Leverage onboarding flows for SEO
Reframe your site as a dynamic content engine, driving organic traffic through the strategic optimization of internal surfaces.
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Relying solely on keyword-driven content can limit the growth potential of a product and service website. If you use a Product-Led SEO lens, you can reframe your site as a dynamic content engine, driving organic traffic through the strategic search promotion of internal pages.
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This approach captures high-intent users and builds a competitive advantage rooted in your product’s unique functionality. By embedding SEO into the user journey itself, companies can achieve sustainable and, most importantly, high-conversion growth.
Onboarding
Onboarding is the process by which users experience the value of your product, transitioning from curiosity to engagement. From an SEO perspective, this process generates proprietary content that can attract users actively seeking solutions. Locking onboarding entirely behind a login wall overlooks a significant opportunity to drive organic traffic. By indexing strategic elements of the onboarding flow, you can capture high-intent searchers and guide them toward conversion.
Develop indexable guides that detail the initial steps of your product’s setup, targeting specific, long-tail search queries. A software user searching “how to set up a survey on SurveyMonkey” “Fire an employee on Xero”, or “create a ticket on Zendesk” is already problem-aware and seeking a precise solution.
I know some of you are thinking these are branded terms for these companies, and that the companies, therefore, have already captured the user, but that is flawed logic. If a user searches for these terms and finds a competitor with a superior explainer, they are likely to churn. Why take that risk of them going to Reddit or YouTube?
By making the first few steps of your onboarding process publicly accessible and optimized with descriptive titles, you attract these users. The guide should offer clear, actionable steps, then transition to a call-to-action, such as “Sign up to complete your setup,” or if they have a login cookie, change the CTA to direct users into the product. This converts onboarding into a conversion funnel, capturing traffic from users who are ready to act. SEO should always be viewed as a full funnel channel.
The key is finding the right balance between visibility and protection. Make the first 2-3 steps of your onboarding publicly indexable, but gate the completion behind signup. You’re not exposing your entire product roadmap, just the entry points that users are already searching for.
Use templates as landing pages
If your product enables users to create templates, workflows, or custom configurations, these assets can serve as powerful SEO tools. A platform offering “POS systems for coffee food trucks” or “Payroll templates for remote workers” can index these as standalone pages to attract users.
A user searching for “best ways to pair Gmail with Salesforce” lands on your template page, recognizes its value, and is prompted to sign up for implementation. (See my post on Zapier) These pages are unique to your product, drive usage, and provide utility that content-only competitors cannot replicate. Indexing these assets attracts users seeking immediate, functional solutions.
Power users who have mastered your product generate valuable data and patterns that can be transformed into indexable content, providing a helpful resource for search engines. This is something we did frequently at SurveyMonkey, where we identified top use cases from our customer database and built landing pages based on the assumption that others might have the same need.
The pages leveraged that data to showcase the product’s capabilities and position the brand as an industry authority. These pages resonate with solution-aware users deep in the funnel, ready to engage with a tool that addresses their specific needs. Since this content is grounded in the product’s unique data, it establishes a competitive edge that generic content strategies cannot replicate.
From a technical standpoint, these template pages should have clean URLs like yourproduct.com/templates/gmail-salesforce-integration. Each page needs unique title tags and meta descriptions that mirror how users actually search. Don’t dynamically generate thousands of low-quality template pages; focus on the top use cases your customers actually need.
Error codes are pages too
System errors or proprietary codes such as “Maintenance mode” on WordPress are moments of user frustration, but also peak search intent. When users encounter an error, they often search for the exact error message to find a solution. Think about how WordPress developers can showcase their development services with explainers built for every error code.
Product-Led SEO transforms these moments into opportunities to capture valuable traffic. When I consulted with Maintainx, we were able to build an entire SEO effort around error pages because the companies responsible for these errors did not address them online.
Proprietary error codes are unique to your product and offer a chance to dominate specific search queries. The content should provide a clear, step-by-step solution, including screenshots or code snippets where relevant, and a call to action such as “contact us to solve your WordPress needs.” These pages face minimal competition because the error codes are exclusive to what you provide, attracting users seeking immediate solutions. By providing authoritative resources, you build trust and drive users back into your product or service.
Search behavior is shifting with LLMs, but specific error codes and product-specific queries remain search-driven. Users continue to type exact error messages into Google because they seek authoritative sources, not AI summaries. Where this gets murky is with general how-to queries. Someone asking “how do I create a survey” might use AI, but someone searching “SurveyMonkey logic branching not working” is coming to Google. Focus your efforts on the specific, product-tied queries that AI can’t reliably answer without your documentation.
Competitive advantage from proprietary pages
These ideas create a sustainable advantage by embedding growth into your product’s architecture. The content generated is not just knowledge-based; it is unique and tied to your expertise.
If these are proprietary error codes or onboarding flows, competitors can attempt to replicate your error solution page or proprietary template. Still, it will be clear that they don’t own it because they lack the specific features and data unique to your product. This establishes a defensible moat that content-driven strategies cannot breach.
The traffic captured is highly targeted, as users searching for these error codes or templates are solution-aware, often deep in the funnel, and engaged. They are not exploring broad topics that AI overviews or LLMs will erase. These users will convert at higher rates since they are already invested in your product category and only need the solution you provide to proceed.
As I have written many times here, to execute this strategy, SEO must be integrated into Product and Engineering teams, not isolated in marketing. Every feature, error code, and onboarding step should be designed with organic growth in mind. This alignment ensures that growth is a core component of your product’s development lifecycle.
SEO is not just about finding keywords with high monthly search volume; it is about finding users who happen to search for keywords. Many of those are searching for information that appears on the onboarding and other internal pages, so maximize these pages. Think of yourself as the user, and you will realize how valuable these experiences can be.
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