Why a MicroSAAS Shouldn't Use SEO, my personal take!
You are a good developer; you can build things but don't know much about sales and marketing. This is a very common case with Indie/ MicroSAAS builders.
To get started, you talk to real-world marketers, see and follow them, and notice a recurring theme: SEO
And you start thinking, maybe I should try it out if everyone says so.
Is that FOMO or something else?
When you're consistently exposed to a particular idea, especially if it's outside your expertise, it can start to seem like the logical course of action.
But then how does it get bad for MicroSAAS tools?
Every action in marketing is said to have an ROI. A tangible and an intangible one. If I do email marketing, I am expecting x number of signups, if I choose to do sponsorships, I expect y number of signups.
Being a microSaas, the priority and necessity for tangible ROI is much more due to your need for survival.
I wrote one LinkedIn post around a simple framework you can use to test the ROI and which activity you should perform first.
When it comes to SEO, microSaaS companies often face challenges that outweigh the potential benefits:
- MicroSAAS websites are usually new, have lower topical authority (some measure it with DA). As a result, they struggle to compete and rank in saturated markets where established competitors dominate. If you can't rank, your efforts won't give fruit.
- SEO needs constant efforts, not just on your owned property which is your website and contents, but also on 3rd party factors such as backlinks, which is difficult to get if your DA is already low.
- SEO isn't just about keywords, and content. Otherwise, every SEO marketer would earn more through personal blogging than providing services. It needs a lot of optimizations from the core web vitals of your website, robots/ sitemaps, understanding of phasing contents, changes in google algorithms, and obviously, the content. By default SEO needs someone who knows the technicalities of a website, and oftentimes it's not the case with marketers. It might come out to be a long time commitment for a single fellow.
There are more reasons but you get the gist, a single developer will aim to focus more on building tool and generating actual revenue, than managing the intricacies of marketing or building a brand recall for informational keywords ranking (if you want to check what I'm talking about, you should find how many types of keywords are there, and what kind of keywords drive revenue). And if you plan to outsource it to agencies, which would start anywhere around $1000, for a good one, I would say you can get actual customer for that amount CAC from other platforms.
I wrote an article too on LinkedIn about why early staged SAAS should refrain from going to SEO agencies, because the actual information needed for SEO houses in the product and customers, which you won't have defined yet.
Just to give you an idea, some ICP-targeted newsletters I tried running for my tool returned me a CPC of around $0.50, and a conversion rate of 10% for signups, and ~3% for revenue, which I would any day take over SEO.
Before you assume maybe I lacked SEO effectiveness, know it's where I began. My works being used in Google project, LG and more.
My stance on micro-business growth is clear: money matters most for scaling your microSaaS. Branding and educating about your solution comes second. I've witnessed businesses fail not due to product quality or branding, but because they couldn't sustain, extend their runways. Don't fall into that trap.
I'm more available on LinkedIn if you want to connect.
If you need 101 top directories where you can list down your SAAS for free, you can get that here It's free! Especially meant for sites with DA less than 10 :)
