Conventional startup knowledge says that, with a purpose to appeal to potential clients, you must crank out plenty of blogs concentrating on high-volume search phrases.
But that’s not how Amazon, Zillow, TripAdvisor and hundreds of different corporations have discovered success. Instead, they centered on creating merchandise customers wished. It was solely then that search engine dominance adopted.
That’s in accordance with Eli Schwartz (left), the previous head of SurveyMonkey’s SEO workforce and progress advisor to corporations like Zendesk, Shutterstock and Quora.
In his new ebook Product-Led SEO, Schwartz contends that corporations are higher off constructing merchandise that fulfill the calls for of finish customers, not writing content material that appeases the whims of search engine algorithms.
Schwartz spoke to Built In about his product-led SEO technique, in addition to why he thinks content material isn’t king, SEO audits are a waste of time and B2B SaaS corporations ought to ignore SEO.
His responses have been edited and condensed for readability.
What Is Product-Led SEO and Why Should Companies Do It?
Product-led SEO is considering your SEO effort as if it’s a complete product. So you need to take into consideration: Who is the person that may be searching for this content material? How does this content material tie collectively? How does the content material look? It’s every thing round constructing a content material expertise, as an alternative of constructing one-off items of content material focused at particular key phrases.
I’ve consulted corporations which have spent thousands and thousands of {dollars} on what they’d name content material advertising — they constructed out blogs, created a CMS, created items of content material.
One firm invested thousands and thousands of {dollars} in a website, and it truly generated a ton of site visitors, nevertheless it didn’t drive any conversions. Because they didn’t do that top-down method of asking, “Who am I attempting to succeed in? What am I creating?”
So SEOs Shouldn’t Target Specific Keywords?
It’s not that I’m utterly ignoring key phrase analysis, it’s extra that I’m placing all the hassle into constructing a very good product and good structure. I’m not going to focus all of my effort round this one key phrase as a result of it has a ton of search quantity.
When I did work for Drops, a language app, they had been concentrating on each single language on the planet. What they did was construct a very good structure. Instead of claiming, “More individuals on the planet communicate Spanish, so we’re gonna put our effort into [targeting keywords in] Spanish,” they put all of our effort into having actually good SEO finest practices throughout all languages.
Ultimately, Drops was in a position to constantly drive the income from languages that you just won’t think about to be high-revenue languages, like Tagalog, or Hawaiian.
Let’s Use a B2B SaaS Startup as an Example. You’re Saying It Shouldn’t Create a Company Blog?
I’m always advising B2B SaaS corporations to not do SEO in any respect. I find out about their funnel, after which I inform them they need to put all their cash in promoting.
They ought to have a look at their funnel and ask the place they generate most of their conversions. They most likely generate most of their conversions from a salesman. How did that salesperson get that lead? That lead most likely watched a video, or they attended a convention, or they downloaded a white paper. And how do you get these individuals to observe these movies and obtain the white papers? They most likely had some type of focused promoting marketing campaign. So make investments {dollars} there.
Instead of pouring 50 % of your advertising finances into SEO and creating content material, put in 10 %, and be sure you come up when somebody searches your model versus one other model or what’s the pricing of your model. That’s the one SEO you want.
I’m Guessing That’s Somewhat of a Contrarian Position?
It is. I don’t even consider in SEO audits. I’ve been on the receiving finish of these audits many occasions, and what too lots of them are missing are the “So what?” and “If I do that, what occurs?”
An SEO audit is like going to the physician who says, “Yeah, you must lose a pair kilos.” Well, what occurs if I don’t lose a pair kilos, am I gonna die? “No, you’re most likely not gonna die.”
If you don’t repair your title tag, does it matter? If you make your website quicker, does it actually matter? Many, many occasions, it doesn’t matter. If you repair these items, you’re not going to generate any extra money. Making the positioning quicker will not be going to drive extra conversions. And nobody even can assure you that you just’ll get extra site visitors.
I Thought ‘Content Is King’?
The person is king. There’s a lot content material on the market that doesn’t promote; it entertains. I feel if we’re sincere with ourselves, a really humorous weblog submit a couple of B2B software that ranks effectively on search will not be driving conversions.
What Department Does SEO Belong In?
I feel that many SEO groups are within the fallacious place inside corporations. Many are on advertising groups and report back to CMOs, and they’re lacking the mandatory instruments to achieve success. They have to migrate over to product groups.
When I seek the advice of, I work with product groups, and it’s a greater place for SEO to be as a result of SEO isn’t this veneer and polish that you just placed on after the very fact. SEO must be baked into every thing you do. It’s not an after-the-fact acquisition effort. It’s a go-to-market effort.
Any Predictions for the Future of SEO?
There’s all the time this factor that SEO is useless. And I actually don’t get with why everybody desires to kill it off. I feel SEO is definitely going to be extra helpful as search turns into extra advanced. Because Google goes to do a fantastic job of utilizing AI to grasp what it’s {that a} person is searching for, however they’re nonetheless going to want somebody to grasp what Google is searching for, and to construct it the appropriate method for Google to try this.
I feel SEO may be very a lot a job for people. There are all these AI instruments that may “do SEO” for you. And I feel these are an entire waste of cash. Yes, they’ll assist you optimize for Google, optimize your title tags. But on the finish of the day, it’s customers that purchase stuff, and customers which have experiences, and in the event that they don’t prefer it, they’ll complain.
Let’s say you need to ebook a resort, and the evaluations of the resort are all written by SEO AI instruments, and the title tags to the resort are written by SEO AI instruments, however you then go and keep within the resort and it sucks. You’re going to be aggravated. So the essential factor is that you just want people to grasp what it’s that people need. SEO won’t ever be capable of be carried out solely by software program.
