Have you ever given up on SEO?
Hi,
I am building a simple desktop app to solve a problem that most of the people working in an office can identify with. However, I am currently doing some SEO research but I am realizing that:
- The volume of research targeting my specific solution seems quite low.
- The keywords targeting the problem itself are quite competitive.
- All the keywords (with decent traffic) I can use to describe my app are quite competitive.
My app is a desktop app, and my only SEO content is my landing page which is quite limiting. I could focus on starting a blog talking about topic-related problems in order to create more SEO content but I don't have the skills nor the time to do it. Plus, by doing that, I would be competing against big blogs & newspapers talking about the same topics.
I am tempted to leave SEO aside and focus on different channels. Maybe I should focus on trying to get links in articles of blogs that are already focused on the problem I am trying to solve instead of putting my time and energy in SEO?
What's your experience with this type of situation, is SEO the right focus for every type of projects? Have you ever decided to give up on traffic coming from Google? If so, what was your alternative strategy and did it work?
#growth #seo
Facts:
If you take a look at successful SaaS websites that get a lot of traffic from Google, you’ll notice that 99% of their SEO traffic doesn’t come from their main keywords but from a blog that talks about related topics.
To build a blog that generates traffic you’ll need to create content, and good content requires time to be written (or money if you outsource it).
Starting from zero means that you won’t see results for at least 6 months/1 year provided that you do everything right.
In short: you should definitely focus on SEO in the long term, but you need to have an alternative plan to drive trafffic in the short term.
This comment was deleted 4 years ago
I would start focusing on SEO from day one.
How much time - I don’t really have an answer to that question 😅
This comment was deleted 4 years ago
Exactly
Getting good results from SEO - for any niche - is possible as long as you have enough time, budget, skill, or ideally a combination of all.
This is actually ideal, and I'd suspect if it's actually quite low, the competition for these terms isn't too high. This is what you want to target for a starting site. Long-tail keywords without a whole lot of competition or search volume. Sure, maybe only 40 people a month search for it, but you want to get in front of every one of those 40 people.
Going for the low volume keywords is actually what I do for projects that are just off the ground. I would rather appear for 50 keywords with a search volume of 10/mo than appear for 1 keyword with a search volume of 400/mo!
Right at the beginning of my MVP soft launch (way premature), I hired a copywriter to “generate SEO”. Luckily, I came to my senses pretty quickly and shut that down. At this point, I spend a little time making sure the site is technically and structurally SEO-friendly, and that’s all I’m going to put into it for now.
My plan, going forward, is to pay for advertising to build my initial base. When (if (no... when)) the site generates enough income to cover the cost of a copywriter, I might head down that road again. Maybe.
Additionally, I’m not a huge fan of pumping out content for the sole purpose of SEO. The internet is choked with pointless, worthless “articles”; do we need more? Maybe I’ll go the road of a massively robust FAQ section, or a collection of instructional pages, rather than another soulless blog.
I have one app (real estate value calculator for Norway, in Norwegian), which gets almost all traffic from SEO. Other solutions require more work to sell, and I guess SEO is less important in those cases.
Do you have a link to your site? How is your traction? If low, I would consider to follow the advise of Paul Graham and "do things that don't scale" --> Go out and sell it manually :)
Link: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html