A Founder’s Guide to Link Building and SEO
SEO is not a flash in the pan. It’s targeted, sustained growth with no marketing spend. I’ve learned a lot about SEO in the last few months and wanted to share our strategies with other founders: Post from Kapwing Blog
Love the picture of you both not getting funding in front of Sequoia.
Really nice post. I love the strategy of one-off projects that you mentioned (Fire Map, Rick Roller, etc.)
I'd love more detail on those and how you thought through and measured success.
Does this type of marketing have a tidy, Googlable name? It's kind of like content marketing but with mini-products instead of articles.
Yes it’s referred to as “Engineering-as-Marketing”. Hubspot is one of the most famous proponents.
oh awesome thanks!
Thanks Matthew! We use Search Console to see backlinks (SEMRush is also helpful) and measure success in the number of backlinks. Anecdotally, we get a feel from Twitter for how successful the projects are.
Awesome guide - exactly what I needed to think about next.
I've signed up for your list too. Excited to follow along in your journey!
Hey @jjejje
Remembered you from your pretty epic post awhile ago on using different avatars while chatting with customers on the Kapwing site.
If anything, this post is even better in terms of the kind of guerilla marketing you're using to get the word out.(loved the chalking of SF, classic non-scalable but so good!) Not sure but I think I'll get arrested for that in Toronto...maybe. :-)
Also, what @disaza said.
I just loved that article. Loved.
Haha thanks Eric :) You should subscribe to the Kapwing blog!
@jjejje
Thanks for mentioning and linking to A Hacker's Day :-)
Thanks for writing about Kapwing! Those early links helped a lot
good stuff Julia. As a founders of startups, we often don't get to choose the work we do but we do the work that needs to get done. I'm horrible at writing but if that's what it takes, i'll do it.
All the best in your journeys!
Thanks for sharing! This is nice to have a full article on backlinks. SEO is so often about the content "hacks" (proper tags, headers, etc.). Backlinks are probably the best source of SEO.
Exactly. We've learned through all of this that gaming Google is very difficult. To appear at the top, you actually need to produce cool, useful, link-worthy content and software, and that's more of an art than a science. I hope that creative entrepreneurs are inspired by this honest, non-hacky way of approaching SEO.
Awesome post, @jjejje - thanks for sharing!
SEO is key, but the strategies for it aren't always obvious. After reading this, I'm definitely gonna start blogging on my own domain -- I've been writing some posts for Medium, but it seems like it's definitely not the move to post there.
I really like your strategy of building side-project style tools for SEO. It's almost like interactive content-marketing. I've heard @csallen mention it as a strategy on the podcast a few times, and I also saw it work well at Gigster, where it had the added benefit of displaying our ability to build products effectively - which built trust with potential customers.
Do you mind sharing a bit more about some of those efforts? How much time do y'all spend on those projects vs. other engineering work? (Do all of those projects require engineering time?)
Great post, Julia. A lot of the info in the post resonates with me, since I work in content marketing/seo every day for SaaS companies.
I'd be curious to hear your experience converting free users to paid. Looking at your business model, you must have a high % of free users.
It would be interesting to hear what has worked well, what hasn't worked well, etc...