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Product Led SEO: How to do it in 5min (2025)

Product Led SEO: How to do it in 5min (2025)

The easiest 5min you'll read about SEO. Discover essential SEO tools and strategies for entrepreneurs. Learn competitor analysis, content optimization, and product-led growth techniques.

Gary Chan
February 25, 2025

SEO is really about what are the opportunities already in the market. First, take a look at what your competitors are doing with SEO or their ranking on Google, and use tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs to do that.

SEO Tools

There are also free tools like SpyFu, SimilarWeb and Ahrefs' free tool website traffic analyzer. SEMRush also gives you free searches every day with limitations.

Competitor Analysis

Plug in your competitors and see what kind of pages they are ranking for, whether they are getting enough SEO traffic from them.

And then disregard the fact that they rank for their own brand name, like Microsoft - people are typing Microsoft as the keyword. So, for your competitor, what you want to do is really check out their blog page and their landing pages, as well as whether there are some sort of pages where it's created using data or generated using programmatic SEO.

Programmatic SEO uses data, sources, and templates to create thousands of pages in one shot. Examples include:

Yelp (using zip codes)
Weather websites
Airbnb

10x your Competitor

Now that you have some ideas of what your competitors are ranking for, it's what are the opportunities to basically 10x that piece of content that they already have? For us, it was compliance memes, and our competitor had the "top 20 best compliance memes". So, what we wanted to do is 10X that and create a blog post called "100+ compliance memes".

This was relatively low effort to create, and there's already a blueprint that 20 is great, so why not 100? As we researched there, people are also searching for security memes, IT memes, hacking memes, and programmer memes.

If it’s really a blog article about some how-to instructions you can try to create a deeper analysis one with videos and more images, edge cases, FAQs, and table of content.

The Main PLG Flywheel: Word of Mouth

Stepping back, we did a review that showed 40% of our signups for PLG came from word of mouth. That's fantastic!

This is really supplied by the paid channel driving the traffic in, and then the PLG experience created the virality. It's a very powerful channel - as more people constantly experience it, that will increase word of mouth.

When we think of it like a flywheel, we think of it like it's multiplying, but also either slowing down or speeding up. So you want to inject new ways to speed it up.

Testing the SEO Waters with Compliance Memes

In the compliance space, our competitor dominated something called "compliance memes," and that keyword was gaining a lot of traffic.

To first demonstrate the value of SEO and acquisition as a potential channel to invest in, we went for a keyword that's low difficulty and high search volume. (I will explain more of that in my upcoming post about SEO basics.)

What we did was notice our competitor had "20 Best Compliance Memes," so we focused on creating "100 Best Compliance Memes." This allowed us to rank alongside them, and we started generating impressions and traffic to our website.

This created a lot of confidence with my team and the organization that there's something here - someone actually knows what this means and how to capitalize on it. It allowed us to invest in more SEO resources and effort toward growing our organic traffic channel.

UX of SEO

And why certain pages get ranked better is because they satisfy the query of the searcher, meaning there's related content, in-depth research, images, GIFs, videos, and breakdowns, and there's a reputable author. It's most recently updated in the last few months. It's constantly updated and it's actually related to what you're selling, and that you can offer a call-to-action to download certain eBooks or subscribe or ask them to read more of your content.

When people actually like your content, they stay on the page, they read it, they share it, and they click deeper into your website. Those are the signals why certain pages get ranked better by SEO because the readers actually like those types of experiences.

SEO for PLG

And SEO for Product-Led Growth means there are some opportunities for beachheads (industry-specific content, how-to contents, self-serve documentations) as well as interactive demos and blog posts about why your company believes your type of software should be freemium and why the product-led growth motion exists in your industry.

The Long-Term Value of SEO

SEO is difficult in the sense that it really takes six to nine months to see results, and a lot of companies can be very shortsighted, so they decide it might not be worthwhile. Only later do they realize that they've tapped out on all the other channels or they've spent so much money on paid ads that they need a new way to improve their traffic quality and reduce their acquisition costs.

SEO has also been changing - there's a shift to AI-generated content and social recommendations on blog posts. The way I think about SEO is that if you create really good, informative how-to content, you will be found.

People still use Google and Bing to search for content. When people find that content, they share it in their networks, creating that kind of flywheel of word of mouth and recommendations into communities. As people absorb the tactics, they learned about the thought leaders and eventually visit the site.

Overcoming SEO Stigma

There is definitely a stigma with SEO as well. Because it can be very complex, a lot of companies hire content agencies and SEO agencies to get assistance. But in actuality, it's pretty straightforward mechanics that just need to be understood, tested, and given a long horizon that you can invest in.

Convincing leadership to do that is definitely a challenge, but in my next post, I will dig deep into how to do SEO specifically for PLG, now that I've shared my experience on gaining traffic and proving how SEO is worthwhile.

Eventually you need another catalyst to drive the word of mouth and increase your PLG pipeline. SEO is a great way to scale PLG-motion.