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Transcript

[00:00]

All right, if you're a startup, I'm going to show you how I would recommend you approach SEO based on the resources you're most likely equipped with and the things that should matter to you and the priorities you should have as an early stage startup. More importantly, I'm going to show you the strategy and the approach to SEO that I would recommend you avoid and you steer clear of. All right, first, let's talk about what not to do. If you're an early stage startup, I would recommend you avoid the traditional way of approaching SEO.

[00:30]

So what's the traditional way? I talk to a lot of startup founders, early stage, other marketers in general. This is what we've been taught as the default way to approach SEO. It's the blog style, blog first approach to SEO with a focus on informational content, producing content with keywords in mind that's going to rank, but that people are going to enjoy reading. It's going to teach them something, not necessarily take them directly to a product.

[00:59]

So what are some classic hallmarks of this strategy? I've included some here. First and foremost would be almost a lower emphasis on keyword planning. By that I mean where you do a lot of keyword planning upfront once a quarter, you plan out three months worth of SEO content you're gonna produce. And then the other 90% of your SEO investment and attention is on producing the content and fine tuning the content and tweaking it to perfection. That's a classic.

[01:27]

Hallmark of this strategy and over emphasis on educational content right like how to do X best ways to Blank how to get started where to get started with blank this content is typically uppermost funnel It's it's attracting people who are just entering the buyer journey. They're in the awareness stage they're very far off from being ready to purchase your product and Therefore another characteristic is a lower visitor conversion rate may even have a lower

[01:57]

conversion rate than other traffic sources to your product. And then last but not least, you hear SEO takes time, right? You always hear that thrown out when justifying this kind of approach. Again, we know this is true. This is just a fact of life with SEO, but it's really used to justify the longer ramp up that this type of content takes before results start to yield. Now, before I get into the strategy that I actually recommend for early stage startups, I do want to clearly articulate

[02:26]

reasons why I recommend against this approach to SEO. Now, the first reason why, and maybe the most important, is that this traditional approach to SEO, compared to the one that I'll be sharing later on, has essentially zero feedback loop, and therefore zero room for you to iterate. This traditional approach to SEO takes months of upfront effort before any data starts becoming clear to you, good or bad, whether it's working or not working.

[02:54]

you're totally blind to data for the first few months. That begs the question, how can you as a startup justify that, given where you're at, if you can't iterate? Iteration as a startup should be everything to you, right? It should be your lifeblood. Iteration is the function through which you beat competitors, you overtake incumbents someday. It's one of your main advantages is the ability to move fast and iterate. So for that reason, a lot of people would argue that this approach to SEO is just incongruent to any kind of early stage startup. Rather, as a startup,

[03:23]

This should be you this this gif of Zach Galifianakis here. You should be prioritizing marketing channels where you have as much data as possible Presented to you as quickly as possible The second reason is that kind of related to the previous point for you as an early stage startup the opportunity cost of Approaching SEO in this way is extremely high. So here's just a random graph. I found this is like a traditional ramp up of Traditional SEO you see a few months at the beginning of essentially

[03:52]

no progress, good or bad, flat curve. Then you start to see a gradual ramp up. You have data at hand at that point. And then, credit where credit's due, down the road, maybe 12 or 18 or 24 months, you really, if you're doing it right, you should see compounding effects and all of your return on investment start to pile in. No one's saying this doesn't work or that there's no place for this, but that opportunity cost of that first part of the curve, if that's six or 12 months, you may not have that if you're a startup, right?

[04:22]

you need to be getting results now. You may only have 12 months of runway period. So it's hard sometimes to justify the opportunity cost of this approach to SEO, in my opinion, when you have other channels you could be working on that will drive results for you now and get you to your next milestone now in terms of growth. And then the last reason, I wouldn't be too concerned with this one. I wouldn't stress too much about this one, but it is important to have this in mind. And that is just that the future is unclear.

[04:49]

So if you're making a heavier investment in SEO that doesn't yield results until further down the line, and that's a known fact, you do need to consider just the overall uncertainty in the landscape right now, right? Higher uncertainty means higher risk. There's a changing media landscape at the moment. LLM search, I mean, search is just changing so much. There's LLM search, perplexity is just eating the world, or it seems like they will be eating the world soon. AI overviews. The landscape, especially the search landscape, is changing maybe faster than ever.

[05:19]

And so you just need to understand that your marketing mix, it has a risk profile, right? And you just need to make sure that that risk profile is balanced. And if you're going to invest in this type of SEO that yields results much further down the road, that you have lower risk growth channels that guarantee results further upfront. Manage the risk profile essentially of your marketing mix. If you're a startup, there may not be a place in your risk profile.

[05:48]

for a long-term SEO investment of this type. So now let's talk about what I do recommend. This is something I have put into practice personally. I have seen others put into practice. I recommend other founders follow this strategy all the time. Let's get into it. I'm gonna break this down into five very simple steps. Go through these at your own pace. At the end of it, you'll have basically a testing framework you can try out at your own startup. All right, step one, first and foremost, before anything else,

[06:17]

You need to understand the difference between informational queries and transactional queries. Let me break these down. Now the first type of query, informational. These people are searching in order to learn something. They're probably at the very top of the funnel. They're just looking to educate themselves. They're fact finding. They are not ready yet by any means to purchase a product or even think about that. They're just getting their head in the game at a basic level.

[06:44]

Contrast that against the other type of queries, which we'll actually be focusing on with this strategy. Those are transactional queries. So these are searches when people are actually looking to take an action. They've already gone through education, they've educated themselves, they're past awareness, right? They're at the bottom of the funnel, they're ready to take a specific action, whether that's making a purchase, downloading an app, whatever that is for you. With the strategy I'm gonna propose, you want to focus on transactional queries. That's where we're gonna dial it on.

[07:14]

So step two is take a step back, look at your product, and take your time and start breaking your product down into the various transactional queries that it can apply to, that can apply to your product. Airbnb, good examples of transactional queries would be short-term stays in San Francisco, cheapest hotels in San Francisco. Notice these searches aren't pros and cons of visiting San Francisco, or best cities in California to visit.

[07:44]

People are looking, they know they've decided on San Francisco, and they're now looking for short-term stays and cheapest hotels, or hostels, sorry. So those are examples for Airbnb. For Dropbox, those would be share PDF via link, faster alternative to Google Drive. They're decided they're ready to take an action, either sharing a PDF via link, presumably with a friend, or they need a place to store their files. So they're ready to take action. They're just cutting to the chase and conducting searches.

[08:14]

to accomplish that. They're not searching how to style PDFs for free, right? Which might indicate that they haven't even made a PDF yet that's ready to share or that's ready to be sent on Dropbox. They haven't even finished making their PDF. Those types of searches we're gonna avoid with this strategy. Step three, you're gonna make a keyword list of some of these transactional keywords using a keyword research tool.

[08:41]

And you're going to focus on some other criteria as well with these keywords that I'm going to share here. So just real quick keyword research tools. Got a few recommendations here. Surfer SEO is good. SEMrush and Ahrefs, you know, super well known, very battle tested by tons of top brands. If you want to go more entry level to get started, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I know a lot of people using mangles. I think it's like $50 a month. It's very affordable.

[09:07]

‍Clicks.so is another tool, and then Keywords Everywhere is just a Chrome extension. If you want to go super bare bones, get super gritty with it, Keywords Everywhere is an okay place to start. Now you're going to search for keywords based on some of the thinking you did in the previous step. You're going to make a keyword list, and you want to make sure that your keywords meet these criteria. They've got to be transactional keywords. They should be highly relevant to your product. You don't want to steer too far off course. You're not going to rank. You're not going to be able to compete.

[09:35]

You want to try to find keywords that have low keyword difficulty, meaning they're not super competitive. You have a fair shot at ranking for them. Each keyword research tool kind of has their own way of presenting that data. You know, SEMrush uses keyword difficulty. It's a score zero out of 100, zero being easy, honored being essentially impossible to rank for it. You want to find keywords and index towards keywords that have low keyword difficulty.

[10:03]

above all else. And then kind of in a secondary fashion, you wanna focus on keywords that have enough search volume to matter. So look for keywords that have, for that exact match keyword at least, have 100 to 1,000 searches per month, preferably in like the US or other priority countries like that. But you wanna try to find those two things, low difficulty, at least some level of search volume. But if you need to pick one or the other,

[10:32]

Pick lower keyword difficulty first. And pick one that has a really low difficulty and 200 searches a month before you pick one that has a medium or high difficulty, but 1,000 searches a month. Because you just want to see if you can rank. You want to see if this strategy can even work for you. And the ability to rank will be what you want to keep an eye out for most closely at first. Step four.

[10:56]

built a conversion focused, but SEO friendly page template. This is the page template you're gonna use to actually produce pages based on the keywords you identified in the previous step. Let's break this down. Conversion focused, but SEO friendly. So what does that mean? I'm going to use an example here from Canva who I think exemplifies this really well. Go on Google, search design Instagram story. This is a great transactional keyword. Someone's searching, they know it's an Instagram story they want.

[11:26]

and they're ready to design it, right? So just that aside, great keyword to rank for. If you Google that, you'll find Canva's page here, Instagram Story Maker, create Insta Stories online. It links to this page, which I've, you know, screenshotted here as a GIF. And let's break this down. This page is a great example. It's conversion-focused, but SEO-friendly. You'll notice, first and foremost in the hero, they have a very clear purple button.

[11:53]

start designing an Instagram story. This points into Canvas product. So they have a simple hero that's action conversion oriented. And then they have multiple calls to action throughout the page. As you scroll, there are buttons throughout pointing into the main product. There is even a fixed section at the bottom of the window that appears with a button at all times leading into Canvas product. So it's extremely conversion focused. The content is.

[12:21]

a means to the end. The content is not the end in and of itself. That's what Canva does really well here. But at the same time, it's very SEO friendly. They've got their H1 with their keyword up front and center. They've got plenty of room throughout the page for text content where they can fit in the relevant keywords they're focusing on. They answer all the questions. They got full coverage in terms of what they're actually addressing with their content.

[12:51]

They prioritize conversions, but without sacrificing SEO friendliness and actually looking good to Googlebot. Now, last step, time to run a test. Here's what I recommend if you are a startup. Pick 10 transactional keywords, pick the 10 best ones based on the criteria I shared earlier. Then you're gonna publish 10 pages. Keep it simple. You're gonna publish 10 pages using the page template you made in the previous step.

[13:19]

you're going to publish 10 pages, one for each keyword you selected. So super simple, a one-to-one relationship, one keyword per page. Then after you publish the pages, you're going to set a 30-day countdown, at which point you're going to come back into Google Search Console or any other analytics tool you're using, and you're going to be able to analyze the traffic you're starting to accumulate. You're going to see, are the pages ranking for the keywords you want it to rank for? What's their average position for those keywords? Is that trending up?

[13:49]

And that's going to paint a picture for you of how well this is working or not working in the first 30 days. If this strategy is going to have promise for you, you should start seeing early signs of life within the first 30 days. At that point, you can decide, like, does this look promising enough for you? Is this something you want to keep pursuing and set another 30 day, you know, extension to the countdown and give it more time and iterate? You'll start to see a picture being painted.

[14:18]

based on the first 30 days. I would also recommend looking at the full funnel. For these people who are coming in, what is their conversion rate? What rates are they signing up for and purchasing your products compared to other traffic sources? And paint the full picture of ROI for yourself, not just how are the pages ranking. So congrats, you are now running SEO in a more startup-suitable way that's focused on iteration and fast feedback.

[14:45]

and has opportunity cost and risk management in mind. So if you liked this video, follow for more, subscribe for more. We'll be making a lot more about SEO. Yeah, thanks for watching and see you in the next one.

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