Product-Led SEO Strategy for SaaS: 6 Experts Share How to Do It Right

There are many approaches you can take to promote your brand online and improve the SEO performance of your website.

However, as a SaaS brand, you specifically need a strategy that can generate qualified leads for your business, while improving its online presence and visibility. Creating and implementing a comprehensive product-led SEO strategy is the way to achieve that.

If you are wondering what is product-led SEO and how it is different from your current SEO strategy, this guide has you covered. To help you get your product-led SEO strategy in order, we asked a few experts for inputs to help put together this helpful guide.

What is Product-led SEO?

You may be wondering at this point – what is product led marketing?

A term made popular by Eli Schwartz, product-led SEO is the process of enhancing your website design and performance with the goal of boosting your organic visibility. With product-led SEO, your website is treated as your primary product. You will need to focus extensively on driving up the user engagement, and prioritising your user experience.

For companies that heavily rely on their product for sales, product-led SEO is a very intentional approach towards marketing. In the process, you are likely to put your product and potential customers at the forefront of your business decisions.

In simple terms, product-led SEO ensures that your brand appears in the results, when a potential customer is looking for the product that your brand offers. Product-led SEO, well because there is nothing better than appearing on the first page of the search results.

So, if you are a struggling SaaS with a simple Shopify website, wondering why your product isn’t generating as many online sales as your competitors, you can stop blaming your luck! It is highly likely that your competitor has a product led SEO agency or consultant, who is able to position the product and leverage the brand knowledge to their advantage.

At this point, we should also talk about the low-hanging fruits in a typical product-led SEO strategy.

Combining all the product-focused content that you are going to produce for your website with providing a free trial of your product that customers can explore and learn can really strengthen your product led marketing strategy. Let us not forget the many benefits offered by the strategy for growing SaaS businesses and products.

Hardy, Founder at Supple Digital

That said, you might still be wondering whether going for a product-led SEO strategy is the right move for your brand. That’s a great question to have, and what we will be talking about now.

Should You Go For Product-led SEO?

We are going to be honest — product-led SEO strategies can quickly get complicated considering the large amount of programmatic effort it is going to demand from you. This is one of the reasons why you might not want to consider this as the first strategy that your team will work on.

It is completely natural and even in some cases recommended to start with a traditional SEO strategy that helps you cover all the right bases. You can then use a product-led SEO strategy to double down on your SEO efforts and results at a later stage. Doing so will help you implement some of the basic content ideas, conduct research on more opportunities to scale your results, and measure the impact that a basic strategy will have on your business.

Normally, product led SEO is something that can happen more organically than many other forms of SEO, content is often not created for SEO purposes, but the content that is there for users, or created by users can be turned into content for SEO – this switch often means that the scale and speed of content is far better, when looking at your business or client looking for these opportunities is often a critical first step.

Gerry White, VP of Growth at Mirador Local

That said, some of the common reasons for a business to not choose product-led SEO strategy are as follows —

• They lack clarity on outcomes, goals and metrics
• They lack cross-functional resources to implement such a comprehensive strategy
• They lack the technical knowledge required to implement the strategy
• They are unable to see a creative way to combine search trends and product features/usage

Benefits of a Product-led SEO Strategy

If you have not already realised it, one of the biggest benefits that you stand to achieve from a product-led SEO strategy and a product content strategy is growth. However, before you opt to implement a product-led SEO strategy in-house or through a product-led marketing agency, you should consider all the benefits that you stand to achieve from doing so.

Quality Traffic Generation

Traffic is what all the brands online seem to be chasing aggressively, but what use is it if it does not translate into paying customers. A comprehensive product-led SEO strategy is the perfect way to generate some high-quality traffic for your business website by strengthening your on-page SEO, off-page SEO and technical SEO. This means that most of your Google traffic generation consists of people who are most likely to opt for your product.

Your product-led SEO strategy will allow you to attract visitors who match your buyer persona. You will be able to profile your audience and ensure what you are offering is aligned with your potential customers’ search intent so that you can cater to them regardless of the stage of the buyer journey they are in.

Lower Customer Acquisition Costs

As a SaaS business, you may already be aware of the enormous dent that marketing and customer acquisition puts in your budget. But even though creating and implementing a product-led SEO strategy might require you to invest resources upfront, it is quite cost-effective in the long run.

Popular SaaS brands like Cloudflare and Slack offer free trial periods to customers so that they can experience the product, and decide whether they want to pay for the premium version.

This reduces friction between the company and the user, and from experience it can help capture (and retain) a user using queries higher up the traditional “funnel”, and using more research intent based queries. This only works this way if your content and product messaging enables accurate “user experience forecasting. This is where the user can accurately forecast their experience of the service. This means including strong product positioning and depositioning

Dan Taylor, Partner & Head of Technical SEO at SALT.agency

As your SEO and content strategy places focus on your product, and value proposition, you are likely to start generating qualified leads organically. This in turn directly translates to lower customer acquisition costs. 

Scalable Performance

With a product-led marketing in place, you will be able to measure and analyse the performance of your product and overall brand and website over time. Leveraging this scalable strategy helps because as your brand grows, you will have the ability and resources to build new products.

When you already have a product-led SEO strategy, you will be able to utilise the momentum you create with it, to push the new products that you introduce into the market. If your website and brand is already dominating the SERP rankings, it is that much easier for you to gain traction.

Improved Brand Reputation

Like any other SEO strategy, a product-led SEO strategy too will help you improve and manage the online reputation of your brand. But it is much more effective than a traditional SEO strategy because with a more problem-solving approach towards customers, you are more likely to build a strong brand reputation.

With the improved reputation, you can bank on increasing your customer loyalty, and actually solving the problems that you aim to solve with your product. A product led content marketing strategy reassures the customers that your product is not just hunting for sales and revenue, but is also the perfect tool to solve their problems.

Product-led SEO vs. Regular SEO

A product-led SEO strategy is similar to a regular SEO strategy other than the fact that the targeted keywords and topics are usually very product-related. You could say that it is a specific type of SEO, so it is not that different from a regular SEO strategy.

To understand this with an example, say your brand has a SaaS tool that helps brands hire employees from different niches. You have a fully functional Magento website using which you target prospective candidates and brands to target.

As a part of your traditional SEO strategy, you might produce content on “10 Hiring Trends that You Should Know About in 2023”. This topic might want to educate candidates and employers about the latest hiring trends, in the form of an informative article.

On the other hand, you are likely to produce content on “5 Tools That Can Speed Up Your Hiring Process” as a part of your product-led SEO strategy. While this topic might also take a more informative tone, it will primarily serve as an opportunity to plug the brand’s product along with a few others.

Regular’ SEO in its traditional sense is just the process of optimising a web page to rank in Google for a specific keyword your target audience is searching but the difference is with product-led SEO, you tell stories, connect features to pain points and create content with an end result in mind.

Lashay Lewis, Founder at Authority Plug

When your product-led SEO strategy is implemented effectively, you will be able to find these key distinctions that differentiate it from a traditional SEO strategy. 

5 Top Tips to Create a Successful Product-led SEO Strategy

Now that you know what is product-led SEO, the various benefits that you can enjoy by implementing the strategy for your SaaS, and how it is different from traditional SEO, it is time to take a look at the actionable part of your SEO strategy.

Talking about pre-requisites for a successful product led SEO strategy, Gerry White also adds

The most important two aspects for a Product led SEO strategy is a core understanding of the product and the audience, one thing that surprised me when working on this for a supermarket was that the user journey didn’t match the approach that our approach took, we needed to understand the users journey, vs how our product content was built out, this meant that we initially had both low conversion rate and traffic from what was key products until we resolved this.

Gerry White, VP of Growth at Mirador Local

Let us now look at some useful tips that will help you create and implement a successful product-led SEO strategy for SaaS.

#1 Create Content That Answers Your Customer’s Questions

One of the primary goals that you want to achieve with a product-led SEO strategy is solving customer queries and pain points effectively. Rather than post about topics just because they are related to your industry, and not assessing its helpfulness might be a big mistake.

You may also want to consider audience profiling and keyword mapping as potential tools in this process. You want to identify the different kinds of questions that customers in different stages of the funnel have, so that you can address all of them with your content. You should also create a comprehensive and more result-oriented keyword research strategy using this approach.

#2 Collect and Apply User Feedback

One of the biggest challenges of a product-led SEO strategy is how much you have to rely on your users to empower your content. You need to implement a strong communication cycle with your customers, wherein you gather user feedback regularly to integrate within your content.

So the top tip is to have a feedback loop from every part of the business that touches customers and prospects to get that feedback in as much detail and as often as possible. Talking to the Sales and/or Marketing teams is usually a great place to start. Find out what are the most frequently asked questions, key objections, pain points, etc

Andrew Shotland, CEO of LSGSEO.com

Every time you focus on creating content that aligns with your website user experience,  you will be able to get some feedback in return. For instance, some products utilise filters that users can use to narrow down their search for a specific feature or part of the product. As a result, your business will be able to collect valuable information about user preferences and needs.

This is also a kind of feedback that you can then use to create topics, and tailor your content around. With regular SEO audits, you will be able to identify problem areas, and improve them as time goes.

#3 Ensure Product Market Fit

The SEO strategy that you utilise for your brand and product can quickly fall apart if your product is not adequate or right for your target audience. While there is some merit in using your content to boost your online visibility and reputation, it may not always be right for your SaaS. 

What you really want to focus on instead – and if you want to play the long game –  is developing a product that your users are actively looking for. You want to conduct surveys, and have some 1:1 interactions with them in order to understand them, understand their needs, and understand their profile.

Cecilien Dambon, Growth Advisor at Organic Growth Marketing

What you need the most is a product-market fit, thus ensuring that your product caters perfectly to your target customers’ needs.Product-market fit defines specific aspects of your product that fulfils the needs and requirements of your target users.

#4 Focus on Your Product Value Delivery

As a part of your product-led SEO strategy, your website is an important part of promoting your product. In fact, your website becomes a product that you want to market with the help of your content.

Cecilien Dambon, also adds,

When you have a product-led SEO strategy, your website becomes your product. Therefore you want to focus on how to optimise the delivery of your product-led content so they can reach users searching for it. Make your website more searchable by optimising its reach through technical SEO, website architecture, new features, etc.

Cecilien Dambon, Growth Advisor at Organic Growth Marketing

If you are able to deliver your product value through your content, you will be able to convince your users of the usefulness of your product. You will also be able to deliver a superior user experience with an improved website to your customers and website visitors.

#5 Be Clear About Your Target Customer

With a product-led SEO strategy, you will be targeting a highly specific target audience through your topics and content. You are specifically targeting people for whom your product is a solution to the problem that they are facing.

To help you with the process, it would bode well to create customer personas listing the preferences and needs of your target customers. This will help you create highly tailored and targeted content that will attract and convert customers. You should revisit your customer personas regularly and keep adding new ones over time.

Create a Product-led SEO Strategy for Your SaaS

Product-led marketing if created and implemented right, can produce great results for your SaaS product and brand. Your product-led SEO strategy has the potential to not only improve your SERP performance, but also attract qualified leads to your website. With that in mind, it is a good idea to invest in an effective product-led strategy which will take your SaaS to the next level.

To get some extra help in coming up with the right product-led SEO strategy and implementing it, get in touch with us. We would be happy to help.