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Catching up to my main competitor Veed

It's no secret, veed.io beat me (motionbox.io) to the market and has had tremendous success with SEO.

They have shared some amazing articles on growth and have made it seem like their journey has been smooth sailing.

While they have been popping champaign, I've been grinding night and day to gain an inch. Over months of reworking the video rendering engine and the UI/UX, our tool has gotten so much better. Check it out here https://motionbox.io

Our SEO efforts are finally paying off we are seeing our brand show up in the SERPs close to a few of their keywords, and they are driving us customers. We still have a lot of work to do if we want to catch up and eventually beat them.

I am going to share some of the things we started doing differently to compete with them through SEO -- again still so much work to do, but we are making noise!

Hiring an Outreach Team

One of the first mistakes I made was hiring someone in the UK for $6k a month to manage our SEO. The problem with having this guru run the show was we were hoping he would do the work while I coded.

This didn't work for us, and instead I should have spent that money on an outreach team and content creators.

When an outreach specialist that used to work at Canva reached out to me, I immediately got on a call with her to figure out what the service offered. She has a team of people who spend close to 40 hours a week trying to find backlinks.

Long story short after having a team of 5 outreach specialists within a month our domain ranking shot up from the 30s to the 40s.

Optimizing Internal Code

I am using Next.js for Motionbox and there is some manual work that you must do in order to get it performant. Things like using next/image, doing static builds, using swr and not apollo in the marketing pages. Then there is using a CDN which it took me way to long to figure this one out. We use bunny.net and they are awesome.

Another cool optimization I did was to strip unused characters from our font file which reduced it from 100kb+ to 25kb. That combined with compressing assets and being strict about trying to ship the least amounts of bytes possible.

Getting your page speed score perfect is very hard, but if you can get your mobile score in the 70s or higher its a win in my book.

Content Structure

One of the biggest reasons Canva grew to a billion dollar company was their SEO strategy https://foundationinc.co/lab/canva-seo

I used this strategy and learnt from it. We made a few mistakes earlier on trying to implement this, but I am glad we did because I learnt so much. Watching veed.io closely help me understand how to properly implement it.

Basically getting your keyword research in order using Ahrefs, and turning the research into solid content clusters is where the honey is.

A content cluster in a nutshell is a page that you try to rank for a parent topic, and it interlinks with other content that are related but in a sub categorical way. Think of it like a parent child relationship between your content topics.

The more structured you can make it the easier it is to pump out content systematically.

Long Tail (Finding opportunities)

The last thing I'll note on this post is when trying to rank in a saturated market you must look for the right keywords that give you a chance to rank for. The sweet spot is somewhere between 0 keyword difficulty - 30 keyword difficulty with 1k+ traffic, sometimes even 500 can be good, depending on the intent and your situation.

Everything revolves around proper research, and from there you can start to compete like we are showing to do.

Final thoughts

Again, we have a long way to go. I am a solo founder with a small team, we are definitely the David in David vs Goliath, but with great heart, passion, and discipline we can win.

P.S happy to answer any questions below

  1. 4

    Just going by your website and veed.io website. Feel like you are too obsessed with the veed.io content and product. Feel like the same message you want to give using the same keywords, same content.

    Figure out your "why" instead of copying. That will also help in SEO and better positioning your brand.

    1. 1

      It’s hard to find differences in this market. My main goal is to bring after effects to the browser similar to how figma brought illustrator to the browser.

      I have some cool things cooking up, but we need to take some market share so we have resources to experiment and do some RnD. Plus engineering and what not takes resources.

      So I believe we should fill existing demand. If you look across the board there are some gaps in the market we can dominate. But at the cores video editor is a video editor.

      Our current differences is we have a library of templates. We have animated text options and motion graphics, like YouTube subscribe animations etc. Also we make it easier to make stock content with our sidebar.

      I agree we should zone in on a specific audience to grow. This is why I think our upcoming partnerships will be good.

      1. 2

        A video editor is not a video editor for all. That's where you have to keep it different.

        Requirements and definitions of a video editor for YouTubers are different.
        Requirements and definitions of a video editor for Instragramrs are different.
        Requirements and definitions of a video editor for a wedding videographer are different.

        Did you get the point?

        Figure out the domain/industry where veed.io has not yet been the market leader and kill that domain. Once you did, use the learning and trust of that industry to the next industry.

        I am going to use your product for one of my youtube videos. Let's see how it goes.

        You are doing great work, keep doing that. Stay consistent.

  2. 4

    Mind naming the backlink SEO team you used ?

  3. 2

    Just wanted to point out that I like your landing page a lot. You guys picked amazing colors and, I really find the landing page to look very vibrant and alive.

  4. 2

    Inspiring post and thanks for sharing. I am going to focus more of my time on the SEO going forward.

  5. 2

    Are you simply inferring that they beat you by looking at the SEO and their placement?
    You could be doing better numbers too.

    How did you get to the conclusion?

    TIA

    1. 1

      They got product momentum and traffic volume first is what I mean. They won the battle, but the war is still on.

  6. 2

    Wow 6k a month! That's brings tears to my eyes. 😭

    Some great advice here and we do a lot already and are getting some great SEO results but I believe it just takes more time than you ever think.

    Will take a look at the Canva SEO link thanks for that.

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