Tyler Roberts
Freelance SEO Consultant
Product-Led SEO – Eli Schwartz – Book Review
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đź“· Snapshot Review
Product-Led SEO is a book that had a lot of promise, with an interesting core idea centred on building and implementing creative SEO strategies. The trouble is that aside from periodic references, and a short section or two on specific product-led SEO strategies, this book reads more like an SEO handbook for ‘marketing managers or executives who are responsible for SEO growth but do not fully understand how it works’.
As a fairly experienced SEO consultant, not much of the information was new or noteworthy to me, though the sections on placing SEO in the product team, as opposed to the marketing team, and on how to gain director buy-in were novel in parts.
Giving a score of 2-stars feels harsh, as it doesn’t feel like the book was written for a well-studied SEO practitioner, but the synopsis does reference ‘seasoned SEO pros’ as a possible reader, which to me feels like a mischaracterisation.
Given that the book’s main idea of ‘product-led SEO’ is so intriguing, this feels like a missed opportunity to double-down on specific and notable instances where businesses have created SEO ‘products’, and perhaps explore the process of theorising and implementing these ‘blue ocean’ ideas.
✍️ Summary of Themes
- A general summary of the basics of SEO and how search works
- An overview of SEO strategies and tactics
- How SEO should fit into a business structure
🙋🏼‍♂️ Who Should Read It?
Beginner SEOs and marketing managers responsible for SEO growth, but who don’t have a complete knowledge of how search works.
Experienced SEOs hungry for more SEO related content who are willing to read a whole book in order to gain a a few insights and ideas around creative SEO strategy.
đź’¬ My Top 3 Quotes
- Anyone can create content for search, but these companies created products for search users
- Build an experience that is useful for users first, and the search engines will follow
- Blue Oceans are wide open spaces where industries do not yet exist. In this space, demand is created by the companies that enter it first. There is always a substantial profit potential. Within a Blue Ocean, there is no competition, and the market belongs to a single player. As the market matures, others will naturally become aware of the profit potential, and the Blue Ocean could turn red.
đź“’ Highlights & Notes
Product-Led SEO: The Why Behind Building Your Organic Growth Strategy
learn the soft skills of how to compromise with cross-functional teams and build internal political capital.
I have looked back and realized my SEO success in a specific scenario was not because of what I did but how I did it. Strategic thinking was far more important than specific tactics.
SEO is an art, and there is no rulebook.
Maximizing SEO visibility requires taking the known rules about search engine best practices and applying a level of creativity and logic to develop a strategic approach.
focusing on the searcher experience rather than the algorithm will be relevant until search engines cease to exist.
Chapter One 1. The Basics of SEO and How Search Works
The primary goal of a search engine is and always was to benefit the user in their quest for answers.
SEO Is Not a Dark Art (Anymore)
Without the conduit of good SEO practitioners, Google would have to work much harder to index a web that is not in line with the way it crawls.
search engine’s algorithms continue to improve every year toward the ultimate goal of ranking the web as a human might.
This idea of intent matching changes everything about search marketing.
On multiple occasions, Google has said there are three primary algorithms that feed its rankings, each of which serves a different purpose.
- Discovery Discovery is the algorithm that crawls the web to identify new pages and sites that Google has not previously indexed.
The discovery algorithm simply looks for URLs and matches them against known URLs. When it finds a new URL not already on the list, it queues it for future crawling. Other than adding URLs to be crawled, discovery doesn’t judge the quality of the content contained at each URL.
- Crawling The crawling algorithm is designed to crawl and understand the entire web.
This is the algorithm that will determine whether the URL will be included in Google’s index.
- Finally, the Ranking Algorithm Ranking uses the information from the first three algorithms to apply a ranking methodology to every page.
According to Google, there are five primary factors that drive the ranking score.
- The intent of the query and how it matches the intent of the content.
- Relevance of the page to the query.
- Quality of the content.
- Usability of the page.
Page speed is a factor, but only if it is too slow to be used on a standard connection.
- Context and settings.
Since Google announced its natural-language-processing tool, BERT, its ability to understand user queries in natural language has dramatically increased.
Gather and study your granular data for a clearer rendering of information rather than assuming the site has become a winner or loser after an update.
Websites that focus on providing an amazing and high-quality experience for users shouldn’t fear algorithm updates.
There were three main updates that targeted problematic sites.
Panda was designed to root out low-quality content.
Penguin demoted unnatural links.
Medic demoted incorrect medical information and had specific use targets.
To be truly successful, the tactics need to be wrapped in a strategy to reach a specific and predefined goal.
Chapter Two 2. What Is Product-Led SEO?
Keyword-based SEO is limited and inadequate, and there is a better way.
there are many aspects that make it an ideal Product-Led SEO strategy. It is programmatic and scalable, creates something new, and addresses untapped search demand.
Anyone can create content for search, but these companies created products for search users.
Product-Led SEO Successes
Build an experience that is useful for users first, and the search engines will follow.
Bill Gates is credited with coining the phrase “Content is King” in 1996.
You can’t focus on search engine bots and expect the user to also be satisfied, but you absolutely CAN rely on the search engines following along if you focus on the user.
SEO tools are great, but human intelligence is better.
It is a common agency practice to showcase star employees during the sales process but then task junior employees to manage the account. Ensure this will not happen by making a request for specific employees to work on the account.
a project-management skillset is more advantageous to cross-disciplinary coordination later as the SEO leader grows into the role down the line.
Within SEO, there will be people who are amazing at strategy and somewhat weak on tactics and others with the opposite skills.
Chapter Four 4. SEO and Digital Marketing
It is amazing to me that anyone would still use rankings as a success metric for an SEO campaign. Rankings are a vanity metric and do not directly, or even indirectly, contribute to the success of a business.
Without accurate reporting, executives and SEO teams end up falling back on useless metrics like rankings.
watch the impression count grow—it’s the best early indicator of SEO growth.
when reporting on anything related to a marketing campaign or business as a whole, you’ll always want to connect the outcomes to the input.
Chapter Five 5. Strategic SEO
Blue Ocean SEO In their bestselling book Blue Ocean Strategy, authors W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne promote a creative approach to marketing. They compare the differences between companies that compete in known markets with defined boundaries versus those that do not. SEO can have similar dynamics.
The Red Ocean When companies are in a known market space with defined boundaries, this situation is known as a “Red Ocean.” In the Red Ocean space, companies need to outperform their competition by differentiating on various points of value, offering, price, and experience. As the market gets more crowded, the competition becomes even more fierce, and profits decline for all players.
The Blue Ocean In contrast, Blue Oceans are wide open spaces where industries do not yet exist. In this space, demand is created by the companies that enter it first. There is always a substantial profit potential. Within a Blue Ocean, there is no competition, and the market belongs to a single player. As the market matures, others will naturally become aware of the profit potential, and the Blue Ocean could turn red.
SEO is the best place to see the effects of compounding within marketing.
Chapter Six 6. Tactical SEO
Since search is all about queries written by users, the underpinning of any tactical effort is keywords.
for backlink-building success, think PR first, links second.
I always like to build an HTML sitemap for large sites,
The two factors that play a significant role in determining crawl demand are: Popularity: URLs that are more popular on the Internet tend to be crawled more often to keep them fresher in our index. Staleness: our systems attempt to prevent URLs from becoming stale in the index.3
Impression data—The monthly impression data for any particular keyword visible on the first page
Is this correct? Is it not any time a page is seen regrdless of ranking?
This is the best source of keyword-research data in the world.
On that same note, there is no hard rule on whether websites should make duplicates of their pages for every city or state they service. The answer to this is specific to each site, but as long as there is no manipulative intent, it is likely an allowable strategy.
As with everything related to SEO, the overarching principle should be whether something is good for users. Anything that meets that bar is perfectly safe to use.
Chapter Seven 7. Broad SEO Categories
SEO is an optimization channel, not a demand-creation channel.
Chapter Eight 8. The Company and SEO
The best way to be successful in a process-driven large company is to always keep the focus on small, incremental wins.
Proposing a complete website revamp is a surefire way to a back burner and the purgatory of no budget, but a refresh of a particular page is a far easier sell.
While every organization will have its own format, here’s a format for SEO requests I have found to be incredibly useful.
Too often, SEO requests are ignored or not assigned because there is not enough clarity on what is being requested.
Chapter Nine 9. Implementing Product-Led SEO
SEO leaders should act like Product managers and insert themselves as a hub between many spokes, all providing unique input to the SEO product they are working on.
Much of effective SEO Product management, especially in a large company, is about diplomacy, and nowhere else do you need more solid diplomatic skills than when working with engineers.
SEO is the last bastion where a small business could be on the same footing as a major brand with deep pockets, and SEO can be a major driver of lasting business success.
Stay flexible. Be more attached to strategy than tactics. There is always an ideal scenario, but then, there is reality. With a flexible playbook, you should be able to adapt to any situation thrown at you and succeed beyond your wildest dreams.
If you don’t have Google and Bing Search Consoles set up for your website, that should be on your task list today. Once you have access, they should be your sole sources of reporting on traffic and search visibility. Internal reporting and even Google Analytics have too many inconsistencies in reporting data to be reliable sources of truth on how much organic traffic you have.
The best data about how you appear in search engines is going to come directly from search engines.
More than one out of every seven searches conducted on Google is brand new!
SEO is ultimately a task by humans for humans.
Henry Ford famously said, “Pausing advertising to save money is like stopping a clock to save time.”
Paid marketing is like renting a house: you never build any equity. SEO is like owning a house: you may have a big mortgage, but every month you earn a little bit more equity in your home.