👓 Product-Led vs Marketing-Led SEO

When is SEO product-led vs marketing-led? 

Does it matter?

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Effective SEO initiatives are desirable because organic traffic is almost always higher intent than paid traffic.

But SEO initiatives can be diverse:

• User generated company distributed content (Examples: Quora, Reddit, HN, Pinterest, G2, ...)

• Company generated company distributed programmatic SEO (Examples: Snyk vulnerability DB, Snyk Advisor, Zapier integration pages, ...)

• Company generated company distributed editorial SEO (Example: most blogs)

Most people view the examples in the first two categories as product-led initiatives.

Historically (and still in most companies today) the third category is owned by the marketing team, and seen as a marketing-led growth lever (even when the content is written by folks outside of marketing e.g. Datadog started with developers creating their blog content).

Regardless of which type of SEO, when it’s a downstream non-product consideration it can lead to inefficient execution and significant missed opportunity.

For product-led companies leveraging SEO it needs to be integral to your strategy, and integrated with how you think about and build product.

This is standard practice in B2C, and increasingly common in B2B.

It doesn't mean that marketing teams aren't still best placed to 'own' the website.

But there are 3 best practices you should follow:

1. Embed SEO expertise into growth and product teams

I’ve found it to be a game changer to integrate SEO expertise into product and growth teams working on acquisition. Treating SEO as something you outsource (be that externally, or internally) slows everything down and prevents you from doing the next two things well.

Of course not every team will need SEO expertise, but for those that do, in my experience, the embedded model has always delivered better outcomes than any other.

2. Think end-to-end

When defining ‘the product’, consider the end-to-end user experience across all surfaces.

At Snyk, we found adjacent problems to developer security (for example developer security education with Snyk Learn, developer package selection with Snyk Advisor), and we built entire user journeys that led to adoption of the core platform.

3. Build content into the overall product growth model

Content - and therefore SEO - should be something baked into growth strategy and therefore the models that you build.

Document and create a shared understanding of the qualitative and quantitative impact on growth. This should cover the independent impact, but also the interplay with other parts of your growth model.

Summary

So does it matter whether SEO is product-led or marketing-led?

It does.

But it’s not about people, functions or ownership.

It’s about the mindset and approach to driving growth through SEO.

The most successful PLG companies treat ALL SEO initiatives as an inclusive part of their product-led strategy.

This post was presented by Sprig and Dopt.

Until next time!