
Why startups need to approach SEO differently than established companies - aerosmile
https://www.atrium.co/blog/seo-seed-stage-startups/
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arosier
>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?

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aerosmile
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.

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doctorpangloss
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?

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ddebernardy
> 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.

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frankcaron
Former TouchBistro director of PMM cosigning on this exact approach being
useful and used by us at the time.

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spencera6
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?

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aerosmile
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.

~~~
nsmog767
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.

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aerosmile
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.

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danvoell
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.

~~~
walshemj
Alexa voice search is an interesting area

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mbesto
Sidenote - what tools do people recommend using for SEO analysis outside of
Searchmetrics?

~~~
jklinger410
SEMRush is my go-to. Ahrefs is also great.

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maryglowbom
Great article! Thanks

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ranidu
Great tips here!

