What's keeping you from using SEO as a marketing strategy?
SEO is the lifeblood of my product. Without it, I would be spending every day trying to market my tool to new potential customers.
Instead, I'm able to spend a few hours a week writing content, fixing bugs, adding features, and managing the support line.
It took a year and a half, but now my product site and blog gets +3000/month in organic traffic.
Because of this, I get roughly 5 free trials every day, and roughly 2-3 conversions everyday. At $30/month, that's pretty good for a one-person product.
When I tweet about SEO, it seems that it's an afterthought for most people. It's something that they'll do 'in the future'.
The problem with that is SEO works for you in the PAST. You have to put in the work up-front, and then in the long-term you reap the rewards of your efforts. It's a long term game, but it's a more sustainable way to build a business as a solo Indiehacker.
By not having to spend all day thinking about how I will get new customers, I can spend all day writing and in code (what I would rather be doing). Not only that, but the traffic is consistent. There's no spikes in free-trials, or times of drought. Just consistent customers rolling in every day.
So, my question in the title of the post, why aren't you investing in SEO? What's your roadblock? Is there anything I can help you with?
Comment below. #ask-ih
My project is SEO 😂😂 codewithhugo.com is about solving day to day problems for developers
That means I just go about my work and write any post that Google doesn't give me a good answer for (eg. I have to dig through source code on GitHub or trawl through documentation).
The problem is that the moment the launch button is pressed, expenses starts to pile up. Ideally, you would want to use outbound and find prospects asap so that you can:
When I built the Closet Assistant, any new features I added I blogged about. It was only slightly more work, and it was a way to get content on the site so I could show up in Google for people looking for those features in a product.
People aren't searching for products in the space, and my tool does something new that people aren't even aware is possible. I've looked at a lot of the relevant keywords anyways and the searches are very limited. I'm going to write blog posts but they won't be SEO optimized. I'll still attempt something evergreen.
Have you validated your product? Who is your target customer?
If no one is searching for something like you have built, is there a demand for it?
Yes, I've validated as much as I can without actually getting someone to pay for it. The target customer is someone who browses the internet and saves images into manually organized folders.
Search is not the same as demand, especially with new tech or weird products. People don't always know exactly what they want or need, and if they're not aware that a new technology can change a product space they're not going to be searching for it.
On my reddit ads I've gotten very positive feedback that the product is cool and piqued peoples' interests.
You're so right, people don't know they want it if they don't know it exists! If you have any cool marketing strategies for these kinds of push-products, please let me know!
@nlowell that first line, "I've validated as much as I can without actually getting someone to pay for it" - no, it's not validated at all. As many successful founders have emphasized, you must actually collect money (even temporarily) to validate your product. Lots of folks will may find your product useful, but when it comes to paying, there's just not enough motivation. I could come up with any number of stellar examples, but the one that comes most readily to mind is Jason Cohen's often-repeated advice, "Price is as important as any other feature to determine product/market “fit.”", and is an essential component of the customer development process. https://blog.asmartbear.com/pricing-business-model.html. There are many, many more. Test it.
Hi Jordan,
I run myslef a website which currently relies on Google organic serach. Before understanding that SEO together with content marketing (alias blogging) was the way to go for grow in terms of visitor and conversion rate, I wasted more then 1 year with Google and Facebook Ads, but also with seatting and waiting for the magic to happening.
What kept me from using SEO and content marketing was the following:
SEO content marketing is indeed a marathon and efforts will pay on the long term. On the other hand there is always the risk that all your efforts might go down the drain if the big G decides to change the rules of the game (within certain extents this is alreayd happenig!). For this reason I also consider SEO and content marketing just a temporary vehicle to reach a more "relibale and stable" source of grow: brand awareness + word of mouth.
There isn't really too much risk that Google will change things and affect your rankings. That only happens when you try to game the system by using tactics instead of just producing great content.
I am not talking about gaming the system here, but I am referring to how Google is trying to keep users more and more on its website/results.
Think about "Google Flights" or Featured Snippets and Answer Boxes. Here a nice post of Rand Fishkin digging into this:
https://sparktoro.com/blog/google-ctr-in-2018-paid-organic-no-click-searches/
Agreed the Search world is continuing to evolve in a way that serves Google. However, those featured snippets can lead to traffic, particularly if your content is extensive, and cannot be answered in a couple of sentences. Check out backlinfo for more on the subject.
On a related note, you can always use paid ads to determine which keywords convert best for your audience, then focus your content writing on those keywords/topics, getting the best of both worlds.
Jordan - ahrefs is $99/month, as are similar tools like Moz and Semrush. Are there cheaper tools (or free techniques?) that offer similar insights?
https://backlinko.com/keyword-research-tools
I've tried to put a big focus on SEO but so far I have been unable to reach the rankings required to achieve sufficient conversions.
I've had some lick creating content but I've been struggling to find places to promote articles (targeting mangers and business owners with employees).
Indie handers had worked reasonable well for promoting articles.
Hi Jordan,
To get to it: I don't know where to start. The product I am developing is to help Automotive Insurance Agents receive information (contact, vehicle, policy, price) from prospective customers easier.
We have generated interest from 50+ agents by simple outbound email campaigns (it is pretty easy to get agents emails, they want to be found) but know that we are not even close to scratching the surface.
I would love to get your help! Specifically:
Thanks!
Chase
Hey!
Where to start: https://backlinko.com/blog & https://ahrefs.com/blog have all the information you need to get started with SEO.
What platforms to use: I usually recommend using a static site generator, such as Jekyll or Hugo (hosted on Github Pages or Netlify), or at the least you could use Wordpress.
Something you could do today: Ask your potential agents what problems they have getting information from prospective customers (Or, ask them what their biggest problems). Then, use their answers as fodder for keyword research. Google some of the problems they're having, and see if there is any good content on that topic. If not, you can be the one!
Check out my blog post on my simple way to do SEO: https://unindie.com/quick-seo/
Thanks Jordan! I will do some research and get back to you on my progress :)
Hey Jordan 👋 I'm writing an SEO crash course and would love to have your feedback before launching it (for free of course!).
Hey Jordan, thanks for posting this.
I think our biggest problem is there's not a whole lot of people "searching" for what our product does. The people that do are good, but we have large incumbent brands and other SEO gurus that dominate the keywords (we're in social media marketing).
We are investing in SEO, currently, but then the biggest issues are there's not a whole lot of results and we're not sure how much we can invest in it instead of focusing on other aspects of our business as a startup.
And we've done a LOT of research.
Hey! You're right, social media marketing is completely saturated.
Luckily, that's not what people are searching for.
They want to know how to grow their beauty Instagram. How to do a giveaway for a Pinterest food blogger. Get more YouTube subscribers to their tech review channel.
I think if you niche down to different sectors and target the people you want to be your customers, you'll have more success being able to reach people with SEO.
No one is searching for generic terms. They want specifics. Give them specifics!
But in your defense, it's all about how you want to run your business. SEO is certainly not required!
Totally, we've actually looked at more niched terms (like how to grow your youtube channel), but we didn't go down to Social media for X niche, which is good advice.
I was able to get to 5 figures MRR without it and, honestly, I think that for a blog starting out on a new domain in 2019 the levels of competition are crazy. Even for long tail keywords with less than 1k monthly searches I saw only huge brands/websites on the first pages.
I decided a few days ago that I want to start anyways. I want to ask you a few things: how many backlinks do you have on the pages that rank? How many words on average on the pages that rank? What's the minimum amount of monthly searches for the keywords that you target? Do you target just one keyword per article or more than one? Thabks for your time!
Here's a quick guide I wrote to how I do SEO: https://unindie.com/quick-seo/
I read your post and gave me the answer to a question I forgot to ask (about Wordpress as a CMS). This leads to another question, is jekyll manageable without knowing how to code? Have you ever heard about carrd? It's a one page builder and I suppose that it is static. I was wondering how google would crawl it as a blog, because from the outside the users see multiple pages, when in reality it's only one. This could be a huge advantage or a huge disadvantage depending on how google behaves.
Another thing. I saw that the blog of your startup has only 10 articles. Given your results (3k organic) I supposed you had written more. Did you delete the bad performing like Brian Dean suggests?
Great questions!
thank you for your time and your answers.
Last question, what do you think about svbtle.com and proseful.com? I wouldn't be able to match the main website in branding but they seem two go solutions for easy and fast blogging.
Those sites are certainly great if you want to blog, but they're not going to help the overall SEO of the website of your product.
If you want a domain level blog that is managed, I'd recommend https://ghost.org/. It's $29/month for the basic version.
Understanding the basics of a development setup (running commands in the terminal + a basic understanding of how web technologies mesh together) will help you if you go the Jekyll route
As for carrd, I believe it's more of a landing page generator, so it doesn't necessarily have all the facilities for getting your content crawled/indexed (eg. A sitemap.xml).
"users see multiple pages, when in reality it's only one" - what you're describing here is a single page application (SPA), Google does crawl/index this but it might take longer than with static (ie HTML-only) pages.
One thing that isn't mentioned so much in old school SEO is that Google now uses mobile-friendliness and (possibly) page load speed/performance as factors. (Performance affects your bounce rate regardless so it might only be as part of that that it affects ranking).
hey hugo, thank for your comment.
I don't even know what a terminal is so we can say that jekyll isn't for me.
I used carrd on my projects and I was able to post a sitemap on search console but google sees it as a single page.
Talking about carrd, let's say that I write 10 articles, 1000 words each. The users see 10 articles with 10 urls (the only difference is that the url is something like domain.com/#url-slug, there is an hashtag for each section) google sees one huge page made up by 10,000 words. The question is this: is it an advantage (I have a super in-depth content) or a disadvantage (too many keywords, google is unable to understand what exactly my page is talking about). I suppose that it is a very hard question to answer.
thanks again ;)
Google understands content hierarchy, so if you have correctly named headings that will help.
If the content is all about 1 thing trying to all rank for one set of keywords then it will make sense to Google.
What SEO people tell you is that it's better to have 1 page that talks about 1 thing instead of 2 or 3 since you're then competing with yourself for ranking.
Hi Jordan,
I've recently launched the last version of my product.
I've been naive enough to think that I would use paid ads and it would pay off. I have a $29/once product.
I've started a blog, but I'm a rookie writer. I'll read yours for inspiration.
Thank you for sharing.
Make sure you read the last two posts on the https://closet.tools/blog. That's where my SEO is doing well.
The best way to write great content for a specific keyword is to look at what's ranking in the top 10 for the keyword and combine them to make one awesome post.
Here's a guide to how I usually do SEO: https://unindie.com/quick-seo/
Are you asking about SEO or content marketing (ie, blogging / producing content on your site that attracts visitors)? I assume its the latter ... the reason is it takes time and energy. But, after experimenting with it and seeing solid results after some consistent effort, I'm anxious to try again.
The beauty of content marketing is that you're making consistent effort (eg. you might need to update/add posts from time to time) but once you're ranking, the results are consistent as well, you'll be getting qualified traffic to your site every day.
Both. I only write content that's SEO optimized. I don't just write content to 'attract visitors'.
And that's for sure! It takes a lot of time and energy up front. Lots of patience too.
Hi Jordan
Thanks for bringing this up. It's a very interesting question.
I haven't done much SEO myself. It's hard for me to understand how I can do it effectively.
I'm not sure where it fits in the cycle of product validation.
Do you start SEO from day 1?
When is good time to start?
Do you produce content on the same domain as your product ? What happens if you decide to start over with a different product / different nam: do you throw away all the Seo work done before ?
Do you think investing in the SEO of a personal blog is better for recycling the effort from one product to the other ?
Regarding changing directions - no, you don't throw it away. If the content is still applicable, keep it, and even move it to a new domain, redirecting from the original domain.
If your audience remains the same, the content is still useful to them.
If you want to do SEO, the earlier you can do it the better.
I do produce content with the same domain as my product. It's in the blog.
Well, it depends. If your product is related to yourself, it's better to have all of your eggs in the same basket. But if the product is totally unrelated, then it would be better on its own.
I am working on my product for 1 year and a half now. I think I didn't do much SEO before because I lack the knowledge, developers are not incentivized to learn SEO and I don't know why. Maybe because it's very simple in terms of programming.
But I have been studying in the last month or so and applying to my business. The results are still small, but I guess I need to wait more time. SEO is slow to ramp up.
Better late than never!
It's a system that still requires creative output, just like any other content creation (video, audio, social media, etc.). Developers aren't typically the best marketers, but I would rather build something that grows itself organically than something that I have to work on every day.
Learn to write well, do keyword research, and provide value, and you'll be successful with SEO!
I am :)
LIES 😉
Hmmm, for me it's mostly fear of commitment.
Worst case scenario: months spent on SEO and the side project/business is not even alive in six months since I am still validating
That being said, after reading your blog, I have finally decided to invest in SEO on all my products, you got me!
Been following your journey for a while now, Jordan! Really happy for you :)
The alternative to that, if you're afraid your project won't last is maybe post all your content for all your projects in a single place (your personal site)
That will give you domain authority, if people are still interested in the product the post is about they'll click through as well.
Down the line you might have yourself a nice personal brand to build from.
I agree, it's probably not worth investing on something that's not certain in the future.
Validate quickly! Shouldn't take more than a few days and some Reddit posts.
Close down/commit to apps early. The faster you can iterate the faster you will be able to find something that works.
Do you have resources on how to validate quickly on reddit ? I would love to learn about it :)
Couldn't agree more!