlessly shipping content are all principles that map well to SEO and marketing. There are three key activities you will do as an SEO: keyword research, content creation, and link building, so let’s apply these principles to them next.

How to apply product-led SEO to your website

When most people talk about SEO it usually comes down to keyword research, content strategy, and link building. Technical SEO is worth paying attention to, but for most websites as long as you have a sitemap and aren’t doing anything too funky with your subdomains, you don’t have to worry too much.

The traditional methods of keyword research, content strategy, and link building are as follows:

• Plug a seed keyword into a keyword research tool, and filter by search volume, difficulty, or some other metric.
• Create blog content to target these keywords
• Spam websites similar to yours for backlinks

Rather than take this approach, here is a product-led way to approach these common SEO tactics.

Product-led keyword research

Keyword research tools are great (we built a pretty good one!), however, they only tell part of the story. If you limit your keyword research to what a tool will spit out, then you will end up with an SEO strategy that is fairly flat and not compelling.

Rather than let a tool do all the work, I try to center my keyword research around the customer I am targeting and the core problems they experience, the goals they have, and the challenges they face in trying to achieve these goals. Like any good product manager, I try to take in as much data (and with as much variety) as possible:

• Customer conversations (support or sales)
• Customer reviews
• Online forums my customers spend time in
• Native features within Google (autosuggest)
• Traditional keyword research tools

I also like to brainstorm bottom-of-the-funnel keywords by looking at:

• What does the product/service do
• What are synonyms for it
• What are the different categories the target customer would place the product in

The goal here is not to end up with a long list of keywords to target. The goal is to understand how and why your target customer uses Google to solve their problems. When done well, this should give you a sense of the questions your customer is asking and how those questions change and evolve through the funnel.

As an example of creative sources for keyword research, one of my clients sells insoles online.

They have the benefit of competing with major retailers like Amazon, REI, and Dick’s Sporting Goods along with the actual insole brands that they sell.

It’s a recipe for SEO disaster.

Rather than fight the same game all these e-commerce giants play so well, we wanted to know why people bought insoles and if Insoles.com could build a defensive moat for their website. We ran a survey with the Insoles.com team to better understand why their customers bought insoles and how often they did. We found that people buy insoles for three reasons:

• For a specific type of shoe
• For pain relief
• For an activity

So we engineered the entire website to make it as easy as possible for people to find insoles for these three reasons. Insoles.com has pages that cover insoles for any sport, the most common conditions their customers have, as well as many different types of shoes. This led to a small team of 5 absolutely crushing their rivals at SEO and building sustainable traffic over time.

Product-led content strategy

Good products solve problems and do so creatively and uniquely - your website is no different. A product-led content strategy goes beyond the cookie-cutter “write a blog post once per week”. Rather than think about content as some static thing on your website, I like to think about content as a feature designed to serve your users and fit into a larger feature set on your website.

Now, blogging very well could be a great feature for your website. We blog frequently, however, there are other types of content to consider as well:

• Landing pages for your SaaS features/use cases
• Interactive tools on your website
• A resource library
• Video/audio content

In building content strategies for clients, the chief aim is to brainstorm a content strategy that is designed to solve problems for the target customer and move them further down the funnel. For an example of this in action, one of my clients is in the video SaaS space and had been burned before by “blog-centric” approaches to SEO.

One of their greatest strengths is the fact that they support converting text to speech for 80+ languages in their video software. This is the key differentiator between them and their competition who are venture-backed and have more powerful user interfaces. Rather than fight on features, we leaned into the fact that Narakeet can blow their competition out of the water with their language support.

They published a series of pages for each language that they support and their traffic exploded. This gave them an authority boost that allowed other pages and older blog posts to start ranking, and the compounding effects of SEO took over from there.

Product-led link building

And lastly everyone’s favorite topic: link building.

Playing the link building numbers game sucks. We’ve all gotten emails that start off with “Hello dear” and then continue on with some drivel about DA and a list of spammy websites. Don’t do this.

Instead, let’s think outside the box, and instead of creating content and then trying to find someone to link to it, create content with the express purpose of earning links.

No one wants to link to your blog unless you have:

• Original data
• An original interview
• Some unique (truly unique) insight

And if you have done a good job of networking in your industry, then you have a recipe for link building success.

Wrapping it all up, what does product-led SEO mean for you?

While the search landscape is undoubtedly changing, I have zero doubts that a product-led approach to SEO will allow websites to adapt, evolve, and continue to grow their traffic.

While generative AI is powerful, most people are using it to simply do what they have been doing for SEO faster (building generic lists of keywords and writing blog posts). All this is going to do is make the web even more crowded than it currently is, which spells disaster for new websites hoping to use SEO as a channel.

Product-led SEO is not a hack or fad, it is an approach to SEO that relies on strategy, creative thinking, and puts your customer at the center of your efforts. While the tactics at our disposal will change, the principles and thought processes will not.

Rather than go into SEO thinking “Oh I’ll just start a blog”, think “How can I make this the most useful and usable website for my target customer”. The more you can lean into solving real problems for your users with content and other SEO tactics at your disposal, the higher your chances are of success. I’ve seen firsthand how this approach can help small teams topple big competitors on Google, and I am confident it will help you carve out a niche for your website in search.