Keyword research for content that celebrates your SaaS product

Let's explore a specific example of how to do product-focused keyword research

Hey all,

Welcome back to the monthly newsletter → and greetings to all the marketing professionals who are receiving this for the first time.

With resource cuts and growing pressure on all our teams to drive business results, we’ve decided to cover a keyword research tactic that’ll have you creating content you’re happy to distribute and that your executive team will appreciate too.

Aka, how to do keyword research and explore content topics that will help you showcase and sell your product.

As a note: Generally speaking, content plays the role of influencing people to purchase when they’re ready and is rarely the thing that drives a direct conversion.

However, in our experience, many teams miss out on creating assets that allow you to authentically bring up your product without scaring your reader away.

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Keyword research for pain points aligned with product features

You might remember when we wrote about our initial framework for creating content that includes your product. If not, feel free to check that out here.

Including your SaaS product in your content [w/ Examples]

This is the image from that newsletter 👇

And here is the process we outlined:

1. Choose a feature of your software product

2. List out the specific problem(s) it solves for your ICP

3. Search for keywords that have an intent related to solving that problem

4. Create content with matching intent

5. Connect that content in a contextualized way for SEO authority and UX

6. Have that content lead back to your product or that feature

What we didn’t cover for you in that piece is what that keyword research process looks like.  

It’s a bit more manual than self-proclaimed SEO gurus like to do for their research, but so is almost everything that requires critical thinking and meaningful business results.

So let’s dig in for a random SaaS product:

Let’s pretend we’re doing keyword research for the customer loyalty app, smile.io.

Step 1) Choose a feature of your software product

Smile emphasizes 3 main features that the product does for its potential users:

1. A points program to reward your customers

2. A VIP program to reward your best customers

3. A referral program to allow your customers to spread the word to their friends

Let’s choose the points program (#1 above).

Step 2) List out the specific problem(s) it solves for your ICP

If we take their website copy on their points page, we can start to understand what problems they believe their customers have and that their product solves.

Their point system program claims that it can help a company:

1. Increase the number of times their customers shop with them

2. Increase the amount of money their customers spend with them

3. Incentivize their customers to leave reviews or engage on social

Etc. etc. etc.

Let’s choose “increase the number of times a customer shops with you”

Step 3) Search for keywords that have an intent related to solving that problem

Now, instead of running straight into a keyword research tool - we’re going to start Googling queries.

To do this effectively, we can pretend we own a Shopify eCommerce business, and we want to learn more about incentivizing people to come back multiple times.

Now we can see the types of articles someone might be served based on these searches.  

If we like some of these articles, we can copy the URLs to the articles we think are helpful and could very much be tailored for our own product. We can then paste those into a keyword research tool like Ahrefs and see if there is any data surrounding the traffic/keywords for these posts.

For example, here are the keywords that the Paychex.com article and the McKinsey article are targeting:

These keywords make the most sense for you to target, as they are aligned with your product's solutions, the ICP's challenges, and the search engine's understanding of the intent behind these queries.

Steps 4, 5, and 6)

• Create content with matching intent

• Connect that content in a contextualized way for SEO authority and UX

• Have that content lead back to your product or that feature

The final steps are to create a piece of content that is, of course, optimized for search AND that can functionally tie your product to the solved pain point. Then you’ll, of course, want to link to all of your other awesome content related to that topic.

And finally, you’ll want to talk about your product by including it in the content in a way that’s not too sales-y.

If you’re creating a list of “x ways to get repeat customers,” you’ll emphasize that one way is to build a loyalty points program.

Then you can drive the reader to another article about building a points program or a list of products that allow you to set up a points program.

And you’ll include a simple, contextual CTA based on the intent of the article that says:

“At Smile, we designed our product with a loyalty points program that helps companies keep their customers coming back. Learn how we help eCom stores like yours → ”

Use this CTA to link to the product feature page.

Now it’s your turn!

You can scale your efforts by going through all of the pain points that are solved for each major feature of your product and coming up with a robust list of heavy-hitting keywords.

Not only will you easily be able to create 50 - 100+ articles in the first year (that you know someone in the market for your product wants to read), you can also confidently stand by those assets as worth distributing even outside of the search engine.

Now you’re influencing deals and creating content more efficiently by being able to use any one asset multiple times - reducing the stress on your marketing budget.

Happy Holidays from the Ten Speed team!

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