Anyone focusing on SEO or content as their main customer acquistion strategy?
I've been working on a series of financial calculators and content where I am focusing on long tail keywords as a way to get people to visit the site and sign up for the email list. SEO is super slow going at the beginning, but I can see very early shimmers of hope that I can drive a somewhat decent amount of traction to my site.
Anyone else in the early stages of growth via SEO? Would be curious to hear your experiences, tips, tricks, etc.
Working on this for Indie Hackers! Well, it's primarily @channingallen working on it. It's a completely new game for us, as none of our earlier content was SEO-friendly, so we're total novices at this. Our new round table format is our first shot at actually targeting keywords and, soon, building backlinks.
Tips so far? First off, sign up to meet with Jesse Hanley. I don't recommend doing this until you've actually made some progress on your own, so you'll have more concrete questions to ask.
Second tip would be to have a sustainable strategy for producing content. If you're absurdly creative and a fast and talented writer then you can crank out content yourself. Otherwise, I think it's better to leverage other people, which is what we do at IH.
I am so glad you mentioned meeting with Jesse. I contacted him for a previous project and his insight was incredibly invaluable. Anyone reading this should definitely message him.
Creating content is what I'm struggling with. When you say leverage other people, do you mean cross post to your own site? Hire them as a writer? Or do people offer it up for free?
I don't have nearly the reach of IH right now, so wondering how you started getting content at the beginning.
I mean get other people to write content for you. I emailed something like 140 people to get my first 10 interviews on Indie Hackers. I didn't have to be clever or anything. It was just brute force. Once that first batch of interviews launched and was popular, other people poured in to do interviews. And although we still do a lot of outreach today, it beats having to think up original content from scratch.
David Smooke does an even better job of this with his site Hacker Noon. I believe he's publishing hundreds of articles per week, and he isn't writing any of that content.
I've recently started trying to improve the SEO for my project, using what I've learned at marketing agency day job.
If you're not using it yet - I'd recommend using SEOQuake, and the free tier for SEMrush can be a great help too. I've only been at it a week or so, and I've seen 1% rank improvement...SEMrush says I can expect a whopping 2.2 visitors!....lol
haha nice! I didn't know SEMrush has a free tier. What product are you working on?
I have been reading this article like crazy lately:
https://medium.com/startup-grind/seo-is-not-hard-a-step-by-step-seo-tutorial-for-beginners-that-will-get-you-ranked-every-single-1b903b3ab6bb
They don't mention a free tier...but they offer a free "trial" that I don't believe actually has a time limit, just a feature use limit.
My product is: www.StripTogether.co
Unfortunately, the results pages for my keywords have much bigger players