we can help
You want to build content that makes the biggest impact on your company, is scalable, and that fits your company’s stage of growth.
Great.
We’ve compiled this resource of first-hand experience, client feedback, third-party data, and a survey (see ToC) to give you further insights into the scalable content types that PLG companies like yours are leveraging to help grow their organic traffic.
Let’s dive right in.
Recommended Reading: Product-led content: What it is, why you need it, & examples to show you how to build it
PLG content for companies with strong brands, developed websites, and expansive products
Organic traffic comes into a website for a variety of different reasons, and one important distinction worth noting is brand queries vs non-brand queries.
A significant number of the companies you might be looking at in the PLG space, such as Stripe, Slack, Hubspot, Zapier, Sprout Social, etc., drive huge swaths of organic traffic due to their brand prominence and authority.
If you’re at this stage, here is where you have the privilege of prioritizing your time and seeing organic results attached to it:
Hold up. Unfamiliar with what Product-Led Growth means? Start here: Product-Led Growth: What It Is, Examples, KPIs, and Department Roles
When tens of thousands to millions of users run their businesses with your product, they’ll need help.
And they’d really like the specific help for your exact tool without needing to call customer support.
So instead of targeting, “Filing 1099 tax forms for contract employees” Stripe is able to create support documents that target longtail queries related specifically to their partnership with DoorDash (and multiple other partners).
Pro Tip: Quick support articles related specifically to your product often make great supplements inside non-brand-focused educational articles. They show readers that you’re willing to help them learn how to solve their problems AND that your product directly helps customers looking for the solution.
Often, larger brands and more developed companies come with a whole suite of products and features for their customers.
If you look at the image below, you’ll see that the popularity of Hubspot’s product and features makes it worth it to create pages to collect all that demand.
***Also notice that their authority is so high in some of these spaces that they’re also winning rankings for valuable, non-brand keywords like “CRM” and “what is marketing automation.”
The internet loves to debate whether you should or shouldn’t have a pricing page that shows people your exact pricing.
There is no debate that a killer pricing page is highly valued by prospects doing their final bits of homework across competitors (or just getting a sense of what their budget will need to be).
It’s also fair that for SEO, a pricing page for popular brands is a great touch to help people quickly search for bottom-of-the-funnel cost questions.
Pro Tip: In addition to building new content, we find that our clients who are this stage experience the biggest exponential growth by updating existing content and addressing what is known as content decay.
Content types for PLG companies still building their brands
But what if you’re not working at a PLG giant, yet?
That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be creating good self-serve support documentation or a minimally viable number of feature/product pages.
It does likely mean, however, that for optimization purposes, you might find the following content types are worth more bang for your buck as better initial growth levers.
Side note: Some of the best early investments are from content that can be templatized; listen in to our recent podcast about using templates to scale for more on this.
Whether you’re Stripe, Airtable, Klaviyo, or Gusto, long-form educational guides are an SEO goldmine for ranking pages (esp. for non-brand queries) and speaking with depth and breadth to your ICP.
These are often your ungated, almost e-book-like ultimate guides to accomplishing a task your customers need to do or fully understand that requires a thorough, authoritative explanation.
Bolstered by thought leadership and the use of hard-to-replicate information like first-party data, these can be a great way to attract high-intent prospects and garner backlinks.
Probably the most plentiful content type that teams produce to see the benefits of SEO falls into the blog or article category.
These can be the same as some of the examples you might see under long-form guides, but often the guides you choose are more personal to your company’s POV and SME, receiving their own spot in the top navigation.
Blog posts allow you to easily create and test topics early in your content marketing efforts - bolstering your website's authority, allowing you to target a wide array of keywords, and typically only needing limited dev and design support to see results.
Even mature companies continue their blog efforts as it’s understood as one of the most consistent ways to generate significant attention and pipeline for companies.
Recommended Reading: Blog Post Templates: Proof That Quality Can Scale
As soon as you can offer these BoFu pages, you’re giving high-intent prospects a quick way to compare your products and prices with your competitors.
And the best part is you’ll likely rank easily, and you can control the narrative around your products.
From templates to tools to calculators, everyone loves a free asset that allows you to do your job more efficiently than you’re doing it right now.
Tools specific to your industry make for pages that can generate a significant amount of relevant organic traffic, and they’re frequently linked to by others who want to point their readers to interesting resources.
***Even unique tools that you’ve invented that don’t have any reported search volume in third-party SEO tools make for great link bait due to their novelty. You’ll just need to handle the initial distribution yourself to peers in your industry.
This one is product-specific, but certainly, one of the most important SEO strategies for highly technical SaaS companies.
Whether you’re a small company making it easier for businesses to use their ERP software solution or you’re a DevOps company that allows all types of data streamlining between different apps?
Perhaps you’re a platform like Shopify, and you have a whole boatload of third-party companies that support your overall product (so much so that you create your own app store).
These companies benefit on the SEO front from the fact that so many searches around what someone is trying to do can be directly tied to the function of your product. This is also know as something called product-led seo (learn how this differs from more traditional content here).
Zapier is one of the clearest cases for this type of strategy.
Now that we’ve covered the most impactful types of content, let’s take a look at a survey we took on LinkedIn a couple of months ago.
We asked SaaS marketers the following question:
If you were coming into a PLG SaaS company that was just starting its SEO and Content program, which content type are you building first?
And there was a decent spread across the top 3 answers/options:
1. How-to articles for ICP needs - received 51% (94 votes) of the vote
2. Competitor comparison pages - received 33% (60 votes) of the vote
3. Tools & templates - received 14% (26 votes) of the vote
4. Partner Apps and Integrations - received 2% (4 votes)
Before we jump into why folks chose what they did, it’s important to acknowledge something first if it wasn’t made clear above.
Jack Virag from Statsig summed it up best at the start of his answer:
“Startup journeys are unique, and the "right move" for one company may be a catastrophic failure for another.”
It’s true.
At Ten Speed, our team has seen each of the content types listed in the LinkedIn survey work as a starting point for various companies within our own client roster.
For example:
The “Partner app & integrations” pages that performed poorly in this particular survey have worked as the biggest standout starting place for clients of ours that have a product that functions as an app or feature inside of a larger, more well-known product that your customer is already using.
In this case, you’re likely not going to outperform that billion-dollar company for the generic keywords around what your product does, especially to start.
But you’ll likely benefit from having integration and app pages for what your tool connects with, and you can share how awesome your product is within those pages.
With that in mind, let's see what some of the folks we reached out to had to say about why they chose the answer they did.
Recommended Reading: SaaS SEO: The Growth Strategies Companies are Using in 2023
How-to-articles for ICP needs:
Perhaps one of the easiest places to get started both in terms of creating content that can be solution focused, connected to your product, and directly related to your users problems are MoFu/BoFu how-to articles.
Your marketing team and founders can create them quickly, and they require little in the way of design and development to get started.
“How-to articles for ICP needs are the *safest* place to start, in my opinion. The foundation of any worthwhile content program is educating users.
Zooming out a little, customers won't discover a young company by Googling their name. It just doesn't happen. What they're looking for is help with their pain points, advice on how to accomplish specific goals, etc., and that's the best place to initially intercept them.
By creating how-to content within your keyword profile (or to establish your profile), your company will actually stand a chance of ranking. From there, readers are able to connect the dots, learn who you are, and consider talking to sales.
How-to articles will expand your keyword profile too. With a simple site health audit (and maybe a few backlinks), your site will be more authoritative and will stand a better chance of ranking.
At that point, it makes sense to start publishing other types of content:
- Competitive pages, for instance, are usually strong for lead generation.
- Partner app integration pages are wonderful backlink opportunities.
- Tools and templates speak directly to your core users.
However, how-to articles are the safest bet, with the inherent SEO juice to ensure all the other tactical content types are effective.”
Jack Virag, Head of Growth at Statsig
Competitor comparison pages
Competitor comparison pages are some of the most effective content types for generating direct leads because they sit at the very bottom of the funnel for folks who are product aware.
Additionally, if you format these correctly, not only will they rank fairly easily, but your sales team can leverage them in their calls and email communications with prospects.
Tyler Wade, from Superside, explains why he selected this choice:
“Comparison pages showcase your differences, qualify and disqualify your ICP and allow you to dig deep into your competitors (maybe find opportunities for your product).
While a PLG company should also create, “how-to” articles (through a product-led lens), it will naturally create [a need for] comparison on the customer journey—if you don’t have the pages, you could lose. Competitor pages can inform your how-to content, should convert better than (most) blogs, and are better for early paid strategies like piggybacking off bigger brands.”
Tyler Wade, Content Marketing Manager at Superside
***To see an example of their comparison hub, check out this awesome resource.
Tools and templates
Tools and templates help you sprint right to helping people experience value from your company.
It’s like flexing on your prospects that you have highly applicable, useful, quality tools that you’re giving away for free (or at the cost of an email address).
Leaving them with the satisfaction of being able to accomplish something more conveniently than before they had your free template, and hopefully thinking, “I bet the tool they’re charging money for must be great, too.”
“Building out tools and templates offer a chance for data capture. In return for your strategy template, or useful video editing tool (e.g. Lightroom presets), your viewers just have to put in their email address.
This helps build your database and drive all-important leads. Not only this, but if your tools and templates are built well, the user will make use of them throughout the year, reminding themselves of your business.
If appropriate, you can then refresh these tools and templates to have them coming back for more.”
Luke McCarthy, Head of Content & Communications at Vamp
What are you waiting for? It’s time to build that content.
At this point, you’re probably thinking - there are endless options, but I don’t have the budget or the bandwidth to do it all right now. If that sounds like you, it’s time to start prioritizing.
We recommend the following free resource plus the educational content linked inside to sketch out the initial content strategy, plan, and topics → From Strategy to Communicating to the C-Suite
And if you’re serious about hitting scale, book a call with Ten Speed to help build your roadmap, walk you through the SEO journey the entire way, and even build your content with you so that you can scale your production & results.
.png)
Discover how we can help.
Book a call with us and we’ll learn all about your company and goals.
If there’s a fit, we will put together a proposal for you that highlights your opportunity and includes our strategic recommendations.