Ask HN: Review my idea - Hosting SEO | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Review my idea - Hosting SEO

5 pointswebstartupper7 comments

Background: This idea was borne out of an internal tool I created to figure out and validate SEO strategies for websites I own. I figure since it works for me, I could try and sell this to a different industry/niche - in this case 'hosting'. This tool currently does not have an UI - I run sql queries directly on the mysql server to get my information. I have created a mockup UI to show how I expect it to work.

UI for explaining the app functionality - http://axemantech.com/HostingSEO/

Pain point it solves: Currently there are many seo apps that show serp rankings, on page and off page seo stats but seting up the system is generally painful. I dislike having to add keywords for my website, add data for my competitors, etc. This generally happens because these SEO apps are generic.

How to solve this: Since this app focuses on a specific niche, it will already be setup with all the potential keywords for the niche (and will continously add new ones). All the data that the customers (people performing seo for hosting companies) want would already be in the system. A customer would only sign up with his domain(s) and the app would show him his serp rankings, onpage and offpage details about the SEO for his web pages and his competitors.

The reason I chose the 'hosting' industry is because its one of the industries with the costliest adwords cpc - which means that a small change in ranking could be potentially very large savings for the companies. I am however open to other niches (especially ones that are not saturated)

I have been a technical guy for 10 years and find it quite hard to change my mindset to that of a business guy. All my questions are related to the business side.

My questions:

1. Does this sound like a good idea?

2. How else can I add value by specializing for a niche industry?

3. How would one figure out the best industry for this?

4. How would one figure out the market size for a specific industry?

5. What's the best way to get the initial users to help build this? I was thinking of contacting people who work at hosting companies via LinkedIn and try to sell to them directly.

Thank you so much for your time HN. You rock.

Akash

Interesting. I'm myself a software developer with a strong interest in SEO, so I know what you're talking about :-) I thought hard about breaking into the SEO tools world but I've discarded it so far for being too competitive.

To answer your questions:

1- I'm not sure. The best is to ask your prospective customers.

2- That's a good question. Can you make something better than SEOMoz by specializing? Your initial Unique Value Proposition is that it's easier because the domain and keywords are known. However I don't see that as being much work. Can you quantify that?

3- I think your initial reasoning for choosing the industry is right.

4- no idea. Google searches, reviews sites would only cover a small part of all hosting companies.

5- Contact people directly from LinkedIn or from contact forms on their websites. Try to get smaller hosting companies first (for e.g local hosting companies in your area).

In the end, I'm not really sure about the value of what you're offering. If you could service one niche, you could trivially expand (it's just a matter of entering keywords). So your product needs to have some more niche relevance. Maybe a list of link building tips, bloggers to reach out to do guest blogging, industry-specific opportunities etc.

If you want to brainstorm this more, I'd be glad to help. My email address is in my profile.

Hi Tommy,

Thanks for the answers. I'm definitely interested in brainstorming. Will send you an email in a while.

Akash

I dont think doing seo for a single industry is a good idea. Actually I think it's terrible.

Seo is a competition. You cant be serving both me and my competitor. Whose website do you promise to.get better ranking to? Who pays you the most? I'd rather just pays adwords then.

I'm not thinking of providing direct SEO services to the companies in the same industry. The app would simply allow them to check and validate their seo strategies and see comparable data for all the other companies in the same industry (on-page and off-page seo stats, back links etc).

At the moment, I'm not confident that there is any niche-specific value the app can provide to the companies. However, assuming I can figure that out, would a company really be put off if their competitor was able to access the same value?

It sounds like you're trying to build http://mixrank.com for SEO. SEO is tough cause the results aren't immediate. Also, as a business person, most would rather pay for results (black or white hat) than a bunch of information that they may not be able to act on.

It is a good idea to start with, but needs a lot of work on top of it to make it usable. Pick a relatively lesser dense industry to start with.

Clickable - UI - http://axemantech.com/HostingSEO/

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