Released soccer coaching app Coachaide.com, now what?!
So, just for fun, I created a tactics board for soccer coaches as a progressive webapp, hosted at https://soccer.coachaide.com. I also support a few other sports like basketball and icehockey (see https://www.coachaide.com). Just a week ago, I released a version that is half-way decent and could be useful for others. There's quite a bit of not-so-great competition in this space so visibility is an issue; I rank absolutely nowhere on search engines. Lots of snake oil sellers for SEO - what's the best way to really get started on SEO and gain some initial visibility?
Seems like you have a few easy opportunities for SEO.
The most obvious one is more text on the site so that people understand what it does and how it works. I noticed the tutorial, but dynamic text doesn't help with SEO much.
Another easy opportunity is for you to launch a blog. Less so about the tool usage, but more of a resource site for coaches - including tactics that you and others using CoachAide have discussed with you. The thing with this approach though is that by itself it is not as helpful, unless you get others linking to you.
An alternative approach to launching a blog, is in doing guest posts in other peoples blogs and linking them to your site. You can also do both approaches - launch your own blog as well as guest post in other places.
However, you might get more traction outside of SEO. Perhaps you might want to double down on what is working - the facebook groups. Yes, it takes time - but you might get much better results that way. You could also amplify that approach, by recruiting people in facebook groups to sell your service (ala affiliate sales) or just give existing users a referral discount.
I do worry that it might be a little early to think about some of these. I think your best bet might be working with a few coaches so that they are willing to not only use it on an ongoing basis but also to part money with to do so. And if these are primarily not professional coaches they will likely be very vary in doing so - so perhaps you might want to make a constrained version of this feature set completely free and charge clubs, etc.
Thanks, yes I agree about the dynamic text. See my reply to @tscionti below about blogging. Yeah, I know I'm getting traction through Facebook, but still it seems awfully slow. To this day, only a few thousand users in the world have ever seen this software. The groups don't scale so well after certain point - many of them are big but it's the same users and of those, likely the same subset of users who are active enough to evaluate anything new. The only shortcut I can see with the social route is that I'd get some actually famous coach to vouch for my software and to talk about it - my reach is not quite enough. As far as monetization goes, I think it's way too early to think about that. Running this costs me just pennies and the development has only cost me time, and I actually consider that time as well spent. With a few tens of thousands of users, I could consider developing some premium features and I have a master plan for that, but overall, way too early to even really think about that.
If you are hesitant about blogging, perhaps launch a few microsites - perhaps a map/directory of sports clubs and a directory of rules, etc. Having close-ended projects might be helpful for getting traction as well as allowing you to manage scope.
I love the idea of keeping a first set of features free. But, it is worth noting that doing so does make it harder to invest in promoting the software.
You say that you have a few thousand users who have seen the software. But, how many have said that they love it? Doing a controlled user-feedback session will likely be significantly more informative than adding features.
Also, trying to get famous coaches to vouch for your software sounds like a good idea. However, before that I would try to get a few less-important coaches to vouch for your software just to get a sense of the effort that would be involved.
Figure out where football coaches hang out (online forums, Facebook groups, Telegram groups ?), become part of those and promote it there.
See what their feedback is and adapt it to their exact needs.
I'd ignore the advice of adding more sports just yet. Focus on nailing one first.
That looks a fair amount of work! Congrats on the result.
That matches my thinking. I've built the product to match my needs as a coach and I've incorporated suggestions I've gotten. There are plenty of FB groups for coaches and I'm active in those but one of the things I've figured is that many coaches don't regularly hang out online. They might still look for a tactic board app one day and they pick the one on top of the results, that's why I figured I should put some effort into SEO as well. The only reason for adding sports is that the cost is minimal to me.
Have you shown it to your coaches friends? What have they said?
Have they come back to using your product the day/week after you forced them to try it? 😂
Try to email medium-small coaching blog owners and see whether they like it enough to create a post on their blogs to promote it. That would be beneficial both in terms of SEO and with traffic from those blogs.
Yes, of course. I've mainly (/only?) received positive feedback from coaches who've used it. We use it regularly & all the time with my assistant coach and some others in my youth club. Shared calendars is one of the big missing features users have asked about. I've emailed some medium/small coaching blog owners. One of the primary issues there is that there's a lot of existing competition, and they are currently either using or sponsoring a different, previous generation solution. Probably need to do that more though. One of the SEO optimization I just did for the latest version is to open up the play metadata (show title/description) by default for guest/robo users. I'm surprised that nobody even pointed that out, even though I had specifically asked about SEO. What I've read about SEO, is that search engines really discount hidden text which makes sense. I would assume same applies for guest users.
You should add lacrosse. It should be pretty similar to a soccer implementation and is a quickly growing sport. If you gain traction in this sport, you could become a main player / go-to tool in the industry.
Thanks, that's a good suggestion! Adding new sports is almost trivial. I just haven't done it because promoting takes time and I wanted to first see if I get any traction in the one sport, soccer, I use it for. I'll add lacrosse shortly.
@itsJunc, already started implementing lacrosse but oh boy, lacrosse fields differ significantly from each other. Believe it or not, my biggest hurdle for adding a new game type is getting a clean svg image of the field. Once I have that, it's less than 30 mins of work to support a new sport. I suppose men can and do play on womens' lacrosse fields, but they just ignore the the fan & half-circle areas in front of the goal, is that right?
That is very true. The girls and guys have completely different lines and rules. I would recommend making two separate fields. If you try to fit all the lines for both men and women on one field, it will likely get pretty confusing.
I'll think about lacrosse - see my reply to @hamishirving on adding sports.
In general, what I've done for SEO is to open up play description by default for guest users/SE spiders, create a sitemap and explicitly define a canonical URL for a each drill/play. The idea is that each published play is a like small blog post, instead of me creating another blog and content just promote another thing. (I'd then need to promote the blog, and then create another blog until it's all turtles/blogs all the way down).
This is super cool, I think could be useful for a lot of sports. Did you build it from scratch?
Yes, built from scratch. What other sports you think it would be beneficial for?
Well, I played a lot of rugby union and recently I’ve been thinking about software that could help rugby teams. It was always a challenge learning what’s call ‘lineouts’, you would have set calls with a lot of movement that needed to be memorised. A tool like this would be helpful to communicate the movements and also test players understanding of the calls.
Just to prove the point, I added rugby (not released yet). I used the field map I got from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rugby_league_playing_field, not sure if that's the correct one to use. I seriously doubt though that Coachaide could gain any increase in visibility or SEO by adding fringe(?) sports without any additional investments to the said sport.
Close 😉but I was referring to Rugby Union, not Rugby League, but they're similar - Rugby Union wiki (with image of field) here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rugby_union.
Say I wanted to build a service for Rugby Coaches, how would I go about using coachaide to provide them value within my own product?
Ah, I knew this would get me in trouble :) Well, if Coachaide worked as it, you'd just use it, create drills and share those links with your users. Later on, you could even directly share a calendar with your users with day-to-day session plans etc. If it doesn't work for your use case as is or you envision a deeper integration, I suppose you'd talk to me about it first.
For starters - having a website that outlines your product clearly as well as a blog can make a big impact early. I see you have one linked so a bit of feedback below, but that's the first step so nice! In addition to that:
Blogging is great because not only can you show yourself to be a domain expert, it gives you more and more content hosted on your domain which gives a good boost for SEO at no cost.
Social media as well - promoting your brand and interacting with prospects through channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc is a great way to expand your reach and connect with folks who could be your customers/know people who could be your customers.
Looking at your site I'm not 100% sure what it does/how to sign up: it's pretty clear it's for coaches though is it for professional, college, or local level? What do I use it for (practice, games, both?); how do I sign up/log in and how much does it cost?
Making those things crystal clear will go a long way in ensuring that when people get to your site, they stick around and give you business :)
How many people are using it? If it's at the local level are there teams you can connect with to try it out and give feedback? As a working MVP getting feedback early is crucial so you can know how to pivot and what to add.
Thanks for the feedback. I know the usual way is to build a product page that features the benefit of the product but I specifically decided against that, because then I'd have two problems in my hands instead of just one. I really wanted to limit the friction to minimum, so that the user can start using the product straight away. It's possible though that decision hurts a bit on the SEO front. Blogging does come with the cost, time, and I'm afraid that I would not keep that effort up. Writing quality content frequently takes effort and I figured I put that effort into improving the product instead. I've been mindful about link design though, for example, each play has its own URL (e.g. https://soccer.coachaide.com/shared/play/2261dd28-2c5a-4ff5-9287-bf455605ca21) but looks like I'd need to have the textual information associated with a drill more upfront and available for the search engine crawlers to see it properly. We all use the software in our local club and happy with it (but still need that shared calendars...)
i dont have any suggestion, just wanna say nice work haha, i played around it and its fun! good work!
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Thanks for the feedback! You are not the first one to ask players' names and that part is almost trivially easy, but implementing a whole team management system is a bit of different story. I question the importance of the naming feature - as a youth coach myself I don't need it.
I already make videos of the plays if you share & publish them. You can download them for your own use and the system automatically publishes them to a youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCw6YPyQM0Yog-VVy0BTQBOA?view_as=subscriber) as well as Twitter and Pinterest.
The obvious audience are coaches. I'm fairly active on various Facebook groups for youth coaches and that's where I've gotten some traction. That takes some time though and in the meantime, my search visibility is zero.
To approach clubs, I believe I'd need shared calendar functionality and that's in the cards. It's a hobby project though so new feature development always takes a bit of time. And I'm mindful about whether it makes sense to keep building new features inside the house when I can't even get people to come to the front door, so to speak.
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Yeah, perhaps there's a seedling of truth to that. Names will have to wait till I have shared calendars and some minimal team management functionality in though.