SEO best practices

General principles

1. Start with search intent

Don't obsess over exact-match keywords, ask: What is the searcher really trying to accomplish? For example, a user searching "difference between retention rate and churn" will likely also benefit from actionable insight on improving customer retention, not just definitions.

We craft our content to address those underlying needs. Cover the main topic thoroughly, include related sub-questions and themes, and anticipate next steps a reader might take.

Here’s what that might look like for "Retention rate vs churn"

• Quick answer first: Retention rate shows who stayed, churn shows who left. If churn is 20%, retention is 80%.
• Context next: Add formulas, a simple numeric example, and a short paragraph on why retention matters for growth.
• Related questions:
• What’s a "good" churn rate?
• How do you reduce churn?
• When should you focus on retention vs. acquisition?
• Next steps: Link to guides on retention strategies, cohort analysis, and churn reduction.

2. Make it easy to digest

When answering a question, lead with the answer first, then expand with supporting details. This helps impatient readers and aligns with how AI tools select responses.

We keep our structure simple and scannable:

• Use a clear heading hierarchy (H1, H2, H3) so readers and crawlers can follow your logic.
• Use one H1 per page to avoid confusion about the page’s main topic.
• Write short paragraphs and use bullets or numbered steps for lists.
• Use plain language – drop the jargon and explain terms plainly so anyone (and any language model) can understand what you’re talking about.
• Facilitate easy navigation – use anchor links or a mini table of contents for long articles.
• Use visuals – charts, tables, and screenshots make key points faster to absorb.
• Structured extracts – add TL;DRs, “Key takeaways” boxes, or pull-quotes to highlight what’s most important at a glance.

3. Headlines matter

Our headlines are the front door to our content – they’re what convince someone (or an AI) to pick us. They should stand out in search results, be enticing enough to click, and still make it clear what the page is about.

We should be bold, creative, and opinionated – but not so clever that we lose relevance. If every result has a nearly identical headline, we win by being different, but if we get too abstract or too witty, we risk missing the actual query intent and dropping out of search entirely.

Quick rule of thumb: If it sounds like every other search result, sharpen it. If it sounds clever but hides what the article’s about, clarify it.

4. Demonstrate expertise and authority

The internet has never been so full of words. The friction for content creation has dropped to nearly zero (thanks, ChatGPT), which means the bar for quality has shot up. The only way to win attention is to raise the bar: create content that actually teaches, clarifies, and adds something new.

Establish yourself (and PostHog) as a subject matter expert. We do this by:

• Backing our claims with data. Include relevant statistics, research findings, or mention credible studies. Citing reputable sources or adding footnotes for facts can also build trust (and AI models tend to favor answers with a cited source).

• Including expert insights. If possible, add quotations or insights from experts (it can be an internal one). An authoritative quote or a first-hand insight provides uniqueness and value that generic content lacks.

• Offering a unique point of view or proprietary data. Bring something new to the table – something only we can. Share internal data\* or a novel insight from your personal experience. Google’s algorithms now consider “information gain,” which measures the uniqueness of information your content adds beyond what’s already out there.

• Be thoughtful about what you share – protect sensitive data and respect user privacy – but don’t shy away from leveraging the knowledge only we have. Our unique perspective is our moat.

5. Be conversational

Our tone is friendly, focused, and human – especially now that voice search and AI chat engines are shaping how people consume information. Content that sounds natural and answers questions simply is more likely to show up in featured snippets, People Also Ask boxes, and AI overviews.

That said, conversational doesn’t mean rambling. Stay on topic and be clear and direct. Think of how you’d explain the topic if speaking to a colleague – friendly but focused.

A more dialog-like tone can also help capture featured snippets or People Also Ask boxes, as the content directly addresses how users phrase questions.

Bad Q&A example

- Heading: Strategies for reducing customer attrition

- Body copy: Customer attrition is a key challenge for many businesses and must be addressed with a comprehensive set of initiatives. Companies should consider improving their product offering, implementing proactive customer success programs, and monitoring engagement metrics over time.

Good Q&A example

- Heading: How do we reduce churn?

- Body copy: Start by identifying where customers are dropping off – look at cancellation reasons, churn cohorts, and feedback surveys. Then tackle the biggest issues first, like onboarding problems or missing features. Even small fixes (e.g. a clearer onboarding flow) can reduce churn quickly. Follow-up questions we could answer: What’s a “good” churn rate for SaaS? What metrics should we track to spot churn early? How do we measure if our retention efforts are working? How can we build a feedback survey?

6. Don’t put all our eggs in one keyword basket

Good SEO articles always target more than one search term. While you may start with a core query (or prompt) in mind, remember there are always multiple ways to search for the same information. Sometimes it's better to target a similar but lower volume search term than the big obvious one.

For example, the parent search term "user persona" (27,000/mo) has numerous derivations:

• Define user persona (8,100)
• Create user persona (3,600)
• Persona modelling (720)
• Benefits of personas (50)
• User persona examples (5,400)
• Examples of user persona (260)
• How to create personas (2,900)
• What is a user persona (260)
• User persona template (27,000)

We target clusters of intent, not just one keyword. Long-tail variations are often easier wins and build topical relevance. Over time, our page can rank for multiple terms and even capture the broad head term as authority grows.

7. Write for our ICP

The more specific we make our content, the more likely it is to resonate – and perform. This matters more than ever with AI-driven search and tools like ChatGPT's Deep Research, which don’t just answer the initial query but often fan out into follow-up questions and related recommendations.

For example, a generic “Best session replay tools” list might compete with thousands of others. But “Best open source session replay tools for startups” positions us as the exact match for a highly qualified search.

When we write, we should ask ourselves:

• Who exactly is this for? What unique context, goals, or constraints does our ICP have?
• What contextual qualifiers would they use? (e.g. “for nonprofits,” “for remote teams,” “for Europe in 2025”) and weave them naturally into the copy.
• What’s next? Anticipate the next three questions they’d ask after reading and answer them in the same piece. This keeps us the source that AI models (and readers) turn to as the conversation deepens.

8. Updates work / are important

Publishing a great article is not the end of the story. SEO is an ongoing process, and one of the best ways to maintain or boost rankings is to keep content up-to-date.

How often this should happen is very subjective, but the more traffic a page gets the more often it should be updated. When updating, don’t just change a few words or the date; search engines are smart about detecting meaningful updates versus superficial ones. Add genuinely valuable content: new stats, a new tip, clearer structure, recent developments, etc. And if your last update was a while ago, consider adding an "Updated on \[Date\]" notice to show readers (and Google) that the page is maintained.

Likewise, updating and improving a page that isn't ranking is often the best way to get it to rank successfully. Just because something didn't rank at the first attempt, doesn't mean it never will.

9. Internal linking isn't optional

Internal linking is a vital part of successful SEO. It helps Google find our content and understand how pages relate to each other. It can also help prevent internal conflicts (where Google is unsure which article to list for a term), by signalling to Google what specific term we think a page should rank for.

Here are some best practices for internal linking:

• Link early, where it makes sense. Google tends to value links placed higher up on the page more than ones buried at the bottom. So, when you mention a concept that you have a deeper article on, link it to that first mention if appropriate.
• Use descriptive, varied anchor text. The anchor text (the clickable text of a link) should give a hint about the destination page’s content. Instead of saying “click here” or linking the same generic phrase every time, use keywords or descriptive phrases that fit naturally in your sentence.
• Link relevant pages only. Ensure your internal links are contextually relevant. Don’t force a link where it doesn’t belong; Google can tell if links are unnatural. The goal is to guide readers to related content they’d find useful, which in turn guides search engines.
• Don’t overdo it. A handful of well-placed internal links (3–5) is usually enough. You don’t need to link every other sentence. Too many links can dilute their value and be distracting for readers.
• Maintain your links. Periodically, use tools or audits such as #alerts-broken-website-internal-links to check for broken internal links (if you reorganize pages or change URLs, update any old links). Broken links hurt user experience and can waste crawl budget.

10. Optimize for LLMs

We’re no longer just writing for Google – we’re writing for the answer engines too. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google’s AI Overviews are pulling from our content to build answers. To win those spots, we need to make our pages easy to retrieve, easy to quote, and obviously authoritative.

The goal is to make our content the easiest, clearest, most trustworthy answer in the room, for both humans and machines. How we do that:

• Clarity over cleverness: Say the thing plainly. LLMs work best with clear, declarative sentences.
• Structure for retrieval: Use clean headings, bulleted lists, and short paragraphs so answers can be extracted in chunks. Each section should stand alone if it’s pulled out of context.
• Front-load the answer: Start with the takeaway, then explain. (Think: “TL;DR first, nuance after.”)
• Semantic redundancy: Repeat key terms and phrases naturally – it helps LLMs reinforce relevance without guessing.
• Authority signals: Cite sources, include data, and highlight expert input. Models tend to favor content that “looks” trustworthy. Author bios, sources, and first-hand insights boost trust.
• Chunk quality: Keep sections focused. A 200-word section that completely answers one question is more reusable than a 1,000-word wall of text.
• Stay fresh and correct: Outdated or wrong info can keep us out of results (or worse, get us quoted incorrectly). Include timestamps, years, and up-to-date references (“as of 2025”).
• Favor Q&A format: Perplexity loves conversational answers and listicles (think “Top 5 tools for X”).
• Consistency matters: Keep facts about PostHog accurate and aligned across different pieces of content.
• Watch competitors: Monitor what SGE cites and improve on those answers to outrank them.

11. Steelman competitors

Many other companies "straw man" their competitors. They claim their competitors are worse than reality, focus on differences that don't matter, and make hyperbolic claims about how much better they are. We don't do this.

When writing about competitors, be honest about their capabilities. Assume they are reading and will dunk on you for being dishonest. PostHog may not have all the features competitors have today, that's okay. Our reputation and trust with readers is more important than whatever "marketing win" being dishonest gives us.

It's also okay to make mistakes here. Competitors change faster than we can keep up. Whenever we find a mistake, we fix it as soon as we realize. We also happily accept updates from competitors if they make our post more accurate.

Additional tips

Good metadata is like a handshake – it’s the first impression users (and AI tools) get before they ever see the page. Well-crafted titles and descriptions can improve click-through rates and help AI engines understand context.

Quick metadata checklist:

• [ ] Meta title includes the primary keyword and stays under \~60 characters
• [ ] Meta description is under 160 characters and compelling (can include primary or secondary keywords)
• [ ] Each page has unique metadata (no duplicates)
• [ ] Preview in a SERP simulator before publishing to check for truncation
• [ ] Add dates, numbers, or benefit-driven language where relevant to make metadata feel fresh and worth clicking.

Useful SEO tools

We use and recommend all the following tools to all writers.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is an all-in-one tool. It's useful for:

• Rank tracking: We use the built-in rank tracking to keep an eye on our visibility in Google for terms we're targeting with content. It updates ranking every 7 days. We only track desktop rankings in the United States atm.
• Competitor analysis: Arguably the most useful feature. Use the Site Explorer feature to analyze traffic and keyword patterns for competing websites.
• Keyword research: There are better keyword research tools, but the Ahrefs Keyword Explorer is still a useful way to find and analyze keyword and article opportunities.
• Site audits: We use Ahref's Site Audit tool to identify website issues – 404s, broken internal links, etc. A scan runs once a week. Andy looks after this.
• Backlink analysis: Allows us to see who is linking to our website and competitors. We don't use this extensively atm, but it's useful every once in a while.

Keywords Everywhere

Keywords Everywhere is a very useful Chrome extension that adds keyword research context to Google searches and other popular SEO tools. It's a great way to do quick bits of keyword research and find related terms.

It's only ~$15 annually.

Google Search Console

While the data is somewhat sampled, Search Console is a useful tool for analyzing the top-level numbers, or specific pages. Especially useful for seeing exactly which search terms are driving traffic to a particular page – sometimes the results will surprise you.

Mangools Google SERP Simulator

A free tool that lets you test how your headline will look in Google search results. This is useful for seeing:

1. Whether Google will clip the headline because it's too long – Google has a 600px width limit on headlines.
2. Comparing your headline to other results – ideally we want headlines that stand out / are more enticing than other results

AlsoAsked

A useful little tool with a decent free tier – 3 searches per day. It generates "people also asked" questions based on search terms.

It's useful for deciding what subheadings to include in articles, though exact matches aren't really necessary.