How to build SEO into your product

I am often asked how to grow organic traffic exponentially.

While that is a broad question, one point I will always make is that organic traffic from the product will impact content marketing every time.

SEO works much better when you don’t have to create the content yourself.

But for that to work, you need to build SEO into your product.

Companies that understand this principle have much higher chances of growing SEO traffic at scale.

What does ‘building SEO into the product’ really mean?

Instead of doing SEO as an afterthought and trying to call on an existing product, “building SEO into the product” means developing a product with SEO in it. the memory.

Considering what a consumer’s intention might be to satisfy.

Thinking about content.

Explains scalable architecture.

Results with SEO in their core DNA promote and index content, useful at scale.

In general, results can be “closed” or “open.”

• Closed goods monitor user experience.
• Open goods allowing users to experience part of the value of the product before signing up.

Not all products can show part of their value.

Calendar, for example, is a helpful calendar management app, but there is no useful way to reveal part of a basic product value to search engines.

If Calendly wants SEO traffic, they have to create the content themselves (which they do). Most organic traffic comes to their blog (see below).

Another example is Canva, which does a great job of building useful content that converts researchers into users with templates and guides that highlight high intentions and direct people directly. into the result with one click.

Some business models just don’t allow SEO to be built into the product – and that’s okay.

Long, high-tech sales circles, or non-software products don’t have to rely on software to be successful.

But the point is that they can be just as successful at reducing SEO. It’s just a different playbook.

On the other side are products like Notion, Trello, Pinterest, G2, or Amazon. These results have SEO in their DNA.

They have different business models but reduced SEO to grow at a large scale.

Notion and Trello, for example, may have chosen to close the production experience. Instead, they allow notes, boards, or pages to be publicly viewed and indexed by search engines.

How does it work?

There is no set process for developing results, just a set of guidelines and principles:

• Get product market equipment.
• Build something that a big market wants.
• Solve real problems.
• Provide a good user experience.

Here is the key question you need to ask yourself when building SEO into the DNA of your product:

What features can you attribute to search engines that satisfy a user’s intent?

If you can relate the value of a product feature to a resolution that people express on search engines, you have something!

A helpful framework for exploring what that might be is Jobs to Be Done by Clayton Christensen, a former Harvard professor, author, and developer of the disruptive innovation theory. According to the Christensen Institute:

“Jobs to Be Done theory is a framework for gaining a better understanding of consumer behavior. While conventional marketing focuses on market demographics or product attributes, Work Theory goes beyond the upper divisions to measure the functional, social, and emotional dimensions that explain why consumers make the choices. which they do. People don’t just buy products or services; they drag them into their lives to make progress. We call this progress “the work” and they try to do it, and this opens up a world of opportunities for innovation. ”

A 5-step process for building SEO into your product

Based on this idea, here is a five-step process to help you build SEO into your product:

1. Identify the tasks to be performed

When building SEO into your product, you need to understand what functions people can use, which is closely related to the main problem you set out to solve the problem. first.

However, you should also take a look at smaller problems that your product solves.

Make a list of all these problems.

2. Make product content matches with accessible content

Your product needs to develop, create, or compile some type of content that searchers find through Google and other search engines.

This is often related to user-generated submissions: reviews, treatments, posts, boards, etc.

For example, reviews or polls allow you to collect, visualize, and present data to search engines. You can also create the inventory yourself, for example for local services or a retail e-commerce store.

3. Explain a smart taxonomy

You need to explain how you sort the data or content of your product.

At this stage, you build a logical and scalable architecture out of categories, subcategories, and examples or results. You can also choose a flat architecture like social networks do with hashtags.

In most cases, this step is predetermined by the architecture of your product and how people use it.

4. Decide what level of user experience you can demonstrate

Take a look at the level of user experience you can show in a helpful way.

You cannot provide the entire product for free unless you use an advertising model.

The goal here is to turn visitors into signs by experiencing the full experience.

It is a balancing act.

5. Confirm user intention

Lastly, you need to prove that your content satisfies a user’s intention.

Check if the keywords you are targeting have a search query and if you can solve the problem that people are looking for a solution to.

For example, Pinterest boards encourage people. G2 reviews help them evaluate software. Comment templates help them customize their own pages.

We’re coming full circle to the Jobs-to-Be-Done framework, as you can see.

Let me give you another example.

Doordash is a 3-dimensional marketplace of customers, restaurants and drivers. With buyers starting the value chain and no one looking for drivers, a restaurant menu is the most logical choice.

Because restaurants are affiliated with a locale, Doordash classifies them by city and restaurant type.

The intention of the consumer is to find a particular type of food nearby or look for inspiration for what to eat. Designing and developing their product that way worked really well for Doordash.

Hard & soft requirements

When you build SEO into your product, there are hard and soft requirements.

Without meeting the stringent requirements, you will not attract organic traffic.

You don’t have to meet soft requirements, but they will increase your chances of scaling SEO traffic quickly.

Hard requirements:

• Google needs to be able to provide pages that are publicly accessible.
• Google needs to be able to access and all pages that are open to the public.
• To rank pages, they must contain valuable content: avoid any types of sparse content.
• Search pages should not be indexed (Google does not want to send searchers to another search page).

Soft requirements:

• Consumers should turn to some way, whether signing up for an email newsletter or for the product, to create business value beyond brand exposure.
• In the best case, the content is either created automatically or by users (UGC).

It’s about loops

The goal is to build SEO into a product to attract new users through organic search.

But it doesn’t stop there.

You will also ask them to sign up for your product and add value to your product. That then leads to more content and signage from users.

In other words, you have to build a lifting loop.

Also known as “flywheels,” the lifting loops are self-reinforcing systems.

For example, a user builds a Trello public board, runs it on Google, searchers find it, add a name, and set up their own board.

To measure the success of SEO, we need to look at it from that kind of holistic view. This is what I call “Organic Growth” – where growth grows and THIS.

More resources:

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Image credits

All screenshots taken by the author, January 2021