How to use SEO and google webmasters to achieve product-market fit
Google queries are a great way to understand customer’s unsaid requirements.Customers usually search for information they need. This can be used to understand customer needs better much better than any other methods as they most likely look up to find a tool/software that can solve their unmet need.
How to achieve product-market fit using SEO and google webmasters
Create a long post
Create a really long post on the key topic around your business.
How long you ask?
Target to have a post that is of 2000 words at minimum. This will ensure that you will cover most of the aspects of the product you are selling. Also, Do ensure that the content actually helps people who would want to understand the market.
This will need a general understanding of your space
For eg : We at PayorCRM are in the payments space.More specifically In the B2B payments space.We did some initial analysis using google trends about the most common keywords in this space Using the inputs from google trends and our own understanding of this space we went ahead and created a long post on the B2B payments space covering most of the aspects of B2B payments
You can find the post here
Sign up for google webmasters
While you sign up you may need to need to do some steps to show that you own the website.
After this is done google webmasters will show keywords for which your website was in a search results.These are called impressions
It may take time for Google to start showing these queries in your dashboard.in our case it took up to a month!
Analyze queries and keep posting
Yes, Analyse queries.Look at not the text but the intent behind the queries
For eg, if some users search “credit card processing software” they definitely are looking for some credit card processing software. Duh!
If someone searches “What is an ACH payment” they may not be necessarily looking for a software that does Ach payments.They may have come upon the term somewhere and wanted to figure out what the hoopla is all about
The gold mine
Check out few queries “Credit card payments through SAP”, “Quick books payment processing ” Etc
These are the unmet user needs we found out! How do we know these are unmet?
We further researched on how credit card payments happens through these products and realized that there is no good product currently that solves these requirements the best way possible
We even came up with posts on these topics check out one here
Repeat the above.Target new keywords that keep appearing on your Google webmaster feed and keep analysing the keywords that come up .
Caution – Unspoken requirements
Although the above method works for requirements that are known and spoken/ searched there might be a lot of requirements that are unspoken.
The above method can’t definitely help you with finding those needs but it can help you direct your thinking to uncover those needs.
Unspoken requirements will need lots of research, understanding of the space and your analysis skills.
Also published on Medium.