Is SEO really still worth it for indie hackers?
Yeah, I get that SEO could pay off longterm. But as an early-stage indie hacker, it feels way more important to put my time into other marketing tactics that will get me users now.
So I'm wondering: Is SEO really worth it for indie hackers? And if so, at what stage does it start making sense?
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For indie hackers: Outsource marketing or do it yourself?
Start doing SEO now.
Probably depends on your product.... but I'm guessing you need SEO. And yes it takes time, but if you don't start now, then a couple of years from now you'll probably be wishing you had started earlier.
Hey @midwestFounder we started a small company, and didn't do any marketing but SEO/blog writing.
At this moment, we are turning over around £40k per year, and it is all purely off the back of organic inbound traffic from Google.
We still haven't spent any money on ads etc., as we wanted to bootstrap the company. Now that we're at a stage that we have a bit of profit we can roll back into the business we are starting to explore ads slightly more.
HOWEVER, I think depending on the nature of your biz, different marketing tactics will work better/worse in this stage of your business. Remember as Seth Godin says, 80% of marketing is invisible - especially with things like SEO.
If you haven't got a lot of money, but are relatively time rich, I'd stick with content marketing, but if you have a bit of money to spend on marketing, then you could spend money on ads, but as @Silvio_SF said, be it doing some SEO stuff yourself or spending a bit of cash on someone to do it for you. The earlier you do SEO the better.
Also, you could just do a couple of guest posts for other reputable websites in a similar space, all of that adds to your SEO juice in the long run!
I've linked a few articles we've done on this stuff that I hope are helpful:-
https://blogwritingservicesuk.com/why-you-shouldnt-focus-on-your-own-blog-if-youre-a-startup/
https://blogwritingservicesuk.com/why-you-should-start-business-blogging-early/
https://blogwritingservicesuk.com/pay-per-click-vs-blog-writing-for-business/
Hope that helps and if you need anything don't hesitate to reach out!
Uhm, that's it! Cheers!
Adam
Very helpful, thanks Adam!
You’re forgetting that with SEO a lot of it, is compounding interest. It is little steps, repeated for a long time, and there are so many different aspects to it.
So yes, I would set aside time now for it, every week, or otherwise, you will be paying to play for the rest of your life.
I get it, it's easy to calculate that if you put one dollar in ads you get X dollar back. But you still need to spend it.
You don't need to create millions of blog posts, start with making sure your site is technically solid, that it loads blazingly fast, and then start adding content. That content can then be taken part to share on your social channels again, saving you time thinking of creating content from scratch all the time.
So yeah indeed it pays off in the long term, but your future self will thank you. Just start small and let the compounding interest take over at one point.
Thanks, that's fair point. I'd think you'd want to want to wait until the product has been validated (at a minimum) - would you agree? And validation doesn't truly come until you've got paying customers...
No I’d always recommend starting the moment you have the name of your business and the domain name, so you have a place that is your own and can start converting an audience (into paid users at one point, but you can start with just a mailing list).
If you want your website to start ranking you need to create content and in the end, content marketing is just solving the same problems that your product solves through media you create and promote.
So it is easy to start writing content even if you don't have a product yet, you're just helping people solve their problems in a different way.
The moment your product or service is fully ready, don't forget to update the relevant content on your website to include call-to-actions to help them convert into (paying) customers.
Really appreciate the input, thanks!
Gotta say, though, I don't agree — putting time into SEO pre-validation could very easily be a waste of time if you end up not getting validation. Seems worthwhile waiting a little longer.
Yes, we got someone on the internet that disagrees! Bring out the pitchforks! 😉
Nah just kidding.
I get what you mean though, and there are different levels of SEO that you can do of course, but at a basic level, having a technical solid website that can be indexed together with some content can already be considered as a minimal level of SEO engagement.
You can use your writing as a way of validating, sharing the journey, getting responses, and trying to set up conversations with people that engage/react with it.
You don’t have to do full-blown keyword research, optimized articles for those keywords etc.
But spending a little bit of time thinking about the infrastructure and building a technically solid website that has some content on there that is then able to (even though slowly) start ranking for that content is what I would fully recommend.
You can do the advanced stuff with link building, optimizing your content, etc later. But let at least your presence be known, and you might attract some people that you start a conversation with and get validation, and if not, after you launch you already have a solid track record for the search engines.
Got it - yeah, that makes a lot of sense, thanks!
💪
Yeah, seems like wishful thinking to me too. Maybe a few years ago, the little guys could snag a solid keyword, but it seems like the the big dogs have already firmly established themselves within most SERPs. I'd focus on short-term acquisition, at least until you've got solid momentum.