"What we need is a better approach to keyword research so we can create content that stands out, overshoots user expectations and is attractive to search engines."

"Good content answers questions and every question is a problem. Hence, if you want to create good content you need to focus on the problem it should solve."

"Instead of heading to the next SEO tool, I started on Quora, Twitter, Youtube, and Co"

"I wanted to find the topics related to toothbrushes that people really care about."

"Social networks are built around discussions and opinions, which makes them a much better tool than search engines."

"Questions Problem, topic, and query User intent Funnel stage Content ideas"

"Starting the research with questions makes it easier to put the pieces together and uncover the underlying problems and bigger topics."

"When researching on Quora, you should save links to the questions, so you can add your answer when you created the content."

"Use all platforms, not just a few. There’s always an angle, question, or trail that you find on one of these that makes your list of questions and queries better."

"A good content marketing strategy considers topics, problems, and queries."

"A problem is a real-life case behind the search. It helps us to understand what a user is trying to accomplish with a search."

"Group problems into a topic because Google measures topical relevance. It’s smarter to create content for one topic first and then advance to the next one to forge expertise."

"Every problem must also be targeting a query to add up to an SEO strategy. Like problems, queries add up to topics as well."

"I often start with a few questions, identify their queries, look at related queries, then find more questions from that, etc."

"Once you have identified topics, questions, and queries, it’s time to look at user intent. As I explained in User Intent mapping on steroids, Google mentions 6 basic user intents:"

"SERP features like a featured snippet or Google shopping ads can tell us what user intent Google sees for a query."

"While User Intent is the intention behind a search, the buyer’s funnel is the sequence of intents mapped to a business."

"For blogs and landing pages, I personally like the “See-Think-Do-Care” framework, originally invented by Avinash Kaushik"

"You can apply this framework to your content and keywords to understand your gaps."

"If you want to create high-quality content you should also consider the situation connected to the problem(s)."

"SEO for large vs. small sites is very different, not only from a technical but from a content perspective. Large sites can capitalize on their product inventory or user-generated content for SEO."

"But small sites that cannot scale in the same fashion and rely much more on Content Marketing."

"Defining the right goal for SEO"

"Everything starts with a goal. Most startups “just want more organic traffic”, but that doesn’t cut it."

"“More traffic” is not a goal; “+30% conversion from organic traffic YoY” is."

"You should also ask yourself the philosophical question ""What does success in SEO look like?”"

"A weekly meeting with the SEO team, analysts, and other stakeholders (e.g. paid team, Growth team, product marketers, etc.) to discuss and measure progress."

"A bi-weekly or monthly SEO report that’s sent out to the key stakeholders – even the CEO if SEO is a crucial channel for the company – to give a high-level overview of performance and current projects."

"One of the biggest questions about SEO teams is where they should be positioned in the company structure."

"The best answer to where SEO should live depends on the business model. B2B vs. B2C is not a good filter since some SaaS companies can use their product to scale SEO (to a degree), for example, Trello (boards) or Typeform (templates)."

"If you have a public facing product that allows SEO to scale, say reviews like Yelp or listings like AirBNB, SEO needs to be integrated into the Product organization."

"The team has to be part of the product team and the SEO lead should report to the CTO (or CPO)"

"Scalable SEO products mostly occur in companies with consumer focus."

"If you rely on Content Marketing to drive SEO, like Hubspot or certain products of Atlassian (e.g. Jira), the SEO team often sits in Marketing."

"In this case, SEO relies much more on resources from design, writers, PR/brand, IT, developers, etc. and often has to compete for them. Thus, success stands and falls with allocating enough resources to SEO and creating shared KPIs to create a sense of responsibility for other teams."

"The fastest growing companies drive growth with dedicated teams that own user acquisition, retention, and monetization."

"In this case, SEO lives under user-acquisition but shares many touch points with retention as well."

"It can have a big impact on retention as well by using keyword research to identify keywords that indicate problems with the product, intents to churn, or missing features."

"If your SEO organization is integrated, the focus on technical SEO is much higher."

"The number of technical SEOs you hire depends on how many fields of technical SEO are important for your product"

"If your SEO team is not integrated and (self-created) content plays a bigger role, the SEO organization stands and falls with writers."

"In best case, they’re part of the SEO team. Having content creators isolated from the SEO team is a bad idea."

"SEO has become too broad to live in isolation; cooperation with other teams, like developers, analysts, writers, etc. has become vital."

"Thus, it’s important for the SEO lead to build bridges to other teams, especially when SEO is not integrated."

"There are two ways to build bridges: ongoing collaboration and cross-functional teams."

"Ongoing collaboration is composed by creating regular meetings with the SEO team and others, placing members of the SEO teams in other teams’ meetings, and finding shared goals/KPIs."

"Cross-functional teams are another way to strengthen the connection between separate teams and focus on projects. A tip I can give you is not to wait for cross-functional teams to form themselves, but to be proactive about them."

"A fine-tuned SEO machine: Input > Process > Output"

"To find them, use your SEO tools of choice to filter your keywords for position > 30 and including question modifiers like “why, where, what, when, or how“."

"The biggest SEO gains for large sites come from new or improved product features."

"Inventory-driven sites have scalable and indexable page templates, either from UGC or product inventory, whereas content-driven sites generate organic traffic with content they create themselves."

"New product features are really only useful for large sites that scale with inventory, which I call “decentralized” in an article about internal linking and in one about finding the right SEO strategy for your business."

"Inventory and how it's displayed is a product feature, especially for marketplaces."

"Good SEOs always find a way to scale inventory, make it indexable, and optimize it."

"The goal is to find keywords that can be targeted with new features and then optimize page templates to rank higher."

"Two challenges arise from that: 1.    Discovering new product features to grow SEO at scale 2.    Getting them shipped"

"New SEO product features are page template enhancements that target certain keyword groups."

"SEO is not an approach product people usually take to inform new features. SEO quantifies customer needs because it’s based on search demand a.k.a. problems real people have."

"As such, SEO research - not classic keyword research - can be a very potent way to discover and develop new product features based on search volume."

"To find something you can “get inspiration from”, you can simply punch your competitor into the content/keyword gap feature of tools like AHREFS or SEMrush and look for keywords you’re not ranking for."

"The framework I found most helpful to discover new keywords and features is “jobs-to-be-done” by Clayton Christensen."

"It considers how a customer thinks about a solution but also how the customer believes to be perceived while using the solution."

"The key outcome of using the JTBD framework is job statements. They consist of a verb, an object, and context like “research new software solutions at work”."

"Part of selling well is knowing your audience and the language they speak."

"So, you need to learn “product speak” and workflows."

"Mind you that even when you can sell well, you need to consider how SEO fits into the company from an organizational point of view. That has a big impact on how successful you can be."

"SEO is less a ""tangible"" thing and much more a meta-layer we add on top of things like web development, design, or writing. You don’t just “do SEO” - you apply it to something. That’s why the success of SEOs depends on the execution of others."

"Getting technical SEO right means to inform the product team based on organic traffic opportunities. There are three ways to do that, ranked by effectiveness."

"SEO is part of the product organization, which I wrote about at length in “Forging a fine-tuned SEO machine”"

"The product roadmap has a fixed SEO track"

"Product teams and SEO have ongoing meetings and communication"

"The dream scenario is having direct reporting lines from developers to SEOs."

"Evangelization of SEO (a) demands constant education and promotion of why SEO is important and how to do it. Convincing executives (b) is a question of how well you speak “money”, meaning how clearly you’re able to communicate that your goals align with revenue."

"SEOs need to add that perspective to their tool kits to be successful because product features and experience matter so much more for organic traffic."

"""Aggregation Theory,"" a term coined by Ben Thompson, describes how disruptive internet companies channel demand based on superior user experience and free distribution and transaction cost."

"In Aggregation Theory, the input is superior user experience, and the output is more users."

"Integrators, on the other hand, have a strongly differentiated product that they directly distribute to customers."

"Integrators like The New York Times, Apple, or Peloton own the whole value chain: suppliers, production or creation, and distribution."

"The goal of integrators is to maximize margin by integrating vertically, but they don't have the same type of network effects that Aggregators have."

"Instead, the input for Integrators is production value, and the output is content."

"I tapped into the nuances of SEO in the difference between inventory-driven and content-driven sites and centralized versus decentralized sites."

"The common denominator for Integrators and Aggregators is strong Product/Market Fit."

"Aggregators can leverage the power of network effects that result from consolidating demand."

"They benefit from aggregated instead of self-created ""inventory"": products, users, businesses, or ads."

"Aggregators are typically marketplaces that commoditize supply: ads, search results, etc., look the same. That commoditization drives scale."

"On the other hand, integrators create content themselves with the goal of increasing margins from production to distribution."

"Their levers are production value of content, consumer experience, differentiation, and distribution efficiency."

"Integrators should strive for content-market fit and compounding trust and brand effects."

"The strongest Growth levers for Integrators are content marketing, paid acquisition channels, Word of Mouth, and referrals."

"There is a third type of company: platforms. Shopify, WordPress, and Stripe build platforms for other companies to build on."

"They grow with their user base and share the approach to Growth with Integrators"

"Integrators: create the product themselves and distribute it directly to the customer"

"Growth focus: Content Marketing, Paid Acquisition, Word of Mouth, Referrals"

"Aggregators: consolidate supply to control demand"

"Growth focus: Network Effects, Technical SEO, Product-led Growth Loops"

"Founded by two former colleagues at Strava in 2016,  The Athletic reached 600 employees and $65M in ARR until the New York Times bought it for $550M in Cash in January 2022."

"The Athletic is an integrator. All content, except for maybe statistics that come through an API, is created by full-time journalists."

"Even though the content is company-created, team pages group it by topic and satisfy several strong user intents: knowing when your team plays next, knowing how they played in the recent game, learning what’s new about their players, etc."

"Not every company can go after an SEO aggregator strategy. So, the big question is, “how can you find out whether your site has the potential for aggregation?”"

"Surfacing that supply to search engines means treating the website as a product instead of a marketing property."

"The Athletic's team pages, the viability is anchored in getting the latest updates about a team, and the features are schedules, statistics, and articles."

"There are three types of supply for SEO aggregation: Best: UGC Second best: inventory Third best: programmatic"

"UGC comes in the form of reviews (G2), templates (Figma/Miro), or inventory (Airbnb), but it can’t be contextual content like “article comments”."

"Almost all UGC platforms are 2 or 3-sided marketplaces between buyers and sellers (and sometimes advertisers)."

"Many integrators start as point solutions that add a marketplace dynamic on top."

"The idea of “inventory” is simple: most products create some type of entity when used that can be aggregated and surface to Google, at least partially."

"Programmatic landing pages can be created for keyword permutations with a finite amount. They’re typically built with the same template for each page. Directories are a good example."

"We’ve already established that aggregator SEO is a product discipline, so the answer to aggregation has to be in the product. Better said, it’s buried in how users experience the product."

"What are the steps users go through to receive core value?"

"Along the journey, does the user encounter entities you could make public?"

"Where do or could users create new entities? (potential for UGC)"

"Does the product have integrations, or is it a platform (with apps)?"

"Do entities have any keyword search volume?"

"Conclusion: shifting from marketing to product thinking"

"Builders need to think about product value (does this really help users?), business feasibility (does this help us grow?) and experience (can we provide something better than what’s already out there?)."

"For SEO strategy, we need to add a 5th risk: can we get significant traffic from the keywords we target through aggregation?"