Having a strong brand makes everything in SEO easier.
Brands have better user signals on their sites, better click-through rates in the SERPs, and get preferential treatment from Google.
Google’s algorithms elevate sites with strong brand signals and punish companies that are too aggressive about SEO without having “the engine” to back it up.
Image Credit: Lyna ™
There is a common belief that SEO can’t do much about the brand, but that’s wrong. We often simply miss the tools.
Product marketing skills and insights can significantly improve the impact of organic traffic and support brand building in the process.
Both disciplines sit between product development and customer needs. Both work on content, audience understanding, and driving revenue – but from different angles.
Together, they can amplify each other. It’s an opportunity most companies miss, to their detriment.
One key lesson is to think long-term about brand impact. Focusing on the user’s value helps create a stronger brand connection, which pays off over time. It’s about building trust and loyalty that translates into sustained engagement and recognition. – Bar Wolf
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
I spoke with five seasoned product marketing experts about their lessons from decades in the field to distill what SEO pros can learn from product marketing:
Lauren (Hobbs) Decker, senior consultant at Carema and former VP of brand & product marketing at G2.
Bar Wolf, product marketing manager at Wix.
Blake Thorne, head of marketing at Govly.
Dirk Schart, portfolio marketing lead at PTC.
Sol Masch, group vice president, product at WebMD.
Product Marketing Tools And Frameworks For SEO Pros
Product marketing and SEO are highly complementary. They can unify customer research and quantitative insights for better prioritization and impact measuring.
They can uplevel user experience with the right messaging. And they can improve the quality of traffic with clear differentiation.
It makes sense: The goal of product marketing is to help the product organization bring the product to market with market research, positioning and messaging, go-to-market strategy, customer education, and sales enablement.
While SEO pros research keywords and analyze search volumes, product marketers spend a lot of time talking to customers.
Traffic is great, but what makes people remember your product? – Blake Thorne
Lesson 1: Improve Content With Customer Insights
When product marketers and SEO teams collaborate early and often, they enable the audience to find relevant content that addresses their specific challenges and needs — making marketing efforts more efficient and effective. – Lauren Hobbs Decker
You will surely agree that customer insights are critical for any form of marketing.
In my work with high-performing tech companies, however, I often notice that marketing teams have no idea where to find customer research, and they don’t have open channels to existing customers.
The results of performance marketing, including paid and organic search, made it too attractive to focus on metrics.
The solution is to either collaborate with product marketing to learn from customer insights or get them yourself.
Product marketers get customer insights through:
1-on-1 interviews.
Surveys.
Focus groups.
Reviews.
Customer support/sales.
They look for:
Pain points.
Motivations.
Expectations.
Good questions to ask:
“What challenges are you currently facing in [specific area related to the product’s value]?”
“How are you currently addressing this challenge, and what do you like or dislike about your current solution?”
“When evaluating solutions for this challenge, what are the most important factors you consider?”
“Have you considered making changes to your current approach? If so, what’s holding you back?”
“What would convince you that a new solution is worth exploring or investing in?”
Some of my favorite customer feedback tools:
Other opportunities for insights:
Analyze reviews on g2.com.
Product analytics data from Amplitude or Mixpanel.
Insights from sales, product, and customer success/support teams.
Analyze the positioning and messaging of key competitors.
SEOs can use customer insights to:
Create product landing pages or category pages (in ecommerce) for use cases and features and competitor comparison pages like ahrefs.com/vs for perceived competitors.
Build lead-gen tools or quizzes based on the most common customer problems and questions.
Generate content for pain points mentioned in interviews that might not have “search volume” but are searched by your target audience.
Use the wording of customers/prospects and embed quotes in the content.
Addressing common pain points and expectations in content.
Prioritizing topics and keywords on the roadmap (instead of by search volume only).
Inform content length and the level of detail.
Incorporate product-tested messaging into meta titles and descriptions.
Tip: AI tools can process large volumes of data from customer reviews, surveys, or social media to identify pain points, motivations, and trends faster than traditional methods.
I so often land on a website via SEO and can see a very strong SEO program at play, but I’m not left with any impression of what the company actually does.
For many SEOs, this moment might be “mission accomplished,” they’ve got their rankings and traffic.
This is where brand and product marketers can step in and work alongside SEOs to augment the experience on that page – what makes people remember the product? What makes people know the brand and have a positive sentiment even if the initial visit is short? – Blake Thorne
Lesson 2: Send Stronger User Signals With Clearer Differentiation
Since the DoJ lawsuit against Google and the ranking factor leak, we officially know that Google uses user signals to a high degree.
In my Memos, I often highlight the importance of a good user experience on top of high-quality content to impact user signals.
Differentiation can top it off by offering another lens for topic/keyword prioritization besides search volume and difficulty.
The deep market and customer understanding of product marketing helps SEO pros understand where a company stands out and where competition is tough.
Differentiation is how a company stands out with unique features and value.
In my guide to building a winning SEO strategy, I explain that an absolutely essential component of any strategy is strong differentiation:
Critical: the approach needs to be differentiated. You need to do things differently (competitive advantage or asymmetry). You cannot expect to do the same things as your competitors and beat them. That’s just a way to end up in attrition warfare and obsession with operational efficiency. Differentiation creates greater value, prices and margins.