Why startups need to approach SEO differently than established companies
atrium.co
atrium.co
The reality is, the guide he created was a product on it's own. While he ended up with "product" market fit for that piece of content on his first try, this is rare.
>We’ll start off with the tutorials, since it is better suited for expensive, amazing content that will allow us to impress and attract 3rd party communities.
To find product market fit, you need to solve a problem. Since you know who your target market is (the main niche influencers), identify real problems they have and solve these problems with your product (content). In this case, the solution was making a more user friendly product than what was available on the market. Some markets are saturated with user friendly content, you will need to make your content 10x better than the rest.
You will know you have solved their problem, and found product market fit, if they distribute your content.
The questions I have are: what is the MVP equivalent for content? How do I know if the content I am creating really solves the searchers problems 10x better than the alternative before spending thousands of dollars on the content?
Look at everyone else on the first page of Google for your question/keyword and make notes about all the things they're missing.
Even if all you do is combine their ideas into 1 'ultimate' article, that's still valuable.
It's one thing if you sell this physical product or service that a normal human being can articulate into a query. It's another if you're selling totally imaginary stuff, like V-Bucks.
What's the point of writing content for things no one knows they're looking for?
“Fortnite bucks are they worth it”
https://www.google.com/search?q=fortnite+v+bucks+are+they+wo...
“Is it worth getting Tinder Premium”
https://www.google.com/search?q=is+it+worth+getting+tinder+p...
...but more of them can than meets the eye at first. In fact, the dating category seems like a prime target:
1. Publish local dating pages, like this one: https://www.pof.com/personals/2700onlinedating.htm
2. When people sign up for an account, promote your mobile app
3. The influx of signups will help with ASO, which will generate more signups, which will help with SEO.
4. Wash, rinse, repeat.
My first site was in the calorie counting space, and we followed the above approach to acquire about 8 million users (our content on the web was related to search terms around food names). Eventually, MyFitnessPal did the exact same thing but much better, and it's still growing to this day using the same strategy.
There isn't. But there's great value in writing content your future customers will want to google about on their way to becoming customers.
Take, for instance, an app vendor that sells some kind of cash register software specialized for bars. If you're that, your ideal client is a new or future bar owner, because it's a harder sell to clients that are already equipped with some kind of solution. So you've every reason in the world to create bar creation tips that walk new/future owners through the red tape and caveats of creating one.
A few years ago I was working for tiny marketing agency and we owned nike and adidas so hard by developing detail content around football boots.
I have done both types of SEO huge gnarly sites at RELEX and was actually pitched an v senior SEO role - I suspect my lack of a degree might have lead to me getting dropped by the Spanish hr team.
None. The linked article explains their extensive keyword research to make sure people are indeed looking for these things.
If your unit economics allow you to pursue paid acquisition, then certainly focus on that in your early days (and if it's SEM, then you'll learn a lot about search terms that you'll be able to leverage for SEO down the road).
But businesses that have a low LTV (eg: less than $100) often don't have that luxury. In those instances, starting with SEO early may be one of the few options you have.
It may be a contrarian strategy, but as a startup you don't really have many other options other than to publish insanely high quality content, even if it means you won't get to publish very frequently. Once you get some traction, you can then start scaling by lowering the amount of effort you put into each and every article.
While I didn't have to do any writing, it would be disingenuous to promote the idea that all it takes for SEO to take off is a clever trick. In fact, if there's one message I would share, it is that there are no shortcuts (but on the positive side, if you do put in the work, you can make it despite being an early-stage company).
Most of my work went into analyzing the topics we should be writing about, creating lists of keywords I was encouraging our writers to use, recruiting writers, and then building relationships in the relevant communities and promoting the content. Eventually we ended up getting enough people to subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on Twitter that the promotional work went away.
Your first articles can be related to your MVP, and the following ones about stuff you discover after gaining your first users.
What I think the OP is trying to communicate, is basically that SEO or creating content that attracts people, is just a natural step within the development of your business. You'd need a interesting take on a problem or solve one that nobody else is solving, and then make sure that you don't miss the keywords people search for.