Product Led SEO — Eli Schwartz

Show Notes

• Speaker 1: (00:00)Bridge toll California customer service number highway miles to the gallon Ford focus, high wind cave rescue operation. What is schema F best wine bars in San Carlos, California. Best Western hotels. How old is Rinaldo? What happened with big grub tips for a wedding? Should I send down the first series Imam Imam on other email clients identify fonts from where to find them or Speaker 2: (00:29)Welcome to the voices of search podcast. I'm your host Benjamin Shapiro. And today we're going to talk about product led SEO. Joining us is Eli Schwartz, who is a growth advisor, helping B to B and B to C companies scale. Their SEO visibility. Feline has helped companies, including Shutterstock Zen desk, Cora G two crowd tackle their SEO challenges and accelerate their organic growth. Previously, Eli spent six years managing survey monkeys, global SEO team strategy and implementation across their entire brand portfolio. And today we're going to talk about the book that he's writing, which is titled product led SEO teams. Okay. On with the show. Here's my conversation with Eli Schwartz growth advisor, SEO consultant, and author of product led SEO feline. Welcome back to the voices of search podcast. Great to be here again. It's been forever in a day, always good to have friends of the pod return. Speaker 2: (01:23)And you've been up to some great things. The last time we talked, you were relatively new. You had just left survey monkey and were going out on your own. Give us the update. What are you up to these days? So it's still doing the same thing, working with some really interesting companies and helping them strategize and grow their SEO efforts. And one of the things that I've discovered by doing that is many companies have exactly the same problem. There's a lot of great things you could do from a tactical standpoint to improve your SEO. But what many of them are missing is the strategic overview on how they're going to achieve those goals, even what those goals should be. And underneath that strategic overview umbrella, they either need someone very senior within the company to be really driving. That can be things like what sort of reporting do you need and how do you get budget? Speaker 2: (02:12)And what tools are we going to work with rather than just here's the keyword we're going to go after? And here's what this, and what I discovered is that by working with each of these companies, to help them build a strategy, there are many, many companies that have the exact same problem. And it kind of goes into the book last year has been very interesting, obviously included pandemic and potentially a global recession. And the problems in SEO are still the same. I haven't heard about this pandemic, go into more detail about that. I am a hundred percent kidding. I have talked so much about, I want to tell you about it. Oh my God, it's all we ever talk about. I'm so sick of it. Look, when I went independent, I left my last startup and I Speaker 3: (03:00)Worked as a marketing consultant and I did a lot of brand development and marketing strategy. And one of the big conclusions for me is that most brands we're not taking a customer led marketing approach. And it seems like you've had a similar realization that there needs to be more product focus in SEO. Talk to me about how you define product led SEO. Speaker 2: (03:23)So I think our product let SEO as the actual SEO effort is the product. And rather than the way most people can do it. The better way of understanding SEO is to understand what is not product that SEO, which is content SEO. And that's the idea where you go into keyword research tool. It can be anything. I like a trust. You know, some rush Searchmetrics, BrightEdge, conductor around Bridger, you know, all the above, right? They'll start with, let's say $29 a month, going up to $99 a month. Anybody with that budget, anybody have the credit card we're actually even used them. Even some of them for free, you can come up with keywords that are related to your vertical and your topic, but there's keywords that go to create some content. And then you hope it sticks. And you hope you can rank on that content. Speaker 2: (04:09)So it's very much of a tactical effort around writing these content. If it's not you it's, you're hiring someone else to write because content hope it ranks. And that's your SEO, SEO approach really encompasses everything about what you're doing. So it's going to be the site architecture, like how do you build the site? It's going to be what you actually offer on the page? Is it just a blog post? Is it a widget? Is it a calculator? Is it a long form piece of content? Is it a entire content library? Is it eCommerce? And how does e-commerce link to each other? So within that approach, I consider it a full on product rather than just a marketing effort, which means that engineering ways into that design ways into that content ways into that, it involves many, many different cross functional efforts within the company, rather than just a single writer writing piece of content and hoping that it works right. Speaker 3: (04:59)So this is a chicken or the egg problem here. And I would describe the dynamic that you've outlined as the approach of content led SEO or product led SEO work content led SEO is starting with where is the opportunity from marketing perspective? What keywords do we work? What content should we create? And then where do we publish it? As opposed to product led? SEO is what is the website, the technical details of the website. How does that dictate what content we should create? It seems like you're taking a foundational approach of let's figure out the technical implementation first and then either letting another team or, you know, your team, but sort of at the end of the process, figuring out what content to create. Talk to me about why the product and the technology is the horse leading the cart here. Speaker 2: (05:52)Yeah. It's really even more than that. So like when you're doing product, let us yet, are we doing any the way you're building a product is essentially based on research and data and talking to customers. So knowing that there's a fit and knowing that there's a use for what you're about to create, no one builds a widget just because they think it's the right thing. Maybe Steve jobs did, but no one else ever did that. They're just, you talk to customers, you figure out are people going to want it? What are they going to do with it? How much they willing to pay for it. But when it comes to like typical SEO, it's just, well, a keyword research tool told me that a lot of people's searches per month, I'm going to create this content. So when you're doing product led SEO, it absolutely is a foundational approach because if you're building technology and I ended up consulting with a lot of SAS companies and I love SAS, and I spent a lot of time in my career in SAS, but SAS isn't necessarily the best fit for us. Speaker 2: (06:41)And the reason why is because there's very little chance of a transaction happening on the content page you've created for sets, especially if the product is very expensive, you need to think about something like a cloud services from Amazon or Google or Microsoft or Baidu or Molly, Bob, anybody providing something really expensive. Yes, they're doing SEO and it's for visibility, but no one's going to like pull out a credit card and sign a multiyear multimillion dollar contract. So really it's about what is it that we need to create. So do we need a website? Do we need a Microsoft? Should we even bother investing in SES? So that's where the foundational approach comes in because when you're approaching as a product is like, should you even be grading this product to begin with Speaker 3: (07:25)The concept of thinking about the foundation first, where I'm a little confused is thinking about what do we build without knowing what content we're trying to get to the consumer? At what point when you're taking a product led approach, do you start thinking about who the customers are, what content they're searching for and how you actually get them to the next step of the fu el. Speaker 2: (07:48)The first time you think of what you're going to create, it's really about the customer. So typically when I consult with businesses that have been around for a long time, they have a lot of data they're not tapping into. So they have customer support data where people actually ask questions that are related to the product. They have potentially sales conversations. So those are things related to product like, you know, too often, especially when it comes to SAS, the words that the sales person uses to close the deal or to warm the deal and bring it closer to their clothes are not contained within the pages of the concept of branding, because there aren't necessarily keywords that are related to it. It's just this sales copy, but sales copy is exactly what people on the internet are looking for when they want to buy something on their own without actually having to talk to a salesperson. So from the begi ing, if you can't figure out what the content is that is useful for the user, I don't think it's even worth creating. Speaker 3: (08:40)So that brings us back to the question. If you have to know what the content is, and you have to take a customer centric approach, then what's the difference between a content led approach where you're thinking of the content first and then creating the technology and a product led approach where you're of building first and then figuring out the content. It seems like you really do need the content or at least an understanding of the customer upfront. Speaker 2: (09:03)Did you need the content? You just need the content that the user wants rather than the content that you think you're going to create based on a keyword tool, telling you a lot of people search that, whether that's even true is debatable. Speaker 3: (09:15)I think that my takeaway here is that the keyword research tools are essentially becoming commoditized. And that when you were thinking about how to build your SEO strategies, you need to consider Speaker 2: (09:29)Multiple data points, Speaker 3: (09:32)Basically building your SEO strategies for Google, using your keyword research tool, to make sure that you understand where people are using Google, but also trying to understand what your customers are looking for when you're thinking about what products to build and what foundation to build. Talk to me about the different places. You look to understand what customers are thinking and what you should be building. Speaker 2: (09:56)So like I said, I love customer interviews. I love being able to talk to actual customers. So to give you a sense, a company I worked with last year is called, get around. So get around is sort of like zip car means Airbnb. So you're renting a car hourly, but you're renting someone else's car. So it's not, I think the car belongs to her. So it's not a rental car companies car, it's an individual's car. So I worked with them for about eight months. I had a unique advantage in working with them in that I actually rented out my car on, get around totally different conversation. Why I felt that I should do that. And I also used their service and rented other people's cars. So very active and very similar to Zipcar. Very much not a service. You go to the airport, wait in line, choose your brand new, or, you know, second year old car, which has a lot of miles on it's very sterile. Speaker 2: (10:44)Like you're jumping into someone's car. That could be dirty, but you're also getting into potentially a car you ever get like a Tesla model S or model X or something like that. So I worked with them on coming up with our SEO strategy. So within that space, now, if you're doing a typical SEO strategy for a company, like get around, you would kind of take one little tiny step back and say, okay, what does this service provide? They allow people to rent cars now. So your keyword research tool look at your keywords related to rental cars. Your keyword research is going to tell you, number one, keyword in this space is rental car and keywords related to that, right? Rent a car, car, rental, SFO, all the different places. Now, if you think about who's already ranking on those kind of queries, it's going to be enterprise.com, which actually registered the domain in 1996 earlier than Google. Speaker 2: (11:33)So very old domain. You are not just the old domain of old business, which used to exist. I don't know what's go a happen by the time this episode releases does not exist. It's still a rental car agency as of today, barely. And then you also in that space, you have the OTAs like kayak and Expedia and Priceline. So for a company like get around and their competitors starting up in a space where everyone's already looking for these queries and you have three pages and four pages of Google where you have established businesses, that's kind of hard to compete. So you take a couple steps back. And again, not just a teeny tiny step back, think about space. You'd go a step further back. And you say, what is it that this product does that is different than all these other companies? And then what are the queries in that space? So understanding the customers, like what makes someone want to rent a car from someone else from an a, another non-business rather than going to the airport, waiting in line and potentially having to fit within the hours that the agencies are going to, what makes them want to rent a car, their neighborhood, Oh, do they not have a car? Are they a city dweller? Are they going on a date? Usually they don't need a car. Are they picking up something from Ikea? Speaker 3: (12:39)They have a family large enough that they need a bigger car. Speaker 2: (12:42)Well, this is temporary, right? So is the family large enough that they usually take the bus, but now the whole family's with them when they need to put them all on a car, Speaker 3: (12:50)Personal experience, it's well, we've got two kids and we could fit everybody in our car. That's a five seater, but we're going on vacation. And now we have all of our suitcases and strollers. We actually need that third row. Yeah. Just throwing it out there. Speaker 2: (13:05)Someone you might know, that's really taking that step back. And then you're creating the content for that, which typically will not exist because that's the product you've created. We've created as a business, a solution for something which we believe there's product market fit. So then there should be content, product, market fit, STO market fit. People should be Googling for that. Not just Googling for the existing. I need to rent a car, but it's like, what is different about my business? So that's where the content of forces involved, but it really involves taking that step back, understand the user and understanding what the users want and font. Speaker 3: (13:38)Let's walk through this case study a little bit. There is a fundamental difference between this product and the incumbents, right? They're a challenger brand, but they have a different business model. The market says that most popular keywords are rental cars and they have a different take on renting a car. What is the product that you're building that differentiates from an SEO perspective? And then what's the context. Speaker 2: (14:05)So the product is really the reason that I approach this as a product is because I think especially for something that is, you know, if it's, e-commerce, you're going to have multiple pages. So it's not really about writing a single blog post on renting a car. You usually have a four seater and a seven seater. That could be just a blog post. What if I want to re create pages that allow me to have every seven seater in every city in the country, that's a product that's getting involved with engineering and figuring out how you're going to scale that, how are these pages going to work? I need a designer to help me do that. Copy. I need to figure out what copy I'm putting on it. Again, it's not a single blog post, which is not scalable in the least bit of seven seater car in San Francisco Bay area. I want seven seater car and whatever type of car that is in every city of the United States, 350 baby. I'm going to break that down by making mall. So now we're going to multiply that by 10, right? So that is the product aspect to it. That goes way beyond well, is their search volume for a seven seater car in Jacksonville, Florida. Speaker 3: (15:04)Yeah. Now I'm starting to really understand what you mean by product led SEO, where you're creating a website that has the technology to a produce pages at mass scale Speaker 2: (15:15)Target some longer term keywords. Speaker 3: (15:17)I'm looking for seven Cedar, Jacksonville, Florida, and you're able to create a different experience, but also a high volume of relevant pages. When do you think about using product led SEO? This is seemingly more of a belly and a tail strategy. Is it when you're a product led SEO team? Are you moving away from attacking the head terms or is there still a way for companies like get around? We don't have to talk about them specifically, but that's the case study. We were talking about ranking for the rental car type terms, that head term. Speaker 2: (15:52)Yeah. So the other thing that's really involved here and the reason I kind of found that this was going to be more successful in a product that SEO is you need a reality check. So if you're a startup and you're going into a vertical where there are a lot of incumbents and another example, which is we're thinking about is life insurance. So there are constant insurance startups. So like lemonade is in the rental insurance space. They just went public. I was just looking for new car insurance. I found a number of car insurance car insurance has been around for a long time for our insurance has been around the internet for a long time. So you're creating a current and startup or any insurance startup today. You're now going to be competing with companies like Geico around for very long time with various stablish domain and a lot of great content. Speaker 2: (16:36)You're go a be competing with MetLife. So like your chances of ranking on your primary keyword, whether it's life insurance, health, insurance, car insurance, pet insurance is very, very low. So if you want search traffic, you need to go not necessarily, but it's a completely different direction and understanding the user. So that's what I think is important to really understand is if you're in a space that has existed for a really long time, you're very unlikely to ever generate traffic from that head term that the keyword research tool tells you most people are searching for. The other thing is if you're creating a brand new product, which has never been searched before, there is no cure of research. So then again, you're going to fall back. What is it that the user's going to look for? What are the query words they're going to use? And what's the intent behind the query. Even if they don't search for complete date, the way you want to be fat, like imagine you run the event space and 2020 happens and people are looking for events. They're just not looking for the events they were in 2019. So one of the things you're going to look for, what's the contribution of print. What's a different angle, or you're going to do Speaker 3: (17:38)Digital events, online events, webinars, virtual events. Maybe I said that Speaker 2: (17:44)Exactly, but like the search volume for that was minuscule compared to events or conference pla ing and all that. So now it's suddenly shifts to what users actually want. Speaker 3: (17:52)Yeah. I think my takeaway here is that the keyword research you're doing is a snapshot in time and it's heavily favored towards here's what the incumbents are ranking for. And if you're able to outflank an established business, here's the search volume you can have if you're doing something that is different and not just directly competing on the same product with an older, more established business, you might want to take a different take. I'm thinking about where search is going to be, as opposed to where it is today. Speaker 2: (18:24)Absolutely. And the other thing is, I'm sure you've had people on the podcast that talks about Bert. So Bert is Google's algorithm update, but when they a ounced this algorithm, there was in like 2018, I guess, or when they a ounced this, a lot of people in the SEO world say, Hey, we haven't seen any results change. Our rankings haven't changed. That's because there is an AI algorithm update. That's based on queries in feeding the queries that you're actually typing based on people's suggests. So that I think is more relevant to how you should come up with content to create using Google suggested queries rather than keyword research queries. Even if there was keyword research queries are coming from Google, because even if you typed in, let's say you type in car insurance, Google is going to immediately suggest car insurance rates. If you're in a specific location, they're going to suggest car insurance, California, car insurance, Wyoming, or car insurance, whatever city you're in. So like really, it comes down to like those specific queries and Google's pushing you down that path. So trying to go after what they used to call the head query might not be that relevant. Speaker 3: (19:24)Yeah. I think it's an interesting approach to SEO. It's a very forward looking approach and I'd love to bring you back on the show tomorrow and talk a little bit about the difference between product led and marketing led SEO. So that wraps up this episode of the voices of search podcast. Thanks for listening to my conversation with Eli Schwartz growth advisor, SEO consultant, and author of the upcoming book product led SEO. We'd love to continue the conversation with you. So you can find a link to Eli's LinkedIn profile. In our show notes, you can contact him on Twitter. His handle is the number five L E L E, or you can visit his website, which is Eli schwartz.co E L I S C H w a R T z.co. Just one more link in our show notes. I'd like to tell you about, if you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voices of search.com, where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. Speaker 3: (20:19)You can also send us your topic suggestions or your SEO questions. You can even apply to be a guest speaker on the voices of search podcast. Of course you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is voices of search on Twitter. And my personal handle is Ben J Shap, B E N J S H a P. And if you haven't subscribed yet, and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, we're going to publish episodes every day during the workweek. So hit the subscribe button in your podcast app, and we'll be back in your feed Speaker 4: (20:48)Tomorrow morning. All right. That's it for today. But until next time, remember the answers are always in the news. Speaker 5: (20:53)[inaudible].