SEO requires "search market fit"
The concept I often share with my clients: “search market fit" has the same principles as product-market fit, but applies to SEO strategies.
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A lot of attention is paid to the concept of product-market fit because if you want someone to pay for what you sell, you need to have a product that the market desires. The more the product matches the market fit, the greater the potential for sales. When a customer doesn’t just want but also NEEDS that product, they will continue to pay for it and even tell others to pay for it too. ← Virality is the holy grail of marketing.
Companies try to assess this potential with metrics like Net Promoter Scores. Still, sometimes the scores don’t reveal much more than that customers like the product, without indicating how strong the product-market fit is. In my opinion, the best metric for product-market fit is sales.
Oversimplified: The fit with the market for a product is at the heart of why some are successful and others are not.
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Product-market fit for new products
Product-market fit doesn’t necessarily mean that a customer is in the market looking for that product; it just means that when a customer becomes aware of the product, they realize that it solves a need they didn’t even know they had.
For example, think of all the ways people are using AI tools today. People were fine using stock photos to illustrate their ideas, but now that idea seems obsolete, as you can create a brand-new image with precisely what you want.
Or, grammar and spell-check features in any writing tool are often enough to produce good content, but now many feel that they can’t live without the added capabilities of AI improvements for their writing.
There wasn’t necessarily a product-market fit before these products came into existence, but once the users experienced them, they never wanted to go back.
Search-Market Fit
With this background on product-market fit, I want to introduce a concept I often share with my clients: “search market fit.” It has the same principles as product-market fit, but applies to SEO strategies.
Before embarking on a financially and resource-intensive SEO effort, a company should ensure that there is a search market fit. Like product-market fit, it means that there will be users searching for that product or keyword if the company is successful in achieving organic visibility.
Search-market fit applies to all three stakeholders in SEO:
The product and website
Does the company make and sell a matching offering that would be beneficial if it were to achieve the desired search engine rankings? It serves no economic purpose to be visible on a search engine for visibility alone; there needs to be a business KPI.
I once worked with a company in a two-sided marketplace where they monetized the sell side, but their SEO traffic was on the buy side. They could have deindexed most of their website without affecting their revenue.
Frequently, I recommend that my clients stop spending money on updating their corporate blogs for SEO, because no one is seeking that content. While they write for a supposed search audience, the content doesn’t fit a market. There are many other reasons to have a corporate blog, but if SEO is the primary one, it might need to be adjusted.Search engines
I have worked with many companies whose initial SEO efforts were targeted at specific queries without considering the types of genres the search engines had already chosen to show for those queries. In those scenarios, no amount of additional links, content, or keywords in the text would make a difference.To illustrate this concept, I have been using the term “search market fit” for a long time, and I hope that this post will be visible for the term, but more than likely it won’t, given that Google doesn’t think this term exists.
It’s possible that I could obtain a significant number of citations and links to this post. I might change Google’s “mind”, but if I were my client, I wouldn't recommend putting too much effort into this strategy and going after something that doesn’t require inventing a brand-new term I think should exist.
A key thing to look at these types of searches is whether Google modifies your search term. In this example, they change “search market fit” to “product market fit” in the results.A lot of SEO heartache could be minimized by simply searching your ideal search terms and noting what Google (or even AI engines) thinks are the right results for that specific query.
Users
This is the most important but the least obvious for most of the companies I meet. Are users searching for this keyword on search engines in the hopes of finding what this company is offering? When companies build an SEO strategy using one of the well-known keyword research tools, this is where the strategy typically begins and ends.
There isn’t enough consideration paid to the users’ needs when they go to a search engine to find a solution. When the user’s needs are paramount, search volume doesn’t matter nearly as much. If the company offers exactly what the user desires, even if they didn’t know it existed, there will be tremendous economic upside. Some call these zero-search-volume keywords; I think of it as finding search market fit.
Going back to the AI example, if you were the first result on Google for the keyword LLM in 2020, there would have been little economic value in this result, but if you were number one for that term just before you released a product you knew the world would love, that is a dominant position that is incredibly valuable.
Search market fit is required for SEO success
Just like product-market fit, if there isn’t search-market fit, the potential for success will be limited. As an additional parallel, just as products often fail after months or even years of effort and investment, SEO efforts without search-market fit will do the same on a long, slow, and painful timeline.
I once met an enterprise that spent $3 million on a “product-led SEO” strategy for thousands of templates of their product, which no one searched for. They blamed the SEO agency for building their implementation wrong, but really, they should have blamed themselves for investing in something no one needed.
When I was at SurveyMonkey, I tried to replicate the SEO success of our top surveys by creating hundreds of subtopics, but just because those subtopics existed didn’t mean there was a search market fit for them.
Paid search has an advantage that if the campaign thesis is wrong, it will fail very quickly, and the company will know to pivot. With SEO, only time will tell the outcome of an SEO strategy, and if the campaign is wrong, the time will never come.
This is the greatest challenge of SEO, as it takes time to work. If you build something for the wrong audience, that time and money are just wasted. Before investing in an SEO strategy, it pays to do some diligence on your search market fit.
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How does this measure up to the idea that producing unique content CREATES a demand for it? (Which you also mention in your book). How can you determine if something is a dead end vs an investment in demand creation?
Insightful article. Yes, it's easy to blame the SEO team/agency for a campaign gone wrong. I'm specially of the view that SEO is not THE solution for every business or organisation. Basic SEO is essential but spending thousands and millions of marketing budget in the hopes of leads seems futile especially if there's no prior user research.