You launch a brilliant new product after years of hard work, only for it to gather virtual crickets on launch day. Zero sales. What went wrong? You overlooked search engine optimization from the start.
Imagine launching a brilliant new product – the solution to a burning customer need that’s been years in the making. You’ve nailed the design, pricing, and marketing strategies. But when you finally hit that “go live” button, virtual crickets. Not a single sale on day one.
What happened?
You forgot about search engines, that’s what! In the digital era we live in, if your hot new product isn’t optimized for search from the ground up, those hungry buyers won’t even find it…no matter how innovative or amazing it is.
That’s where product-based SEO comes into play. No longer a siloed tactic or afterthought, search engine optimization today is mission-critical for any business launching a product or service online.
Buckle up, because I’m about to dive deep into the world of product-based SEO. By the end of this post, you’ll understand exactly why this customer-focused approach is crucial for driving qualified traffic and outperforming your competitors in organic search.
In the early wild west days of SEO, cheap tricks like keyword stuffing could win you those coveted top rankings. But did that translate to more customers and revenue? Rarely.
Today’s smarter search algorithms see right through those black hat tactics. To get serious organic traffic in 2024 and beyond, you need to play by the NEW rules.
I’m talking about rules that analyze factors like:
In other words, to rank for those competitive money keywords and drive high-intent clicks, your entire product, website, and company need to be optimized for an amazing user experience from start to finish.
The name says it all – product-based SEO means baking search optimization into your actual product, services, and customer experience itself.
Rather than tweaking website pages or building backlinks in a silo, all teams (product, marketing, engineering, customer support, etc.) need to collaborate on search-enhancing strategies from day one.
Here’s a quick snapshot of what that unified, customer-centric process looks like at a deep level:
Product Managers: Learn the ropes of SEO to understand how it impacts product roadmaps, feature decisions, and user experience designs. Build products with search discoverability and keyword-matching functionality as core requirements.
Engineering Teams: Write clean, semantic website code and architecture optimized for search crawlers. Streamline webpage load speeds and Core Web Vitals. Integrate structured data and schema markup.
Content and Copywriters: Craft high-quality, in-depth content assets that provide comprehensive coverage on topics mapped to customer search queries and pain points.
Customer Support: Gather voice of customer data and insights into common issues, questions, or complaints that need to be proactively addressed in products, content, and services.
Marketing Teams: Collaborate on go-to-market strategies anchored around capturing keyword-driven organic traffic. Build links, awareness, and authority through strategic digital PR campaigns and synergized paid/social promotion.
Every team and function now aligns around enhancing organic visibility by exceeding customer needs and search engine standards.
Still not convinced that product-based SEO is worth the investment and coordination? Numbers don’t lie.
Studies consistently show that businesses earning organic first-page rankings for relevant keywords generate more customers at a lower cost compared to those who solely pay for ads.
Think about it – If you’re searching for “enterprise payment processor,” which company are you more likely to trust and contact? The first few organic listings or a promoted ad that screams “pay me money!”?
Data from my recent study revealed that organic search drove over 50% of total website traffic on many websites of our customers, and this share is only expected to increase as more businesses adopt a product-based approach to SEO.
Furthermore, fully optimized, customer-centric websites with comprehensive product listings and educational content dominate search results in 2024. Our agency achieved a 194% increase in organic traffic for an ecommerce client simply by implementing product schema and in-depth, SEO-optimized category pages.
And it’s not just traffic we’re talking about. Product-based SEO delivers bottom-line results in the form of higher conversion rates and customer lifetime value. When a visitor lands from a highly-relevant, info-packed search result specifically matching their intent, they’re far more likely to take action compared to an irrelevant cold lead.
To say I’m bullish on product-based SEO would be an understatement. In my decade of experience, the smartest companies are all shifting budgets and resources into building proficient in-house SEO operations embedded within their product teams.
Why in-house instead of outsourcing to an agency? Simple – you can’t out-optimize something you don’t fully understand.
External SEO consultants operate on the periphery with limited insight into your products, customers, and internal business operations/planning. Sure, they can recommend some quick fixes like boosting site speed or adding a few keywords.
But that old school, siloed approach is the antithesis of a unified product-SEO strategy! Only your own in-house team can dive deeply into company data, customer feedback, product plans, and search insights to supercharge your SEO at every level.
My Advice? Start Building True SEO Expertise Within Your Core Product Teams ASAP.
Even companies that intellectually understand the value of product-based SEO often fail to properly implement it. Why? Because in a shocking number of organizations, there is zero collaboration between SEO specialists and the product management teams driving actual development work.
These two mission-critical functions operate in total silos, completely undermining unified SEO efforts.
If your SEO team is just assembling reports and optimization checklists without integrating hands-on with launch cycles, backlogs, and product requirements…their expensive work will never see the light of day.
Conversely, if your product teams are building features, designing user flows, and driving roadmaps without SEO input or keyword mapping at every stage – congrats, you’ve successfully created an un-discoverable product that won’t get found by your target customers! Time and money wasted.
Executing a cohesive product-based SEO strategy across an entire business is no easy feat. It requires top-down commitment from leadership, meticulous planning, and flawless cross-functional coordination.
But take heart – because I’m going to outline a proven, step-by-step process to successfully bridge the SEO-product divide and propel your business to the top of organic search rankings, ahead of the competition.
Executives, Directors, and VPs from every corner of the business need to be on board and see product-SEO integration as a top priority. If leadership doesn’t spearhead this cross-functional initiative, it will inevitably fall apart due to misaligned incentives and priorities between teams.
If needed, bring in third-party experts and real-world data to quantify the potential impact product-driven SEO can have on your brand’s visibility, customer acquisition costs, market share, and revenue gains.
Once leadership is fully committed, assemble dedicated teammates from each core function:
Together, map out responsibilities, success metrics, and KPIs for each team’s contribution to your unified product-SEO strategy.
For example:
Product Managers – Lead integration of SEO-driven market/customer insights into upcoming product requirements and roadmap planning. Build wireframes, specs, and prototypes with search visibility and keyword matching as design pillars.
SEO Strategists – Conduct comprehensive keyword research and map top terms to product features, categories, services, and content gaps. Keep a pulse on emerging trends and search behavior shifts to proactively address.
Engineering Teams – Optimize site architecture and code for maximum indexability and crawler experience. Build internal tools and processes for efficiently implementing schema, rich results, etc across product catalogs.
Marketing Teams – Drive brand authority and awareness to reinforce credibility signals consumed by algorithms. Support organic rankings through coordinated email, social media, and paid search campaigns.
Customer Support – Gather voice-of-customer feedback and surface common pain points, use cases, and language patterns to shape product experiences around what customers are actually searching for.
It sounds like a big lift – and it is. But don’t stress. We’re just getting started! Mapping a cohesive strategy is the first step. Next comes the glue that holds these disparate efforts together: communication and collaboration.
With goals, roles, and measurement plans defined, the rubber truly meets the road in collaborative execution. Everyone needs total visibility into each other’s work streams, priorities, and obstacles.
One simple yet highly effective tactic is to schedule a weekly 1-hour meeting where cross-functional teams provide brief, focused updates and flag any outstanding issues for group problem-solving.
Product managers share upcoming sprints and epics, SEO specialists contribute keyword/search intel to prioritize, developers give status updates on crawl health and optimization work, marketing outlines campaigns to reinforce rankings, and customer support shares VOC data to address gaps.
Yes, one more meeting might make your eyes roll. But bringing these traditionally siloed teams together in constant communication is arguably the biggest success factor for sustainable product-SEO growth.
You should also define shared communication channels (project management tools, Slack groups, wikis, etc.) for collaborating asynchronously. The more insight and context each function has into the others, the tighter your product-based SEO engine fires.
Make no mistake – implementing a unified product-SEO model requires extensive trial and error. What works in one market or industry may flop in another. Processes will need refinement over time.
That’s why it’s crucial to launch phased pilots so you can gather data, analyze results, optimize constantly, and scale successes.
Start small. Identify a high-priority product area, category, or paid search campaign to designate as your “SEO model” pilot. Have cross-functional team members follow the roles/workflows you drafted (eg: SEO guides target keywords, product designs UX around those terms, engineering implements technical specs, marketing gives an authority boost, etc).
If executed properly, you should see a measurable lift in rankings, organic traffic, conversion rate, and revenue associated with the optimized pilot product area compared to unoptimized control cases.
For example, let’s say you integrate SEO insights and holistically optimize your online payment checkout funnel to match customer search behavior:
Maybe your bounce rate on that funnel decreases 23%. Cart abandonment drops 15%. Overall ecommerce conversion climbs 18%.
Success! Now rinse and repeat, expanding product-SEO integration to new areas while course-correcting any weak links in your process based on learnings.
As your pilots prove the multimillion dollar revenue impact of product-driven SEO, you’ll need to allocate budget and staff for proper scaling across your entire product catalog, site, and digital business ecosystem.
Hire dedicated in-house SEO talent to own not just execution, but upskilling teams across product, engineering, marketing, and support via comprehensive SEO training.
Empower SEO program managers to further refine systems and processes that seamlessly integrate product, customer, and technical SEO insights into new feature releases, launches, and marketing campaigns from day one.
The journey to establishing product-based SEO as a core competency isn’t easy. It demands long-term commitment and patience. But you already know the payoff is worth it: a website optimized for search humans and engines, dominating market share and revenue.
The days of disconnected, bolt-on search engine optimization are over. To survive and thrive in 2024 and beyond, businesses must holistically integrate SEO into the fabric of their entire product experience.
No more cogs working in siloed chaos or uninformed teams inadvertently creating unfindable products.
By building a culture of interdisciplinary collaboration united around delighting customers and search engines alike, you’ll open the floodgates to compounding organic traffic, conversions, and revenue growth. The kind of unstoppable momentum that allows you to crush competitors and dominate your market.
You know the old saying – “The best product doesn’t always win, the most discoverable one does.” Let this mantra fuel your approach to product-driven, customer-centric SEO initiatives in the years ahead.
So what are you waiting for? Get those cross-functional meetings booked, align around some pilot products, and start driving more high-intent traffic to your business through search! Your future market-leading position (and profits) await.
If you’ve read this far, you understand just how transformative a cohesive product-based SEO strategy can be for your business’s online growth and profitability. But effectively executing this customer-centric methodology across your organization is no simple feat. It requires meticulous planning, cross-functional collaboration, and a long-term commitment to baking search optimization into every level of your operations.
That’s where the Bobdo Agency team and I can help. We offer comprehensive consultations to assess your current SEO posture, identify gaps and opportunities, and build a custom roadmap for integrating product-driven SEO principles throughout your company. From getting buy-in and defining roles to implementing new processes and upskilling your teams, we’ll work hand-in-hand to establish a thriving internal SEO culture. One that supercharges your products for maximum search visibility and empowers you to crush the competition through dominant organic growth. Reach out today, and let’s start laying the foundation for your future market leadership.
