About a year ago, I launched Siteguru, my SEO tool. Right now, the tool has over a thousand users.
This is how I did it.
Some background info: SiteGuru is a free SEO tool. Initially, you could check just one page and would have to sign up to analyze your entire site. Signing up is free, and I offer paid plans for analyzing more pages.
Starting off: Adwords
Right after I launched the first MVP of my product, I ran a few Adwords ads just to see if it caught on. I knew the product was far from perfect, but I thought it was useful. Adwords was a great way to figure out if other people agreed.
I wrote about this in my post How I tested my website with 100 real visitors spending just $100. It worked, and after a week SiteGuru had it's first 10 users.
Because I didn't have any paid subscribers, I knew Adwords wouldn't be a sustainable solution. But it did help me figure out if the product was worth more effort.
Linkbuilding for an SEO tool: good luck with that
I got positive feedback from people who tried Siteguru, so it was time to do some outreach. I started emailing bloggers in the SEO space, inviting them to try Siteguru and write about it. At the same time, I hired a linkbuilder to reach out to relevant sites that could feature my tool.
The result? Zero. Nothing. I didn't get a single response, and neither did the guy I hired. I knew it's a competitive space, but this was disappointing.
Through some more Adwords campaigns, SiteGuru was at 60 users.
The first big break: ProductHunt
In August, I posted SiteGuru on ProductHunt, and it was mildly successful. I got about 100 upvotes, lots of visitors, and about 100 signups.
SiteGuru was now at 180 users.
The first dollars, and lots of users.
In November '17, SiteGuru got featured on StackCommerce. They let me offer a paid deal at a ridiculous discount (90%), featured the deal on sites like The Next Web, and brought in lots of visitors. Lots of these visitors signed up, either using the StackCommerce deal, or just for a free account.
The StackCommerce deal ran for about 3 months. SiteGuru now had 750 users.
I ran similar deals with parties like DealFuel and GreeDeals. They weren't bad either.
Organic growth, or how SEO caught on
After about 8 months, I finally started to see more organic traffic coming to the site. This contributes to the user growth and required little effort. It just took so long before it took off. I guess that's because the SEO tool market is so competitive.
A year in, SiteGuru is now at 950 users.
Changing the sign up process
For the first 12 months, you could run a free pagecheck on the homepage, that didn't require you to sign up. I hoped that this would convince people to sign up and get the real deal: a full analysis of your website.
Many visitors ran a pagecheck (conversion rate ±30%), and seemed to be happy with it (based on their click behavior, time on page, etc.). However, only 5% would sign up.
I decided to try something else: the free pagecheck is gone, and you need to sign up to get a pagecheck. The full sitecheck is where the real value is, so I wanted people to see that.
Results are very positive: conversion increased from around 5% to 20%. It helped break the barrier of 1000 users (woohoo!), and it continues to grow.
What would I have done differently?
A lot of things, but the biggest learning: I should have changed to requiring people to sign up before showing anything much sooner. It helps me demonstrate the value of the tool and gives me a much better conversion.
That's it! If you have any suggestions about how I can futher increase user growth, or have any questions, let me know!
Nice read @RickVanHaasteren. How was your experience with StackCommerce and related sites from a seller perspective?
Thanks @leemunroe! It was pretty good. The margins are low, but it's a great way to get your product in front of a large (yet somewhat price-sensitive) audience.
That’s a great story! Congratulation on this adventure, this is brilliant!
Maybe just one question: As you are building a tool to help develop SEO, why don’t you use this tool for your own SEO, and then prove that you service is better than all the others SEO tools?
This tricky question cames out of my mind the day I met this founder dealing with boosting influence on social networks : which guy was having less than 100 followers on each of his personal social networks accounts...
😉😉
Thanks Piem!
Great suggestion! I think I can write a good case about how I used SiteGuru to boost SEO. I'm a new player in a competitive market, and already have decent rankings. Eat your own dogfood, drink your own Champagne!
Something, do before my users can even use my product is sign up for it. This requires email verification so this eliminates fake email signups. This gives them a chance to see a tangible product. Now here's the additional check: before they can even use my product, I make people enter a credit card if the product isn't free. This weeds out people who aren't serious about paying for anything. I give some products away for free, but I need to ensure they are legitimately there for a reason, and by entering a credit card, most won't stick around, eliminating my non-serious users.
So it definitely made sense for you to remove the "Free check" or at least -- use it for free (once) after they sign up. This way you at least got their email.
Thanks!
Interesting article!
I know the article wasn't really about this, but what plans do you offer and how does the conversion look from free user to a paying customer?
I now have 2 paid plans that let you scan more pages instead of just 50 on the free plan.
Monetization is definitely the next step, and I probably should have focused on that much sooner. I'm thinking of offering free trials and converting people into a paid client after a month. That would mean I'd have to ask for their creditcard during signup.
I'm still trying to figure out how exactly I'm going to do that. The e-book Growing a Million Dollar Company Book by @Shpigford is a great inspiration for that.
Thanks for sharing!
Thanks so much, Rick!
Nice Story, good luck onwards!
I am wondering If those users are actually active? Paid? Logging in and using it regularily?
Because your login entry barrier from the article sounds as if you artificially pushed up registrations without having a direct benefit other than more rows in db.user
But maybe I misunderstood?
Thanks! Good point. The number is registered users. Paid is only about 10% of that.
There's more benefit to the registrations than just seeing the number increase. Registered users get a report on their entire site, instead of just one page. It's easier to showcase my tool that way, and it turns out those users come back often.
I also send regular emails related to their site performance as part of the onboarding flow, which I couldn't do if they would only run the single page check - they didn't have to enter an email address.
Got it now, so the first page check actually gets them into your funnel for more value. Must have missed that in the article. Sounds like you have a way to scale now... Knowing the conversion numbers should give you some room to experiment.
All the best!
Great article Rick, thanks for the insight!
Cheers Grant!