Many SaaS companies are adopting a product-led growth (PLG) strategy.

It’s a pivotal move in accelerating organic growth, but this achievement wouldn’t be possible without product-led onsite content to drive experience and deliver value.

Product-led companies build effective content strategies to showcase and support their products. But what content types drive conversions and organic growth for these brands?

We will cover some essential content types that PLG companies need to use to benefit their SEO.

Why is product-led content essential for SEO success?

Product-led companies use content to enhance the product experience and provide value that constantly improves. It’s also a natural pathway for sign-ups.

Valuable content is engaging, and engaged readers are more likely to invest, especially if it elevates their product experience.

As product-led content comes in many different formats, it’s important to deliver the brand narrative consistently.

If your product documentation coveys one message, but your landing pages another, website visitors could deliver an inconsistent message and affect your chances of conversion.

Producing evergreen content is an effective method for growing your brand’s presence and user trust. Creating a consistent and unique image, tone, and messaging across all channels will reinforce your brand and its messaging.

Think about how your content ties in with your brand objectives — it’s not enough to deliver a great product without backing it up with a rich content strategy.

Your strategy should be a healthy mix of content and SEO, resulting in more people associating your brand (and product) as a positive solution or to resolve their pain points.

Consider the search terms most valuable to you and your customers, so their online experience leaves them wanting to return for more.

SEO helps determine how to articulate your business’s unique content and identity. SEO insights and search trends can help drive meaningful results that align your content and business goals.

Of course, your content’s distribution model won’t always revolve solely around SEO. PLG-led content can land in the hands (and eyes) of your readership in different ways:

  • In-product: When the content will be primarily used as part of the product to optimise customer experience. Free tools and templates are examples, giving people a head start to help them perform a task more efficiently.
  • Gated content: This is content created by organisations that the user usually pays for. Gated content often includes product demos, webinars, Ebooks, and courses.
  • Virality: When the goal of the content is circulation. Through drive account invites, social sharing, or word-of-mouth, content spreads rapidly between users. Timing is everything when it comes to viral content, so keep pace with your industry and user base.

Let’s look at some popular types of content that product-led organisations use and how they persuade customers to buy without interacting with sales.

Product-led content types

Different types of product-led content serve different purposes, but they all offer the user something of value about the product.

Using the following types of product-led content can help increase your online traffic, but note the importance of optimising for both non-branded and user-branded keywords.

Blogs

Blogs are the most abundant content type and move readers through the buying funnel. Product-led companies use blogs to target informational keywords, tangential content, educate customers on new releases, and bolster their position and authority in the vertical.

It’s good practice to offer various content types, from how-to guides, listicles, tutorials, and traditional blog posts.

You could demonstrate how other users use the product and, where possible, encourage readers to try out the product through CTAs to help generate product-qualified leads.

Competitor comparisons

Comparing your product with a rival’s can help the reader determine which is more suitable.

These bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) pages target research-intent leads by directly linking them to compare your products with competitors.

Unlike educational content guides, this is an excellent opportunity to discuss your features in detail and target branded queries.

You control the narrative around your product and work quickly to plug any product gaps quicker than your competitors.

Educational content guides

A well-written education guide can illustrate to your ICP how your product will make life easier. It’s a great way to rank for non-brand queries, while solving a problem for your customers. You can also dive into different concepts and then explain how your product(s) are beneficial.

Pricing pages

Not everyone thinks it’s best to make your pricing publicly available online, but there’s no denying its value to customers at all stages of their research. When they compare you with your competitors, the price will inevitably be one of the most critical factors.

While you can compare your prices with competitors in your comparison content, a pricing page enables you to be found by users searching price-sensitive queries.

Product and features categories

It’s common for many of the more prominent brands and more developed product-led companies to offer their customers a whole host of products and features. Creating categories allows customers a clear overview of your product and its features. It’s important to demonstrate capabilities that allow you to sell the product’s value proposition that benefits the user.

Support documentation/FAQs

You must prioritise end-user feedback and issues, mainly if your product is a significant component in the efficiency of an individual or business’s operation. Support centres, support documents, FAQs, and community forums enable users to ask questions, report bugs, find answers, and make suggestions for improvement.

Ideally, users want to find specific information about your product as quickly as possible without engaging in conversation. They are more likely to use these when they’ve bought your product or are ready to buy. Again, it’s helpful content showing readers you are willing to help them solve their problems.

Templates

Templates and tools specific to your industry are another effective method for driving relevant users to your site.

Everybody loves an in-product content experience, especially when it’s free. For example, a company offering a project management solution can offer downloadable and integratable templates to assist with different aspects of project management.

Templates encourage users to get started immediately and provide immediate value and utility to the user by allowing them to do a job even more efficiently (most likely saving them time).

You can further personalise the template experience by presenting the user with onboarding questions. This customer-centric approach enables you to tweak the templates to the user’s specific needs.

Product templates are also great for earning backlinks. Individuals often point their readers to exciting resources to speed up productivity or product learning.

Integrating user success stories into your narrative

While this doesn’t apply to all PLG companies, it sells itself when people use a product. Product reviews, user testimonials, and success stories are arguably the most powerful forms of product-led content, but people will only share it once they see sufficient value in it.

The more touchpoints others have with your product, the more opportunity a brand has to build trust and leverage messaging.

Final thoughts

With more and more software companies adopting a PLG model, your content needs to be built around a narrative based on your product(s) and services, targeting queries based on research and purchase intent.

Over time, your product and its supporting content will help you achieve product-led growth and become visible to the end user as you intended.