SEO + SaaS = Trust the process?

[seomatic]

I'm far from the biggest fish here, but I am a (half) owner of a SaaS business which took 8 years to scale to $100k/month, but here I am. Let me share with you my growth graph and illustrate how SaaS truly is exponential, but with a long runway up front. (Note: the huge dip is COVID, which basically cost me a year to recover from, entrepreneurially speaking).

View attachment 43868

The point I just want to make sure is clear is: (1) every dip can be viewed as an indicator to exit -- do you have the faith to hold (and, if possible, correct) when you drop? and (2) do not zoom in too much on any given point or you might miss the larger picture; what follows is an illustration of this with AAPL stock (my first stock purchase).

Used your retention chart as inspiration to create a similar one for my content. I've seen that some pages get some impressions then suddenly die, while other pages just grow and grow. My idea is to improve pages that are not doing well, instead of just publishing new content. I will post updates here if it works or not.

 

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[seomatic]

Day 9/100

• published a new article
• worked on the visuals
• improved internal linking

 

[eliquid]

As an search engine marketer for more than 23 years now and an owner of a SEO SaaS...

Most people get the majority of their rankings not from the content they push, but from algo updates and not getting hammered... while their competitors get hammered, making room for others to rank higher.

We just had a major algo update in late May, which is where it seems a lot of your impressions and clicks started to gain more momentum.

I wouldn't celebrate yet.

Many times a few weeks after an algo update, things get rolled back or undone.

This isn't to poo poo on your parade or your work, you clearly had an steady upward trend prior to the update.

I just want you to recognize there are factors outside of you just publishing content that are impacting your recent improvements, and that also those could be undone in a few weeks too.

 

[heavy_industry]

This isn't to poo poo on your parade or your work, you clearly had an steady upward trend prior to the update.

I just want you to recognize there are factors outside of you just publishing content that are impacting your recent improvements, and that also those could be undo in a few weeks too.

There will always be factors outside your control.

Focus exclusively on the things you can control.

 

[seomatic]

As an search engine marketing for more than 23 years now and an owner of a SEO SaaS...

Most people get the majority of their rankings not from the content they push, but from algo updates and not getting hammered... while their competitors get hammered, making room for others to rank higher.

We just had a major algo update in late May, which is where it seems a lot of your impressions and clicks started to gain more momentum.

I wouldn't celebrate yet.

Many times a few weeks after an algo update, things get rolled back or undone.

This isn't to poo poo on your parade or your work, you clearly had an steady upward trend prior to the update.

I just want you to recognize there are factors outside of you just publishing content that are impacting your recent improvements, and that also those could be undo in a few weeks too.

I'm not celebrating. Actually I'm disappointed that the site isn't growing faster. But I'm also not worried about algo updates too much. In my opinion updates are done to prevent seo tactics mostly. I haven't used any tactic that could get punished by google. Now I understand that's what probably every seo thinks. But yeah I haven't even build a singe link so far, only published content. And my content isn't even that good, I'm still working on improving it.

I believe Google has the best algos, even bought some Alphabet stock recently. They have a 20:1 split coming in July and I believe that could push the share price in the long term (my personal opinion, no investment advice).

Also the competition isn't such a big problem in my market. It's a new developing market and the competitors aren't doing such a great job. Actually that's one of the reasons why I started the site in the first place. For example they have the product and content and two separate domains and aren't really advertising the product effectively.

The traffic is actually not only from google. Around half of it is from other sources like bing and direct. I'm looking to add more channels later like twitter and facebook (paid ads). Growth has actually begun before the update.

 

[eliquid]

There will always be factors outside your control.

Focus exclusively on the things you can control.

You're missing the point.

The point being, don't get caught up thinking that monitoring the XYZ you are doing, is what is getting you rankings. Which in turn for a lot of people makes them think they need to do more of the same XYZ.

The rankings could be happening for a whole other reason.

So the point is, figure out what's actually going on.

 

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[eliquid]

I'm not celebrating. Actually I'm disappointed that the site isn't growing faster. But I'm also not worried about algo updates too much. In my opinion updates are done to prevent seo tactics mostly. I haven't used any tactic that could get punished by google. Now I understand that's what probably every seo thinks. But yeah I haven't even build a singe link so far, only published content. And my content isn't even that good, I'm still working on improving it.

Why do you think the site would grow faster, it's only a few months old.. right?

If you think Google only punishes link building tactics, you haven't done SEO very long. There are specific updates that pertain to content and quality of content. AND there will only be more of those coming.

There were plenty of perfectly fine white hat and gold standard sites that got hit on this last update ( and updates prior ). An algo update can and does wipe out sites that never did anything wrong on their end.

Just be mindful of that.

Also the competition isn't such a big problem in my market. It's a new developing market and the competitors aren't doing such a great job. Actually that's one of the reasons why I started the site in the first place. For example they have the product and content and two separate domains and aren't really advertising the product effectively.

So what's your plan when your competitors do produce better quality content? What about when a higher authority domain publishes similar content ( but isn't a competitor and outranks you )?

Competition is always an issue.

If you aren't going to build links, you are going to have a hard time when other updates roll out.

You have to be thinking about 2-3 years down the road.

 

[seomatic]

Why do you think the site would grow faster, it's only a few months old.. right?

If you think Google only punishes link building tactics, you haven't done SEO very long. There are specific updates that pertain to content and quality of content. AND there will only be more of those coming.

There were plenty of perfectly fine white hat and gold standard sites that got hit on this last update ( and updates prior ). An algo update can and does wipe out sites that never did anything wrong on their end.

Just be mindful of that.

Yes, it is around 4 months old. I didn't went in full force with it and could have produced the content in like a month. So let's say I would have done that for the last four months, then I would have published 4x more content and the site would have grown much faster.

Can you name any of the white hat sites that got hit? Very interested to learn about it.

So what's your plan when your competitors do produce better quality content? What about when a higher authority domain publishes similar content ( but isn't a competitor and outranks you )?

Competition is always an issue.

If you aren't going to build links, you are going to have a hard time when other updates roll out.

You have to be thinking about 2-3 years down the road.

Well there are already higher authority domains publishing content. But there isn't a dominant site in the niche and that's my goal to build to #1 site of the niche. I know it will be though.

To be honest the industry is moving so fast that it's impossible to plan 2-3 years ahead. My plan is to be as adaptable to change as possible. I believe that link building is mostly a waste of time. Especially if the industry isn't very competitive. When you talk about link building you mean buying links right? Because otherwise I wouldn't call it link building. I believe links should come naturally.

I'm interested in promoting my content via paid channels to get links though. If that's what you mean by link building then I definitely want to learn more. Any good resources on how to do it?

 

[seomatic]

Day 10/100

• published a new article
• improved existing articles
• improved design

 

[seomatic]

So I just looked at the most successful single page on the project and it didn't start out strong. There was even a huge dip after the first few days. Is this normal to have this pattern or should I have improved the content during the dip? Is it possible to speed up the rise by improving the content during the dip?

 

[heavy_industry]

So I just looked at the most successful single page on the project and it didn't start out strong. There was even a huge dip after the first few days. Is this normal to have this pattern or should I have improved the content during the dip? Is it possible to speed up the rise by improving the content during the dip?
View attachment 43926

Day to day traffic is geometric Brownian motion.
Variability is expected.

You should be looking at a longer time-frame. If you remove the noise, you can clearly see an uptrend, and this is everything that matters.

You're missing the point.

No, I am not.
I didn't say that the content itself is the only factor that determines the success of the site. There are obviously thousands of other variables, including the changes in searches, market, and search engine algorithms.

I said that you should focus exclusively on the things that you do have control over. And one of those things is content that is being published.

Further more, this site is growing steadily. Which means that whatever OP is doing, is working. It may not be working 6 months or 6 years from now, but right now it works.

Go hard @seomatic

 

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[seomatic]

Day to day traffic is geometric Brownian motion.
Variability is expected.

You should be looking at a longer time-frame. If you remove the noise, you can clearly see an uptrend, and this is everything that matters.

Yes, I really like the comparison charts in Search Console to compare last 7 days or last 28 days. It shows nicely the progress: +127% MoM for impressions and other metrics improved, too.

Do you think it's the right time to start monetizing already? The site is growing nicely but still hasn't made a single cent. Feels like the discussion in The Social Network movie, should we put PopUps for MountainDew on the site? lol.

 

[seomatic]

Day 11/100

• published a new article today
• did a ton of research and learned new stuff
• improved design and visuals (reduced file size by shrinking images)

 

[seomatic]

And updated the weekly performance chart. Still on track to grow further.

 

[AmppaDamppa]

This has become an interesting thread! Nice job @seomatic keep it up.

 

[seomatic]

This has become an interesting thread! Nice job @seomatic keep it up.

Thanks, I've changed my strategy a bit. Going more into content quality than content quantity. I believe that some of my pages don't have enough value for users at the moment. So I add more information to old pages at the moment.

 

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[AmppaDamppa]

Thanks, I've changed my strategy a bit. Going more into content quality than content quantity. I believe that some of my pages don't have enough value for users at the moment. So I add more information to old pages at the moment.

That's definitely a great plan because the content needs to be better than the ones you want to beat on the first page, especially without links!

 

[seomatic]

Day 12/100

• published one new article
• updated a ton of existing content to beef it up
• design improvements

 

[seomatic]

Can't believe it but the site broke 5k impressions yesterday ... that's 150k per month / 1.8m per year.
Also the other metrics like clicks, ctr and average position are going up ... more choppy but going up.

On the con side I discovered today that Google Analytics is pretty much worthless. The way it counts engagement time is probably the dumbest way to do it. Let's say one visitors only visits one page then engagement time is counted as 0. So I built my own analytics solution, which is cool because it works without cookies and we don't need those annoying popups on the site. (but still a privacy policy I guess ... looking into that)

 

[seomatic]

It seems some professional SEOs are reading the thread as well. So here a perhaps weird question for them: What should I target with my homepage? At the moment the site structure is like this home > topic > subtopic. So all the subpages rank for some specific keywords based on its content. But the homepage is pretty much useless for now, what keywords should I target with the homepage?

 

[seomatic]

Day 13/100

• published one new article
• fixed some bugs
• completed a beta version of the SaaS product, very minimal MVP just to see user engagement (or lack of) can't wait for results

 

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[AmppaDamppa]

Can't believe it but the site broke 5k impressions yesterday ... that's 150k per month / 1.8m per year.
Also the other metrics like clicks, ctr and average position are going up ... more choppy but going up.

On the con side I discovered today that Google Analytics is pretty much worthless. The way it counts engagement time is probably the dumbest way to do it. Let's say one visitors only visits one page then engagement time is counted as 0. So I built my own analytics solution, which is cool because it works without cookies and we don't need those annoying popups on the site. (but still a privacy policy I guess ... looking into that)

View attachment 44018

To see real engagement time, look at Analytics > pages report > average time per page. There you can see the actual time people have spent time on your site, on average. Also, your home page is almost impossible to rank for a query, at least in my experience. However, more experienced SEOs might have more knowledge of this.

 

[seomatic]

To see real engagement time, look at Analytics > pages report > average time per page. There you can see the actual time people have spent time on your site, on average. Also, your home page is almost impossible to rank for a query, at least in my experience. However, more experienced SEOs might have more knowledge of this.

It doesn't work they forced me to use this f... GA4. Completely worthless software.

 

[seomatic]

Ok I figured it out. Apparently you can switch to the old Analytics version in the account selection. So average time on page is between 2-3 minutes. Is that a good value?

 

[seomatic]

Yesterday the site reached a new all-time high in impressions. Just a little bit higher every day

 

[seomatic]

I'm interested to hear from the SEO pros here: Do you think embedding videos in the content is a positive ranking signal, if it is relevant? From my understanding it should improve the dwell time on the page and also satisfy a broader range of users because some people are more audiovisual than others and want to watch videos while others want to read text. Unfortunately I'm super bad at making videos so I thought about using 3rd party videos. The ultimate blockbuster would be to implement videos from my own youtube channel. Can't wait till all the youtubers discover SEO ...

 

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[seomatic]

Day 14/100

• published a new article
• research and development
• technical improvements

 

[seomatic]

Yesterday, the site reached a new All-time-high in position (or to be correct an all-time low 😀). Aiming below 20 now.

 

[seomatic]

Day 15/100

• published a new article today
• nothing else 😀

 

[seomatic]

The tool I built a few days ago is already the page with the most impressions. So I'm going to continue building more tools. I believe tools can have positive effects when it comes to engagement time and could also be potentially link magnets. It's sometimes even easier to build a tool than to write a long piece of content. Perhaps I should start building tools as freelancer? Really enjoying the work.