Want to fix “bounce rate problems” without compromising on SEO values? Well, product-led content is something you should consider.

Product-led SEO ensures you serve information with your product as the best & irreplaceable solution. But there are some caveats to this, product-led SEO isn’t for all. If you have a startup that sells products/services, consider learning more.

By the end of this issue, you will be able to:

1. Understand what is product-led SEO
2. How to leverage product-led SEO to your benefit
3. What’s wrong with the current approach

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The whole point of incorporating any marketing channel is to generate results. Anything that’s not fruitful, why pursue it? To make SEO fruitful, you need to get some basics right.

Traditional SEO strategies are dead and with AI search, it’s definite that SEO has evolved. Old strategies won’t work anymore and if you don’t evolve, better not participate as well. AI search will take care of most of the queries and better than those who prefer not to evolve.

Now is the right time to get started with promoting your product/services since the algorithm is prioritizing good content.

To make the product-led SEO work, here are a few pre-requisites:

1. Know your product really well
2. Find topics your audience is searching
3. Prioritize business potential keywords that solve the problems and help you promote your product as an irreplaceable solution

With that said, here are 3 steps you can start implementing product-led content marketing for your products/services.

Step 1: Difference between product-led & product-first content

It’s already difficult to compete for organic traffic, and it will only get tougher going forward. No matter how good or bad the quality of content that competes, search engine algorithms will still find it difficult to rank good content on SERPs, thanks to a massive number of pages trying to rank.

What can be done?

Create a content marketing strategy around your product and the traffic that you drive will blow your mind.

Here’s why product-led content works:

1. People search for problems. The intent is to find a way they do it manually or a solution that can do it for them – your product/service comes in the latter. Need inspiration? Here’s how Adobe is implementing product-led content.
2. When promoting your product as an irreplaceable solution, you’re bound to find topics that your potential customers are searching for that also are beneficial to your product.

The problem arises when the product-led approach is misunderstood as a product-first approach. Let me explain.

When your product is the nucleus of your content marketing efforts, it is bound to fail. However, when the problem is at the nucleus of the same content marketing efforts, it’s a recipe for growth.

There’s nothing wrong with product-first content, it’s just that search engines aren’t the right channel for that, Paid ads are.

Step 2: Sales using product-led SEO

Sales is a by-product of right product-led content and driving traffic to product pages makes so much more sense.

Remember, traffic means nothing if there are 0 conversions. There’s a difference between info blogs and business websites.

If you focus on the business potential of the topics you target, you will find the result you’re looking for – sales.

Ask these questions you can ask to validate topics for product-led content.

The sole objective of the content should be to address all the problems that the target audience has and topics that they care about. A small section of the audience will discover your product/service, some will check out and a small fraction will try – that’s what you should aim for.

Pose your product as the best solution without belittling other options. To do this, you will need to know the product/service like no one else. This will come in handy to come up with a solution for some of the most peculiar problems that your potential customers have.

Step 3: Who cannot benefit from product-led SEO?

Just like SEO isn’t for everyone, product-led content is also isn’t for everyone. For businesses that don’t “solve” problems of a target audience, you better rely on other marketing channels. For example, amusement parks and art galleries. Such businesses better utilize local SEO and social media to promote their business. There’s little to no scope for product-led content for such businesses.

However, if you’re a service-based business, for example, a Financial advisory firm. You can leverage product-led content marketing strategy by creating content around topics like:

1. Financial Survival Guide for Gig Economy Workers
2. Navigating Financial Uncertainty During a Pandemic
3. Financial Planning for Early Retirement Abroad

Topics like these have a very high intent of professional help and you can place yourself as the best solution for their problems.

Video Guide

Never heard of Product-led content before? Here’s an in-depth webinar on the topic for you to get started.

Today’s action step →

1. Identify published posts that can be optimized for your product
2. Find new topics using basic keyword research
3. Optimize the content around educating and not selling

SEO this week

1. Chats with Bard showed up in search, Google fixed it within 24 hours
2. After OpenAI, Google has released support to block Bard from crawling your pages
3. How Google is expanding AI search features to more users?
4. Red Team: Google’s ethical hackers who keep the AI safer for all
5. How to debug drops in Google search traffic?

Masters of SEO

1. Want to build links the way Google likes? Nick has shared easy-to-follow steps
2. Lily Ray digs deeper to find more niches & content types that took a hit after HCU
3. While buying links seems really easy and fruitful, it only damages and does little to no good. Says Andrew Holland
4. How to share SEO on a shoestring budget? Connor Gillivan shares easy steps
5. Samantha North shares On-Page SEO Fundamentals to move the stuck blog posts

How can I help you?

I put a lot of effort into coming up with a single edition of this newsletter. I want to help you in every possible way. But I can do only so much by myself. I want you to tell me what you need help with. You can get in touch with me on LinkedIn, Twitter, or email to share your thoughts & questions that you want to be addressed. I’d be more than happy to help.