Use-case-led SEO: A strategy for sustainable organic growth

How to build lead gen tools that blend product marketing and SEO

In an era where traditional blog posts are losing their value and users crave tangible solutions, building lead generation tools at the intersection of product marketing and SEO has emerged as a strategic differentiator.

The underlying principle is that Google rewards any experience that allows users to "do the thing" instead of "learning about how to do the thing".

By shifting from text-based content to interactive utilities like calculators, generators, and quizzes, growth teams can deliver real value, capture high-intent traffic, and guide prospects down the funnel more efficiently.

We’re calling this use-case-led SEO — an approach that aligns product marketing insights with the rigor of SEO (keyword) research, helping teams identify the right use cases, measure ROI by projected search volume, and adopt a fail-fast experimentation mindset.

• Use-case-led SEO can work as both lead generation and brand differentiation asset in the age of AI and LLMs. As AI chatbots and agents continue to advance and provide accurate answers to a vast array of questions, these tools can maintain, and even grow, their value by offering users a direct path to solutions for their problems, incentivizing them to visit your website with superior UX/UI for problem resolution and higher chance to stand out from others and become top-of-mind.

• Furthermore, use-case-led SEO tools have the potential to evolve into AI agents themselves. This transformation could take various forms, such as integrating with AI chatbots to offer personalized product recommendations or using AI to analyze user behavior and tailor lead-generation strategies accordingly. By embracing these advancements, these tools can become important PLG or prospecting entry points, even standalone product wedges with their own monetization streams. Think of an AI content generator with a free or paid tier that can funnel prospects into the core SaaS enterprise offering.

Equipped with no-code solutions and backed by cross-functional resources — such as engineering, product, and design — organizations can swiftly develop, launch, and iterate on these lead gen tools.

In this post, we’ll see how companies like Ramp, AirOps, and more showcase their use-case-led SEO, and how you can do it too!

By combining SEO, product thinking, and product marketing depth, growth teams can create a sustainable edge and transform organic channels into scalable revenue engines.

1. Understanding the shift from static SEO content to interactive solutions

One of the most significant changes in modern SEO strategy is the move away from static, keyword-driven content toward interactive, problem-solving solutions that go far beyond a typical blog post or landing page.

Rather than simply answering questions with passive text, well-crafted lead gen tools actively guide users toward solving a tangible challenge — like calculating budgets, automating data workflows, or creating personalized strategies.

This approach not only captures higher-intent traffic and engagement as per the latest Google algo changes but also significantly increases conversions by offering direct value from the moment a user lands on your site.

When planning these interactive solutions, it’s crucial to align keyword research with authentic user needs. Instead of focusing solely on high-volume search phrases, you can tap into product marketing insights to get deeper into customer pain points that arise in real-life contexts.

As discussed in Kevin’s latest Growth Memo on product marketing and SEO, you can use AI to mine any of these sources for these insights:

• Customer calls and support ticket transcripts: Front-line teams regularly interact with customers and can offer valuable insights into common questions, concerns, and frustrations. You can use ChatGPT or Humata to mine customer calls at scale and extract structured insights.

• G2 reviews: Customer reviews can also provide insights into product strengths, weaknesses, areas for improvement, and even competitive alternatives. Scraping these websites and related insights can also be a goldmine of insight for use-case-led SEO.

• Focus groups & surveys: Moderated discussions with a group of customers as well as targeted surveys, can gather quantitative and qualitative data on customer satisfaction, preferences, and needs, revealing shared pain points and opinions.

This customer-centric approach ensures that marketing efforts are aligned with genuine user needs, leading to a more prioritized and focused use-case-led SEO roadmap.

For example, if you find that “financial forecasting software” is a popular keyword in your niche, don’t stop at a generic blog post — create a tailored financial calculator or an interactive budget planner that walks prospects through the process.

Another key benefit of these immersive use-case-led SEO experiences is their potential to shift users immediately into a demo or a live product environment. Whether you’re showcasing a snippet of your SaaS platform or offering a limited hands-on trial, that seamless transition accelerates the buying journey by letting visitors “try before they buy.”

The result? More meaningful conversions and a sustainable, high-value acquisition channel that builds both authority and pipeline in the long run.

2. Sustainable differentiation and long-term growth

With use-case-led SEO, your content doesn’t just directly solve your audience problem, but it does so in a bespoke, interactive, and branded way. Classic SEO articles can be easily copied by competitors, but custom, interactive solutions are far more complex to duplicate.

By investing in building these specialized tools, you create a competitive moat that not only sets your brand differentiation apart but also sustains long-term growth.

Moreover, once the process of crafting effective lead gen tools is mastered, the opportunity to expand into a suite of such tools emerges.

• Each new asset can target a different stage of the customer journey, reinforcing your brand’s authority, enhancing user satisfaction, and contributing to a compounding effect on organic growth over time.

• This approach transforms static content strategies into dynamic and compounding ecosystems that continuously attract and engage your ideal customer profile from multiple angles — or different roles (eg. buyers and champions) and segments (eg. SMBs and mid-market) of your SOM in tandem.

• Scaling across tool types further amplifies this effect. Take Shopify as an example: they maintain a flagship business name generator landing page while also creating individual pages for long-tail keywords like “candle business name generator” or “t-shirt business name generator.”

• This tactic not only taps into niche search volumes but also demonstrates a deep understanding of varied customer needs, reinforcing brand authority across multiple segments.

By blending product marketing with advanced SEO tactics through free, use-case-led SEO tools, companies can build sustainable growth engines that are difficult for competitors to replicate and that generate lasting organic value.

3. Integrating examples and proven tactics

Let’s look at examples of use-case-led SEO from companies like Ramp, AirOps, Deepgram, Shopify, Riverside FM, and Storylane.

Ramp’s free growth tools

Ramp’s suite of free calculators and growth tools are a prime example of use-case-led SEO. They include a set of:

• Calculators — per diem, burn rate, reimbursements, etc.

• Generators — expense policy templates, mission statement

• Databases, directories, and libraries — vendor search, accounting docs

  

Want to build a use-case-led SEO strategy ahead of your competitors? Book a call with one of our seasoned advisors.

They even segmented the tools by a mix of customer segments — eg. Investors, procurement, accounting, and founders.

Specifically, their mission statement generator has been continuously capturing high-intent traffic since its inception. These interactive resources not only drive organic visibility — by being extremely SEO optimized pages complete with keywords, FAQs, examples, and product marketing CTA doors, but also build trust in the brand by providing tangible customer value from the outset.

AirOps AI strategy generator

Similarly, AirOps’ AI strategy generator goes beyond static text, offering a custom-tailored plan that resonates with users’ unique businesses based on their website and a full-blown, automated SEO research of adjacent players and competitors.

This input-based, use-case-led approach differentiates it from standard SEO how-to content, turning visitors into engaged prospects by solving specific problems in real time — and with clear entry points into nurturing and prospecting.

Deepgram AI tools database

Deepgram takes this a step further with its AI-generated database of thousands of AI tools — an industry-leading resource that attracts users actively exploring new SaaS solutions, thereby positioning Deepgram as an authoritative brand in this rapidly evolving market.

Shopify’s business name generator

Another example we love is Shopify’s business name generator, which captures niche search queries, reinforcing brand visibility while providing immediate utility.

As mention

Riverside recommended tools

Riverside FM curates an extensive tool collection that serves creators with tailored resources, enhancing user experience and brand loyalty — and funneling straight into their product signup form.

Storylane interactive demos

Another great example is Storylane — a fast-growing startup that has taken use-case-led SEO by storm and scaled it (they called it demo-led SEO, but hey!).

• They created 100 pages for use-case queries like “How to understand if your influencer's audience is the right fit? (using LinkedIn)” that cover “how to do X with [tool]?” — think Ahrefs, Mixpanel, Canva, etc. — working back from real ICP problems and insights aligned with keyword opportunities.

• They’ve done so by minimizing the amount of text on each landing page and putting their product front-and-center — it helps that their product is about creating (product) demos in 10 minutes! — making the content experience highly interactive.

• They manage to go from 700 to 70,000 monthly traffic and outranked all support articles from the actual domains (yes, they’ve outranked Canva, Slack, Ahrefs, and all the pages they created these demos for!) — proving once again that SEO can work really well with (almost) no text!

  

Together, these examples illustrate that by offering free, interactive tools, you can achieve sustainable and organic lead gen while also differentiating your brand!

A cautionary tale — keep in mind that initial spikes in results are not the end goal. In fact, it's quite the opposite. Without consistent effort and ongoing optimization, those initial gains can quickly disappear.

It's like a plant that thrives after the first rain but withers and dies without consistent watering and care.

4. Adopting a multifaceted mindset that blends product, marketing, and SEO

Now, let’s get into the execution part of use-case-led SEO. Creating effective use-case-led SEO demands a cross-disciplinary mindset that fuses SEO expertise, product marketing insights, and good UX/UI.

• Product marketers mine opportunities from customer research and optimize for high intent and recurrence in customer touchpoints.

• SEO experts ensure that these tools correspond to high-traffic opportunities and rank high in search results

• PMs and designers focus on making UX/UI and signup onboarding as seamless as possible.

Quantifying the return on investment for such tools is as crucial as their creation. Similar to how SEO data informs content strategy, marketers can leverage search volume, recurrence of use-case in customer calls, and analysis of competitive gaps to estimate a tool’s potential impact.

This methodical evaluation ensures that resources are allocated to projects likely to yield substantial organic visibility and sustainable growth, turning insights into actions that drive both short-term wins and long-term brand differentiation.

Build your dream GTM team across product marketing, SEO, and demand gen. Tap into our deep talent network and go-to-market faster.

5. Strategies and resources for building effective SEO mini-products

Choosing the right tool format begins with aligning your solution to the user’s core needs and pain points.

• Calculators: sometimes, a simple calculator is ideal for providing actionable answers — think cost estimators or ROI calculators. This can start off with scrappy Excel sheets on the back-end that get embedded into a more dynamic iFrame of a branded landing page with a few tools mentioned below.

• Generators: In other cases, a generator that creates customized outputs adds more value, such as name generators or personalized strategy builders. In most cases, these are GPT wrappers — think customGPTs — trained for specific use cases and parameters.

• Quizzes & Chatbots: Meanwhile, a quiz can deliver an engaging, interactive experience that invites users to learn about themselves or their business while connecting them directly to your product offering. This can be a form or also a customGPT guiding the user towards specific paths and decision trees.

• Databases, directories, and libraries: even dynamic CMS collections of tools, templates, services providers and similar can have real impact on users. These collections effectively build a bridge for customers from their how-to query to concrete solutions and details or recommendations on which one is best for which use case.

Once you’ve decided on the tool type, leverage no-code solutions for rapid development. We recommend looking into software like the below to make it easy to spin up prototypes quickly.

• Cursor AI: An AI-powered code editor that helps developers in writing, editing, and debugging code — better for your engineering team.

• 0dev: A platform that allows developers to build and deploy full-stack web applications quickly.

• Outgrow: A no-code tool for creating interactive content like quizzes, calculators, and assessments.

• Stackblitz: A new way to build and deploy web applications with natural language.

• Softr: A no-code platform for building web applications and internal tools without code, using Airtable as a backend.

• Bubble: Another great Softr alternative to build full-stack applications with no code.

• Ucalc: A service for creating and embedding advanced calculators and forms on websites.

Keep in mind that turning your tool into a genuine pipeline driver may involve gating tactics. There are two ways of going about this:

• Hard-gate: you could require email sign-up before any interaction

• Soft-gate: you can allow some usage, then asking for email before revealing the results.

Which approach should you go for? The more you have a unique offer, the more you can hard gate. However, most companies should start with soft-gating in order to spread word-of-mouth and virality, then experiment with progressively harder gating.

Putting all this into practice demands a lean growth squad approach. Assemble a small, agile team that includes an engineer, a product manager, and a designer. Move fast, rely on no-code platforms to iterate, and concentrate on deploying a minimum viable version to gather real-world data.

Throughout this process, embracing experimentation is crucial: treat each lead gen tool as a growth test. Launch, measure, and be prepared to pivot based on user behavior.

Failure in one iteration simply provides the insight to make the next version even more effective, guiding you toward a sustainable, high-converting organic acquisition channel.

Closing thoughts

By blending product marketing acumen with SEO rigor, and by leveraging agile development strategies, use-case-led SEO can turn a static website into a high-converting interactive content ecosystem powered by valuable, differentiated lead gen tools.

Instead of simply chasing keywords, focus on delivering meaningful experiences that resonate with prospects and customers alike. As you scale this approach, you not only strengthen your brand’s presence in organic search but also build a sustainable foundation for long-term revenue growth.