I’m sure anyone reading this will already be familiar with the main reasons to love SEO as a marketing tool:

• It’s likely that every customer looking for your product or service will use a search engine at some point during their buying process. This means you will generate website traffic and revenue from SEO if you get it right. Very few other marketing tools offer that certainty of involvement.
• It’s free, unlike almost every other marketing activity.

But SEO also has its downsides:

• You might have to wait a long time to see any impact.
• There’s always a level of uncertainty on whether SEO efforts will pay off.

I read Product-Led SEO by Eli Schwartz because I wanted to get an updated strategic perspective on SEO. I certainly got it. In the book, Schwartz provides three things:

1. A suggested approach for growing revenue and traffic from product-led SEO.
2. The case that SEO might belong in Product rather than Marketing – I don’t agree with this but I understand his reasons, as I explain below.
3. A useful refresher on SEO for execs/people who don’t do SEO every day.

1. Product-led SEO: a strategic and tactical idea for growth

Schwartz outlines a solid approach for growing website traffic and revenues from SEO. If I were running a B2C website aimed at millions of consumers where the demand for my product was well established, then I would definitely consider following his advice.

He basically advises SEO teams to chase the user, not the algorithm. And he gives a really good example of how to do that:

• Imagine you’re doing SEO for a telehealth company. The business wants to persuade consumers to book an online consultation with a doctor, rather than in-person.
• To really grow revenues from SEO, your team needs to look beyond tweaking keywords. Instead, you should start with the users. Why do users seek out telehealth? What are the pain points that start that ball rolling?
• Surveys and conversations help you to build a picture. In this case, it appears that users with embarrassing ailments prefer to have an online consultation.
• Your SEO team decides to create an online library of articles covering every possible embarrassing condition. By going all out in writing hundreds, maybe thousands of articles, you ensure that any consumer searching for one of these embarrassing complaints will find your content. From there, the consumer is then guided to book a telehealth appointment.

By building a product – in this case, the best repository of content on embarrassing health conditions – you can increase your search engine visibility and visitor conversion while also building a moat against your competitors, as your product won’t be easy to copy.

It’s important to consider all options open to you – spec them all out, with costs and expected outcomes – but it’s important to only choose one and give it everything. Even then, he reminds us that patience and belief will be needed.

“No business should let poor quality content be its first impression to potential customers. Content should never be deployed and then not measured. Content is inherently trackable. It should earn its keep.”

2. Does SEO belong in the Product team?

Imagine that you follow Schwartz’s advice above and persuade your organisation to invest in a large content repository that will bring highly relevant prospects to your website.

If you do this, then you may also want to follow Schwartz’s second point on product-led SEO: it could be that your SEO team belongs in the Product department rather than Marketing.

He makes the point that SEO is multi-disciplinary and must work with a number of departments to succeed. Therefore, the SEO team needs to be led by someone that is acting more like a Product Manager, even if they sit in Marketing:

• Engineering – it is imperative for SEO success that engineering resource is available to help build the product and/or make necessary updates to the website. This means planning, exec buy-in, and (most important of all) huge levels of interpersonal skill and diplomacy. When the chips are down, sometimes a friendship between the SEO manager and the engineer could be the difference between success and failure.
• Content – everyone puts this first in SEO but it’s not any more important than the other pieces. He advises against using keywords as your driver. Sometimes content will be programmatic/short form and sometimes it will be keyword-driven/long form. You need to think very carefully about what is needed.
• Data Science – if you don’t have a data science team, then use the data you have. However, a Data Science team can really help take your numbers up a level – e.g. instead of reporting on how many people are coming to the site from organic search, are those people spending more?
• Design/UX – you must involve Design from the earliest stages of your project.

I don’t agree with Schwartz here, as I feel strongly that SEO belongs in Marketing. It is Marketing that carries the metrics around website traffic and conversions. They also carry the targets for brand awareness and impressions. Those are the numbers that drive SEO, which also has to be aligned with paid search, PR for backlinks, and other marketing activity. But the idea of SEO needing to be run more like a product – with roadmaps and resource plans – is very interesting and certainly something I will think about going forwards.

3. A useful refresher on SEO

I realised fairly early on in the book that a content repository product for SEO is not ideal for B2B technology organisations with long sales cycles and smaller target markets.

But it was still a useful read, as Schwartz provides a good refresher on SEO and Google and what you need to keep in mind. I’ve summarised some of it here:

Keywords used to be the lifeblood of search marketing:

• Search engines used to focus on keywords in meta tags
• Then search engines began to understand the page to parse out the keywords
• Google brought out Panda in 2010 to flush out poor quality content
• Google then brought out Penguin in 2012 to stop manipulative link building

Google continues to improve but the focus now is on the query – what is the user actually looking for and which pages best meet those needs? It does this by:

• Understanding what a user wants
• Understanding web pages, sentiment and word constructs

This is intent matching and it changes everything in SEO.

Google’s key algorithms:

• Discovery – this is how Google finds new pages that it will crawl in future.
• Crawling – Google decides how much effort it should put in to crawling your site, based on number of links, domain authority, newsworthiness etc.
• Indexing – Google decides how to cache a webpage and what database tags to use. Does the page have too many ads, duplicate content etc?
• Ranking – library science is used by Google to categorise the pages. It uses five factors for ranking:
  • Intent of the query
  • Relevance of page to the query
  • Quality of content
  • Usability of the page
  • Context and settings

The 5th algorithm is understanding deeper meaning. Today, Google is focused primarily on the user’s query and what they are actually looking for. BERT is the natural language processing tool that works out what a user really wants.

If you’re looking to learn about SEO, the best way is to set up a website and see for yourself::

• Get your website set up on Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and Bing Search Console
• Search site:yourdomain to see how you appear
• Look at keywords you’re getting hits on
• Check your click-through rates
• Check the devices, pages, number of pages, first and last URLs

From there you can:

• Write content for keywords
• Improve meta descriptions
• Generate links
• Find keywords that are being used and insert them

How to do an SEO audit

What to audit:

• Penalty analysis
• URL structure
• Duplicate content and canonicals
• Internal links
• Backlinks
• Indexation – most important
• Script usage
• Keyword usage
• On page SEO
• Content quality
• Robot.txt
• Sitemaps
• Site speed
• Content
• Spam
• Schema
• Mobile & desktop
• International

The best way to do an audit is with an internal employee but second best is consultant with internal team.

SEO & Digital Marketing

• SEO is part performance marketing and part brand marketing. Because it is ‘free’, it often gets overlooked. People tend to focus on the paid activity and what ROI is coming from it. SEO should also be measured rigorously.
• Revenue should be the true metric of SEO.
• Rankings are a vanity metric and do not contribute to the success of a business. They show you’re on Google, not whether anyone buys. You should be measuring visitors, leads, and revenue.
• If you have long lead cycles, you’ll need to use SEO mainly at the top of the funnel.
• If revenue can’t be measured, at least measure clicks but measure the value of the click. You can do this with engagement rates/bounce rates/pages per visit/time on site.
• If engagement isn’t leading to a conversion event then there is an issue. SEO should be judged on conversions.
• If attribution is hard, use lead forms completed/demo requests.
• Organic can also help at the mid funnel stage, by directing people to webinars and demos.
• Branded organic search is low in the funnel but isn’t really counted.

Personas for SEO

• Buyer personas are helpful for SEO but don’t focus on keywords. Focus on real people. Who is using the website? Where are they in the funnel? What devices are they using? This can effect what type of content you show.
• How to build personas for search:
  • Identify all potential users of a website or product. What kind of content or keywords do they need? Target the problem.
  • Determine how the users might search based on where they are in the funnel – late funnel (brand plus pricing) or top (solution to problem)
  • Slot users into type of content they might expect
  • Match the user with a specific call to action to where they are in the funnel
  • Classify the type of device your users will be using to access conten
  • Consider whether the user will need precise language or culture cues for international content

Strategic SEO

Google’s BERT tool has enabled:

1. Did you mean?
2. Google suggest
3. Related queries
4. People also ask – you should avoid your content being used in Google snippets unless you want to increase awareness

• Google used to personalise searches on past behaviour but not now.
• Learn from your competition:
  • Look at what is working for them and do it better
  • What gaps have been created
  • What links are they getting

Tactical SEO

• Keywords – Google now cares more about queries and intent
• Backlinks matter
  • Nofollow versus follow: some pages with nofollow could rank highly. Google’s AI does the working out rather than leaving it to humans. For example, Google probably ignores nofollow on Wikipedia as links are hard to get – they carry value.
  • Most social media traffic doesn’t count as quality SEO links. But social shares might show it’s resonating.
  • You need to take a PR approach for backlinks – build relationships with journalists and get them to write about you.
  • Internal linking – if an internal page gets a powerful external link but it doesn’t link anywhere else, then the external link is wasted. Ensure you always have links by putting a related-page module on each page that can display them. Make sure newer content is appearing on older pages. Always built a HTML sitemap for larger sites so every page has at least one link. A site directory doesn’t have to be pretty – just an alphabetised list of everything.
• Crawl budget – Google assigns a crawl budget to sites to stop wasting money. You need to tell Google not to waste time crawling lower quality pages so it can efficiently spend its budget. “Crawl demand” is affected by popularity and staleness. Google Search Console can help with crawl demand.
• Google Search Console is really important. It gives you the most correct data:
  • Impression data
  • Keyword visibility
  • Traffic trends
• The most important utilities in GSC:
  • Coverage: you can see how many pages are included in Google’s index
  • URL Look-ups – is Google accepting canonical alternatives for certain pages?
  • Data comparisons – year on year
  • Filtering – compare sets of devices, URLs, keywords etc.
• What to look at in GSC:
  • Brand vs non-brand: branded traffic does not show SEO success. Growth in non-brand is what you’re looking for. You must know the ratio between brand and non-brand.
  • Comparison report: year on year checks on important pages are key
  • Canonicals: they’re only suggestions that Google might accept
  • Errors: some don’t matter but robot files, crawling and schema need addressing
• Duplicate content:
  • There is unjustified paranoia about making sure all content is unique.
  • Canonical just means primary – your suggestions are only suggestions and Google decides for itself. It’s only a problem if the entire website is duplicated.
• Site migrations and updates
  • Best practice is to set up redirects or 301s. You will need to do this deliberately. In theory the equity that a link has earned is passed on to the redirect.
  • Before you launch, crawl the entire site to ensure the redirects are ready.
  • You can never tell what will happen – you might get 100% or you might get 50%.

SEO in marketing categories

• SEO is not a demand creation tool – it is an optimisation tool. It improves the visibility of a website when the demand in there. If you have long sales-cycle B2B sales, SEO is the wrong investment.
• Search is always part of the buying process. In B2C, the conversion offers happens in the same session. In B2B, it takes longer. This means that content needs to be created differently. In B2B, you’re building positive awareness through webinars and other content.
• Mobile
  • You don’t need a separate mobile SEO strategy. The search is the same – what people do after differs. A number 5 slot on mobile is page 2.
  • Google is mobile first so if you don’t have a mobile site, it won’t crawl you.
  • Mobile was last decade’s paradign shift. Now it’s voice and smart assistants.
• Voice
  • Voice takes away multiple results options – and they matter. AI can’t read people’s minds so multiple options are needed.
  • Voice on the other hand must be perfect.
  • The main thing to do is work out how you appear on voice search.
• International
  • Only 10% of the global internet user base speaks English.
  • Google’s keyword algorithm is not as strong in other languages. Synonyms and spelling corrections are not as good.
  • Keyword research:
    • Use Google translate to search all primary keywords
    • Put them into Semrush or Google keyword tool
    • Take the highest volume ones and manually search them
    • See who is competitive
    • Add their sites to your spreadsheet
    • Open up the original site and Google translate and note all important words in title tags, menus and calls to action
    • Now pick your winners
    • Implement keywords on a staged version of site
    • Check spellings and accents
    • Use a native speaker to check
    • Launch site
    • Track progress
• SEO in large company
  • You need buy-in from engineering and product and you need to get in early, or resource will be gone.
  • Political and diplomatic savvy are critical, along with the expertise to show how SEO will make an impact.
  • Keep the focus on small incremental wins, as they add up and you’ll get stuff done. Don’t try a website revamp unless you have to.
  • SEO should be viewed as a product.
  • Too many people judge SEO on rankings and it’s a vanity metric. Measure adoption and engagement and growth in impressions.
  • Prepare a template for SEO requests that includes columns for impact of fix, effort of fix and confidence that impact will work. Then have a stacking ranking of the totals. You must give clarity.
• Winning at annual planning
  • Getting resources is your goal – you can change the plans later.
  • Don’t get deprioritised. You need to be the team that everyone loves to fund.
  • Aiming for 10% traffic increase is not helpful. Aiming for 10% increase in revenue from organic traffic IS helpful.
  • Don’t ask for engineers to update stuff. Ask engineers to build X product.
  • Keep SEO jargon out of your pitch.
  • Exec buy-in is important:
    • Use the same KPIs as everyone else and don’t say SEO is hard
    • Don’t talk about upsides you can’t prove yet
    • If you’re planning a new ‘product’ use competitor numbers from Semrush to show value
    • Be transparent about long timeframes
    • Ask for everything you need upfront
    • Measure – anything that shows progress to a conversion event:
      • Leads filled out
      • Pages viewed
      • Returning visits