21 lessons in SEO after growing Flexiple’s organic traffic from 4,000 to 40,000 in 6 months & revenue from 0 to $1mn 🧵
1/ SEO is the most reliable channel of traffic & arguably also leads.
With ~6 billion+ searches occurring each day, ignoring SEO is a very grave error by any marketer - don't make that mistake.
2/ SEO is also a great validator of your startup idea!
If search phrases related to your idea actually have volume, it naturally indicates that there is a market for your offering.
3/ Biggest regret for Flexiple, was to start working on it late - it is a channel that takes time to deliver.
So, start & invest as early as possible!
4/ Don't wait for your product to be built before starting on SEO:
- Begin writing a couple of articles each week so that they rank by the time you launch
- This gives you users on the day of launch instead of a few months after it
5/ While it takes time, once it does start delivering its results are very consistent and, of course, free forever!
Just an estimate by Ahrefs (which I think is very conservative), we get $8k of traffic each month - for FREE :)
6/ Golden rule: Never write a single word before doing sufficient keyword research. @ahrefs is the best in this regard.
Our first 20 articles were not SEO optimised - they’ve been read by not more than ~100 people vs. our last 20 articles => 50k times.
7/ Further, all companies write articles. But few have them SEO optimised!
No point in investing time into articles that no one reads AND SEO traffic is the only channel that delivers over time.
So, inherently writing articles without SEO optimisation is just poor strategy.
8/ People assume that there’s a trade-off between writing quality content vs. SEO-optimised content.
Nope.
SEO optimised doesn’t mean poor quality content - it just means aligning your article with Google’s parameters while giving maximum value to the reader.
9/ While starting your blog, avoid hosting it on a subdomain. Subdomains are treated as separate websites - you don’t want that.
Pairing your main marketing website/ product with your blog is crucial.
10/ Your blog’s speed/ loading time is a very important metric in ranking too.
So while fancy images/ animations might make your website more pretty, they also negatively affect rankings. Maintain a good balance.
11/ Before starting the whole exercise, do a quick SEO audit. This is to ensure every page of your website follows SEO best practices.
Personally, my experience with @ahrefs' audit has been great.
12/ While it is possible to rank for keywords even without much Domain Authority, it is MUCH tougher.
So, along with investing in content, also work on building your website’s “domain authority” (DA).
13/ Backlinks still remain the only TRUE way of growing your website's authority.
Focus on getting only quality backlinks => backlinks from directory OR spam websites are not only useless but also detrimental!
14/ Further, a lot of content exists on the 100 ways of getting backlinks to your website. I’ve found that writing “guest posts” are the most reliable method.
It works because while you get a backlink, the other website gets free content - tangible upside on both sides.
15/ But "guest posts" are a highly involved channel which would require:
- Reaching out to a lot of websites
- Having to write quality content for them
So, avoid writing a guest post if you aren’t getting a backlink in return.
16/ A simple Google search can get you a great list of websites accepting guest posts in your industry.
A few good search phrases to find such websites:
- [your_topic] “guest post”
- [your_topic] “guest article”
- [your_topic] “write for us”
- [your_topic] inurl:contribute
17/ Target keywords that have:
- Low “Keyword difficulty”
- High “Monthly volume”
- At least one website in the Top 10 results with a “DA” lesser than that of your website’s
Here’s my thread giving a step-by-step explanation of that process:
In 8 tweets, I'll explain SEO using the analogy of a LIBRARY.
The characters:
👩🏽Librarian = Google
📘Books = All websites
🧔🏽Person searching for a book = Your potential customer
I'll connect it all in the end 🚀
Come on, let's go! Thread👇🏽
1/ Potential customer searches Google
This is equivalent to the person coming to the librarian and asking her to suggest the most relevant book on say "Photosynthesis" ('cause I'm a nerd😅).
2/ Google prepares the search results
The librarian now has to decide which books to recommend from a sea of books.
So, she does this by setting certain parameters to rank the various books.
How did we make $100k using GoogleSheets after 2 failed products?
Many asked me this. So, in 14 tweets, I cover Flexiple’s 1st year comprising:
- Product 1 & its failure
- Product 2 & its failure
- What went wrong
- Why/how GoogleSheets worked