>It’s important to view each article as a distinct product that requires a budget, has a clear purpose and performance goals, and also needs a distribution strategy.
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?
The MVP you're looking for are shorter content formats like tweetstorms. Assuming you have enough followers to accurately gauge the response, you could develop an editorial calendar and then track the likes/retweets/replies.
Does anyone discover in app purchases through a Google search? At IAC, how would SEO help sell a Tinder Pro subscription? At Epic, how would SEO sell Fortnite V-Bucks?
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?
> What's the point of writing content for things no one knows they're looking for?
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.
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.
This isn't about "apps" its about classic site seo and how the enterprise level work varies from a scrappy start up.
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.
People don't search for those things directly, but they might search for competitive advantages on those platforms, and if you can give them a good reason why they need x, you might sell.
This all seems to make sense, but how realistic is it for a startup to actually spend time on SEO instead of putting those same resources into product development, traditional marketing, etc?
Author here. Absolutely fair - it's the chicken or the egg question... It's important to get some quick traction doing quick and dirty tricks, but eventually you'll have to demonstrate that you have a scalable channel.
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.
This makes sense when the content is closely aligned to the product, like in your examples with language/framework tutorials. What I don't get is all these startups putting money into blog posts like "5 things we like about mondays" when they could be doing doing something valuable.
Yep, I think we're all sick and tired of the "5 things..." posts. The point I am trying to make in this article is that founders of early-stage startups are able to - and should - go above and beyond that. Far, far, far beyond that. Essentially, give it all you have, and put it all in your first post rather than splitting it over many different articles.
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.
It sounds like they did not spend too much time on it. They hired someone in the community to write for them. Then others wanted write on their platform for free. It was a very clever strategy that scaled without much effort or time from them.
It actually took all of my time to get the operation going. Considering that I was a co-founder and there weren't many of us around, it was a sizable time investment and a huge gamble for the company.
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.
Product development and the internal documents you have, can serve as the basis for good content. Essentially you're writing about problems that you're solving with your product.
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.
Great Article! Definitely, don't be scared of the entrenched group. As the article discussed, if your domain is new and doesn't have authority, figure out how to go really deep on a topic. The experience of 99.9% of SEO experts that I know is that after 2 months at a job, they get tired/bored and have implemented 90% of the strategy that they are going to. There is always room to compete as new snippets, algorithm updates, updated information or processes occur.
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?