Growth with Gary
Posts
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
May 08, 2025

What is Product Led SEO?

Product-led SEO is an approach where SEO strategy is tightly coupled with the core strengths of your product and user experience to fuel organic growth, not just by attracting visitors, but by turning them into involved users and customers. This process starts with identifying market opportunities through competitor analysis, using tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs to research what pages (for example, programmatic or deep resource pages) are already ranking and resonating in your niche. The aim is to create content and experiences that "10x" what currently exists, for instance, creating more comprehensive guides, interactive demos, or super-relevant resources that expressly show the value of your product

Compared to traditional SEO, which usually focuses on traffic and keyword rankings, product-led SEO favors the UX of SEO-creating content that actually answers user questions with depth, multimedia, and actionable guidance, all closely linked to your product's unique strengths. It produces a flywheel effect: as users find and share valuable, product-centric content, word of mouth and organic discovery fuel the engine, pushing product-led growth. At its core, product-led SEO is all about using SEO as a scalable method to inject your product into the discovery process, driving awareness and high-intent conversions in a compounding fashion over time.

Product led 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.

Gary Yau Chan

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.

Quick Implementation Checklist

Ready to start your product-led SEO journey? Here's what you can do this week:

Week 1 Actions:

✅ Set up Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4
✅ Create accounts for SEMrush (free version) or Ahrefs Webmaster Tools
✅ List your top 5 competitors and analyze their top-performing pages
✅ Identify 3-5 product features that solve specific customer problems

Week 2 Actions:

✅ Find one competitor content piece you can "10x" (like our compliance memes example)
✅ Create an outline for your first comprehensive guide
✅ Set up basic keyword tracking for 10-20 target terms
✅ Plan your first month of content topics around product use cases

Week 3-4 Actions:

✅ Publish your first "10x" content piece
✅ Set up internal linking between product pages and blog content
✅ Create templates for future product-focused content
✅ Start measuring organic traffic to product trial conversions

The key is to start small but stay consistent. One great piece of product-led content beats ten generic blog posts every time.

Common PLG SEO Mistakes to Avoid

Mistake #1: Writing Generic Content
Don't create blog posts that could belong to any company in your space. Every piece should clearly connect to your product's unique value.

Mistake #2: Ignoring Commercial Intent Keywords
Stop chasing high-volume, informational keywords. Focus on terms where people are actually looking for solutions your product provides.

Mistake #3: Forgetting the Product Demo
If someone lands on your content and can't easily try your product, you've missed the entire point of product-led SEO.

Mistake #4: Not Measuring Product Metrics
Don't just track traffic and rankings. Measure how SEO content drives product trial signups, feature adoption, and customer conversions.

Mistake #5: Giving Up Too Early
SEO takes 6-9 months to show real results. Most companies quit right before they would have seen the compound effects kick in.

Mistake #6: One-and-Done Content
Your best content should be constantly updated, improved, and expanded based on user feedback and search performance.

Your Next Steps

Now that you understand the basics of product-led SEO, here's how to move forward:

If you're just getting started:

Focus on creating one comprehensive guide that showcases your product's core value
Set up basic tracking and competitor monitoring
Plan 3 months of product-focused content topics

If you're already doing some SEO:

Audit your existing content to identify opportunities for product integration
Look for quick wins where you can "10x" competitor content
Start measuring organic traffic's impact on product trial and conversion rates

If you're ready to scale:

Consider programmatic SEO opportunities using your product data
Build templates and processes for consistent content creation
Invest in tools and team members who understand both SEO and product-led growth

Remember: The goal isn't just to rank higher on Google. It's to use organic search as a scalable way to get your product discovered by people who need it most.

Resources and Tools Mentioned

Free SEO Tools:

Google Search Console (essential for tracking performance)
Google Analytics 4 (measure content to product conversions)
SpyFu (competitor keyword research)
SimilarWeb (traffic analysis)
Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (backlink analysis)

Paid Tools Worth Considering:

SEMrush ($119/month) - comprehensive competitor analysis
Ahrefs ($99/month) - best-in-class keyword and backlink data
Surfer SEO ($59/month) - content optimization

Additional Reading:

[Link to your upcoming SEO basics post]
[Link to other PLG resources you've created]
[Community or newsletter signup]

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.

What's Next?

This post covered the fundamentals of getting started with product-led SEO in just 5 minutes of reading time. But implementation takes consistent effort over months.

The companies that win with product-led SEO are the ones that start simple, stay consistent, and always keep their product value front and center.

Ready to scale beyond the basics? Once you've mastered the fundamentals here, check out my advanced guide on Programmatic SEO: Scaling Product-led growth. In that post, I dive deep into how PLG companies like Zillow, Yelp, and Unsplash use programmatic SEO to create thousands of pages automatically using data and templates—turning SEO into a true product extension that drives massive organic growth.

In my next post, I'll break down the technical side of SEO basics—keyword research, on-page optimization, and how to measure what actually matters for PLG companies.

What's your biggest challenge with SEO right now? Connect with me on LinkedIn and let me know. I read every response and often turn them into future posts.