Why should you care about ‘Site-Search Fit’? The central piece of any SEO strategy.

The main reason why SEO campaigns fail

Most SEO campaigns fail because they ignore site-search fit.

Where product-market fit is the single most important factor to launching a new product, site-search fit is the single most important factor that will make or break an SEO campaign.

Many SEO agencies over-rely on a one-size-fits-all SEO package that is pitched in more the less the same way their prospects.

But they ignore how the strategies they bring forward will fit with the type of business they’re working with. This is where site-search fit comes it.

What is ‘Site-Search Fit’? The right strategy for each type of website

Achieving site-search fit means finding the the SEO strategies and tactics that will have the biggest impact on a given type of website, while trimming off other deliverables that are unnecessary.

Get this wrong and no matter how talented your SEO team is, how cutting-edge your strategies are, or how big your budget, the chances of success are much lower because the strategies being employed simply doesn’t fit the business context.

Here’s what an off-the-shelf SEO campaign scope may look like:

These campaigns force businesses to make unnecessary gambles on:

1. Whether your site fits these off-the-shelf deliverables
2. Whether the SEO team is skilled enough to see the nuances in each deliverable and how they need to adapt it to your business context
3. Whether the competition level is low enough for the campaign to perform well

That’s why identifying strategies that will work particularly well with your type of website will significantly increase the chances of success.

Let’s go through some examples of what these deliverables may look like for different types of website.

Examples of ‘Site-Search Fit’

Let’s go through some examples of site-search fit for different types of website.

E-commerce sites

• Category page optimization: Often the main money pages for e-commerce websites involving unique on-page strategies than other type of landing pages.
• Pagination optimization: E-commerce pages often need to implement pagination when SKU numbers are high. The SEO strategy needs to investigate whether pagination is implemented in an SEO-compliant way.
• Crawl depth: Ensuring that all SKUs can be easily crawled by search engines through a large e-commerce site.

Here’s an example from Matt Diggity on how they helped their e-commerce client grow their traffic by 417% in 8 months with an SEO strategy that has site-search fit.

SaaS products

• Tools & Trails page optimization: Often the main entry point of new users. Making these free tools and trails page of SaaS products discoverable will have a direct impact on the business’s customer acquisition.
• Product-led SEO: SaaS and tech companies stand at a sweet spot to gain from product-led by engaging their communities for UCG at scale.
• Comparison page optimization: Getting customers to discover your tools comparison page instead for ‘vs’ keywords common in the industry.

Here are 5 examples of how tech companies leverage product-led SEO to grow their business from Kevin Indig.

Local businesses

• Location keywords: Ensure that location-specific landing pages are being built to target location-keywords relevant to the business.
• Google Business Profiles: Increasing search discoverability on Google maps and ‘near me’ queries.
• Testimonial keywords: Optimizing testimonials for landing pages are particularly important for local businesses that compete with bigger brands.

Here’s how we leverage these strategies for one of our local business clients at Criclabs.

Enterprise businesses

• Programmatic strategies: Particular important for enterprise brands that need to create hundreds or thousands of landing pages across multiple markets and regions.
• CMS optimization: At an enterprise level, working closely with developers to ensure that custom CMS set-ups have the right SEO knots and bolts for editors at scale can make or break the campaign.
• International SEO: Local language optimization for each market & region, as well as overseeing hreflang tag implementation.

Here’s a quick run-down of how bigger brands like G2, Zapier and Webflow us programmatic SEO generate millions of page views each year.

How to find the right ‘Site-Search Fit’

When approaching vendors and agencies, the one key question to ask is “How does your SEO strategy cater to our type of website.”

If all you see is a templated SEO package without any deliverables that answer to your specific set up, it’s a big red flag.

Don’t get me wrong, off-the-shelf SEO packages and campaigns can work, but they don’t give your business any competitive advantage when it comes to winning organic search discoverability over competitors.

That’s why at Cric, we customize all our SEO service offerings for every single client to find site-search fit, regardless of their business context.

We’ve developed a comprehensive list of topics and issues to investigate when finding site-search fit for a given project. Here’s are a few of them:

• Who are your competitors and what strategies and tactics are working on them
• What are similar brands doing in international markets that are more competitive
• How is your site set up and how we can leverage that in our strategy
• What are your overall business goals and marketing goals in the next 12 months
• What is currently working for the site in terms of SEO (i.e. content, architecture, links, landing pages).

But what happens after finding site-search fit? I’m a big advocate of creating SEO second brains to run an SEO campaign. Feel free to out my article on building an SEO second brain here.