A framework for evaluating the SEO viability of a business

There’s a few advantages towards running SEO as a marketing channel. The main one for budding entrepreneurs is that there is a low upfront cost to getting started.

Besides cold emailing various people, anyone can generally write a few articles to test viability of organically ranking in Google search results without having to spend money on ads.

On the longer term advantage - SEO done well can build a perpetual marketing channel that stays mostly evergreen (but this is definitely not guaranteed with competition).

So given these two advantages - I’ve started to think from an SEO first approached in evaluating new passive income business ideas.

Here’s my framework towards evaluating SEO content based businesses.

1. Would the business benefit from long tail keywords?

Getting SEO page results on Google nowadays is incredibly hard without existing domain authority.

Therefore the best way to rank immediately is to target low keyword competition keywords that have a long tail of results that you can target.

For example, most online weather websites were built off of getting the first result for “weather in Location X”.

Even more were built off of aggregate keywords such as “average weather in Location Y” or “average high temperature in July in Location Z”. And of course this can keep on going until you’re reaching keywords that only have <10 searches per month.

Generally these keywords are much less competitive because of the low keyword volume. And additionally, since it's long tail, you won’t run out of keywords to write blog posts on.

2. Does the business target action based SEO keywords?

Most internet businesses want you to convert as a user on their website after coming from Google. That’s usually done by giving the user some informational value from a blog post and finding a small percentage that want to learn more.

And so when evaluating businesses for SEO, I try to make sure there is action based intent from the blog posts targeting certain keywords.

Going back to the weather example, most weather websites monetize off ads because there’s no depth to a search about the weather.

Once I land on the first page of a weather website telling me the current weather in Austin TX, I’m immediately bouncing off the page. I don’t need to know anything else about this weather website and I’m certainly not going to sign up for a weather subscription.

So this means we have to make sure our business has actionable keywords that promote a visitor to engage with your content more. This is mainly done by directing visitors to other blog articles or internal products.

But converting visitors into customers isn’t the only action that’s useful for internet businesses.

For example we could instead:

• Allow the user to contribute towards the site by writing comments or joining a discussion. This creates user generated content which can lower your pages bounce rate.

• Push the user towards adding data points about something or voting on polls.

• And of course lastly - pushing the user to internal monetization.

3. What’s the Content Monetization Strategy?

Going back to the weather example, a couple reasons why it’s probably bad to start a weather website is not only because the industry is now long tail competitive AND has low search intention, but also because there’s not much money involved in weather.

Almost all weather websites can only monetize by showing ads. Ads have the worst CPMs in terms of how many visitors you receive. If we get 100K page views per month, Google Adsense ads are going to pay you a shockingly small amount. I don’t even know if it would be above $500 to be honest.

So the main metric to measure in the monetization model for SEO is understanding how much money is my dollar / visitor worth and how can I increase it?

For example - I can strictly look at two revenue models and clearly see the value in selling a subscription directly to users vs running ads. I run a Youtube channel that makes around ~$500/month off of ~70K monthly views which equates to 0.7 cents per visitor. Not great for ads monetization but my operating costs also aren’t that high.

Also most job boards make more money given they are just a direct to employer advertising model → otherwise known as an affiliate model.

Affiliates and sponsorships are models where you negotiate directly to the buyer. These are tougher to scale, but because you don’t go through the middle man of Adsense and negotiate the deals yourself, you’ll make more money.

And then the last and best idea would be to sell something direct to consumer, ideally a useful B2B subscription or just a B2C product whether a digital or physical product or service.

And of course I don’t think B2C subscription is necessarily a great way to go after running Interview Query because retention is so hard. But at least it's much easier to convert customers.

Meanwhile B2B SAAS businesses are the opposite - usually it’s much harder to convert customers and easier to get them to stick around.

Many B2B SAAS businesses have to create free courses, create email bait and capture forms, nurture leads through an email journey, spin up sales teams, and essentially do a lot of work to convert a visitor as a customer. They also usually have less keywords to target and are competing against a lot of other businesses.

So if you can at least measure your unit economics of:

• revenue per visitor
• cost of writing an article
• % chance you can rank in the top 3 results for the article keyword

You'll have a pretty good idea of how viable an SEO strategy is!