How to improve my SEO
I have a question real quick. I'm trying to get on the first page of Google because everyone says SEO works very well in the early stages for startups.
I've been checking out backlinko.com to learn SEO and Brian Dean. This guy is amazing.
But I'm still struggling to get to the first page.
I wrote an article using LSI/keywords and all of these stuffs. I also checked it against app.usetopic.com and article is supposed to rank.
I think every niche/market is oversaturated with too much info and it's hard to get to the top today.
How long do I need to wait to rank? Do I need to write a lots of articles?
Any ideas?
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Seems like no one has mentioned Ahrefs.com yet. One of the tactics we used was to go there, check out what content ranked for certain keywords, and study why their posts could rank so high. You'll find key things that you can learn from them.
Then make your content much better than them. That's the way to rank higher. It is a lot of hard work.
SEO is a long game, especially if you are just starting out with a new website.
Google has already indexed billions upon billions of pages that have been building up authority for years. Getting a new site to rank, especially with little content, is going to take a while.
That's just to set expectations, I will affirm that SEO works and can work if you put a proper strategy in place. Any advice I can give will be more generic without knowing more info about you and your company. For starters I'd recommend doing this:
##Tooling
##Strategy
Once you have done the above and have a narrowed down set of keywords to focus on, create content for them. I try to blog at least once a week as it's a regular enough cadence to create a lot of content while fitting with my schedule. That said it's a commitment, so if you can only create content once every 2 weeks or once a month that's fine. The important thing is to be consistent add quality content to your website.
I hope this helps! As said, this is pretty generic as I don't know much about you/your business however this gives you a good base to build an SEO and content strategy.
Hi, thanks for sharing your strategy. I'll give it a try but I've been doing a similar strategy with no results. I think it's because I have an early-stage startup and the website has no domain authority yet. This is my business: https://www.pixela.xyz/ if you want to take a look
No problem!
Quick disclaimer, some of this feedback might hurt but I mean it in the best possible way and to help you get results from your efforts. There's a lot of potential here, so hopefully this pushes you in the right direction.
Points are not listed in any particular order
#1
I'm going to start by agreeing that SEO probably is not the best focus now. Because you are early stage you really need customers and to refine your market. If you do not have customers or at least have a clear picture of who your customers are, then you won't be able to build an effective strategy to reach them. There's an adage in marketing: marketing to everyone is marketing to no one, and it applies with SEO too.
#2
You have 2 blog posts and a total of 10 pages indexed by Google, it is going to take a lot more than that to getting your content ranking.
Writing assistant apps can help you optimize your content, but they won't make you rank overnight.
Google is so successful as a search engine because they are adept at understanding content and returning the best search results for any given query. If you want your website to rank it will probably take 6 months of concerted effort to build trust and earn a spot in the top 10 of search results. That means 6 months of consistently creating content, and choosing topics and keywords strategically which brings me to my next point.
#3
You need to pick your posts wisely. This post for example is super broad and I could imagine sites like HubSpot, Neil Patel, or any other marketing influencer site would have way more in depth and authoritative content that has been getting traffic for a while now.
This goes back to point #1 if you have not already really honed in on your target market any effort for SEO and content will be wasted.
Once you have your personas in place, start digging into the questions they are asking that you can answer. I've been meaning to publish a draft of a post that goes in depth on free strategies/tools to choose keywords so I'll update this comment with a link.
#4
Design indirectly affects SEO. Google pays close attention to when people hit a website and bounce off as it signals to Google that the content is not valuable. Your website's design is pretty basic, but parts of it come off as unstyled rather than minimalistic (most notably, the full-width content of your blog, it looks more like an HTMl page than a piece of content I'd want to read, bookmark, and share).
#5
Not related to SEO but I noticed you have 6 pricing choices which is a lot. There are some psychological studies that go in depth on the optimal number of choices to provide and 3 seems to work the best for SaaS. Ironically the more options you provide, the less inclined people are to choose as they get overwhelmed by the decision and move on.
Again, this hinges on your own market research and what people want/are willing to pay for. If you're seeing a lot of success with 6 choices ignore me and keep doing your thing!
#6
Are you married to the product name? .com domains are not as necessary as they once were, I use a .io for example, but .xyz domains could turn people off as they can be associated with spam. It doesn't affect SEO as much, but it's another usability and brand thing to be aware of.
Wow, great insights. I think now I'm better off to plan my future strategies. I really appreciate your time and comments.
I think I'll do SEO anyway, because a long journey begins with a small step, so if I write content now, I might have some rank in 6 months.
Thanks so much again
I don't agree with this. I've read 450+ founder interviews and yeah SEO works but AFTER being successful with another acquisition channel. So basically, they started getting paid users via channels like Product Hunt, cold email, partnerships, guest posts, etc. They noticed this brings them some search traffic that converts and doubled down on that.
From my research SEO (with a few exceptions) is a bad strategy for an early-stage startup. It takes months to see results, plus you're probably in the early stages of a product-market fit and still don't know if you can create a predictable flow of customers at all. There are faster channels to test for that.
Are you receiving traffic from Google (at all)? Or is it a new site?
Hi zerotousers, I agree 100% with you according to my experience. I've been doing a SEO with no results. I think it's because I have an early-stage startup and the website has no domain authority yet. I wonder if you could share the founders interviews to take a look at their strategies in the early stage. I think I'll go with PH. My business is https://www.pixela.xyz/