SEO + SaaS = Trust the process?

[seomatic]

You mentioned earlier your site is a "service for professionals. That's why we have the up and downs during the week. People search for it more on weekdays and less on weekends."

So are these services coming from service providers? Why are you not making money from the value creation here?
How does this fit in to the publishing of articles?

I'm planning to offer some kind of SAAS product for money, the content creation and publishing is just the marketing strategy. I will start building the product, once I have enough traffic. In my experience it's always the best to build the funnel from top to bottom.

How much are you spending per 30 days on Advertising to get these page stats?

Spending 0 on ads at the moment. It's all organic reach from google and a little bit from bing. Will setup some retargeting ads once the traffic is high enough.

 

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[seomatic]

Awesome thread, thanks for sharing.



Don't be angry or envious of them. There are two reasons for that:

• Understand that the market does not reward people for being smart. It rewards people for providing perceived value. If you have something that people want, they will throw money at you.
• As a psychological defense mechanism, you will never become something you hate. Don't hate rich people if you want to become one of them.

Feeling like it's hopeless it's a natural part of growing any successful business. The numbers on your site are very optimistic however, and they indicate impending exponential growth.
(it's already exponential, but I'm referring to the steep growth curve you're looking for)

1. Set a goal.
2. Make a plan. Define a process that will take you to that goal.
3. Forget about the goal. Focus exclusively on the process and do it as best as you can.
4. Win.

I would also suggest not looking every day at the numbers. And do not react emotionally to them. There will be a lot of variability in the short term. It's the month to month average growth which is of interest.

I'm not an angry at all rich people, I know a few and most of them are good people. I'm just angry at people who are rich and dumber than me or people who made their money illegally or immorally. We have this saying: "The dumbest farmers have the biggest potatoes".

Yes, the numbers looking better and better, that what keeps me going. It's just the reality of exponential growth, that it starts so slow.

 

[seomatic]

Yesterday, was another fantastic day for the site!

• It reached 100k impressions overall
• All-time high in clicks: 46 clicks per day
• All-time high in average position: 22.1 compared to 32.7 overall

I'm quite happy and it gives me confidence to continue the journey.

 

[seomatic]

The month of May is gone, time to update my charts!

In May/2022 the site achieved:

• 54,400 impressions (+101% MoM)
• 863 clicks (+362% MoM)
• 28.6 average position (5.9 improvement MoM)
• 1.59% ctr (+130% MoM)

 

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[seomatic]

Day 5/100

• created a second tool, because the first tool is already popular
• published 2 new articles
• researched some information I need for tomorrow

I'm quite amazed at my accomplishments this week. It's just nice to look back, when you know you did your best.

 

[SSTrey]

I'm planning to offer some kind of SAAS product for money, the content creation and publishing is just the marketing strategy. I will start building the product, once I have enough traffic. In my experience it's always the best to build the funnel from top to bottom.



Spending 0 on ads at the moment. It's all organic reach from google and a little bit from bing. Will setup some retargeting ads once the traffic is high enough.

This is really interesting. Is your marketing strategy (of content creation & publishing) at all related to the SAAS product you want to offer later?

 

[seomatic]

This is really interesting. Is your marketing strategy (of content creation & publishing) at all related to the SAAS product you want to offer later?

Oh yes sure, the closer it is related the higher the conversion rate in general. It's called content marketing.
When it comes to SEO, the best case studies I've seen (which means companies doing it right):

• wise.com (ex transferwise.com)
• zapier.com
• coinbase.com

 

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[seomatic]

Yesterday was another fantastic day with high pace and new all-time highs in impressions and clicks.

• Impressions over 3k for first time - 3,324
• 12.4% increase from last all-time high
• 47 clicks (+1)

Super happy with the performance recently and the graph starts to look like an exponential growth curve.

 

[seomatic]

Oh yes sure, the closer it is related the higher the conversion rate in general. It's called content marketing.
When it comes to SEO, the best case studies I've seen (which means companies doing it right):

• wise.com (ex transferwise.com)
• zapier.com
• coinbase.com

another excellent example is canva.com

 

[seomatic]

Finished another day, happy weekend to everyone reading!

Day 6/100

• Published 3 new articles
• updated some older articles
• did some minor improvements to the tool I developed

 

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[seomatic]

Wow, I was doing a little dance when I saw my stats today

• new record in impressions, clicks, and average position

 

[seomatic]

Let's add some value here by explaining what I'm currently working on. There is a markup for FAQs in Google, that can make your site actually appear bigger in google (taking more real estate in the serps). See below to understand:


A lot of webmasters are worried about implementing this markup because they are worried that users will find the answer directly in the SERPs and won't click on the website. But so far, I'm seeing quite some boost on sites where I've implemented FAQs. I have implemented it only on some pages for now.

What's interesting though is that Google actually split tests the version with FAQs and the version without FAQs. I guess it's a test to see which result is better for the user and after Google collected enough data they will show the better version. So I don't think implementing FAQs can hurt your website. Also what's quite interesting there seems to be no limit on how many FAQs you can implement.

Actually, there is also a similar Markup for forums and Q/A sites where users can write answers. It's very important to use the correct markup:

• FAQ if you write the content yourself
• Q/A if the users write the content (forum, Question and answer sites, ...)

 

[seomatic]

Another thing I'm currently trying is to benchmark my content. If you didn't know, yet: You can compare different URLs that contain specific keywords in the Google Search Console. This gives me a good idea of what works and what doesn't. There are two ways to do it:

1. put the keyword in the folder name and then compare different folders with each other: mysite.com/topic1 vs mysite.com/topic2
2. put the keyword in the URL and just compare different keywords: mysite.com/what-is-keyword1 vs mysite.com/how-to-keyword2

Both ways work just fine and are very useful to see what kind of content works and do more of it. Folders are much better if you have a lot of pages and don't have the same keyword in the url for example if you write about variations of the keyword.

Impressions are an excellent early indicator of success because I'm seeing that clicks follow impressions with some time delay. I'm also watching average position because it gives me an idea of how competitive my content is compared to other sites that are already ranking. It makes more sense to focus on topics where you already rank high in my opinion.

 

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[alord]

SEO is slow and can be frustrating (I've grown my company to 6 figures with just SEO). Keep it up and trust the process.

 

[seomatic]

SEO is slow and can be frustrating (I've grown my company to 6 figures with just SEO). Keep it up and trust the process.

Thanks, I'm gaining more trust in the process every day. Just curious, is your company SaaS or eCommerce?

 

[alord]

I run niche online sites that monetize through affiliate and display ads

I've ranked all kinds of sites through our agency as well though including SaaS and eCom

Just to give you an example of how SEO can get you insane exponential returns.

Our current biggest client was not seeing results after investing quite a lot for 5-6 months.

He called me and told me: "Man, I will give it just another month, I'm really not seeing results."

Literally a few days later his traffic skyrocketed to 8 times when we started. After 16 months in the campaign now his site went from about 2k visitors a month to over 102K

This is a screenshot of his site as of today.

As well, my biggest niche sites at the moment took over a year before making decent revenues.

I've invested also a considerable amount on another site and it still didn't give me a decent return after over 2 years just because the niche is competitive af and it takes time to build up the authority and trust.

That's why niche selection is a critical skill in SEO btw. You might be the best SEO in the world but if you don't have enough resources to invest to make a dent in that niche - including time - it doesn't matter.

 

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[seomatic]

Day 7/100

• published 6 new articles today
• researched the whole day information (it's quite important to learn new stuff to have material to write about)
• worked on some graphics to make the page prettier, it's mostly text at the moment and it doesn't look good
• also thinking about some videos (any experiences with video?)

 

[seomatic]

Hard work is finally paying off:

• Impressions +25.9% compared to last all-time high
• MoM growth 121%
• average position 6.0 MoM improvement

 

[heavy_industry]

Hard work is finally paying off:

• Impressions +25.9% compared to last all-time high
• MoM growth 121%
• average position 6.0 MoM improvement

View attachment 43859

How many months did it take you to do from 0 to where you are now?

Are you making money through ads or do you sell something?

 

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[seomatic]

How many months did it take you to do from 0 to where you are now?

Are you making money through ads or do you sell something?

4 months since the first impressions. But I've not really focused on the site for a while. I could have done the build in probably 3-4 weeks. It's not monetized, yet. I'm waiting for more traffic. The plan is to do a SaaS product.

 

[seomatic]

Day 8/100

• published one new article today
• did some competitive research
• created new graphics for my content

 

[Bing]

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).



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).

 

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[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).

View attachment 43869

That's awesome progress, congratulations. The covid dip looks really scary, but I believe that crises are always opening new opportunities and it's all about adaption to change.

I guess the different colors are the cohorts of months the user signed up? I don't know much about SaaS but what do you think might be a fair valuation of a SaaS company like yours? I know that pure SEOs sites that are monetized via ads can have 4-5 multiples. For a SaaS with good moat and retention it should be closer to 10-20? So you could possibly exit at > $20m ... ever thought about it? Surely makes a comfortable retirement or enough free chips to play.

Based on the slow rise I guess you also use search traffic or any other channels that work well with SaaS products?

 

[seomatic]

Yesterday was another crazy day for the project.

• new all-time high in clicks: 16% improvement
• MoM impressions growth now at 113% (!!!)
• a lot of pages sit around position 10, so expecting more growth when hitting the first page

 

[heavy_industry]

MoM impressions growth now at 113% (!!!)

Nice, I'm sure your dad will have an even better impression!

 

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[Bing]

That's awesome progress, congratulations. The covid dip looks really scary, but I believe that crises are always opening new opportunities and it's all about adaption to change.

I guess the different colors are the cohorts of months the user signed up? I don't know much about SaaS but what do you think might be a fair valuation of a SaaS company like yours? I know that pure SEOs sites that are monetized via ads can have 4-5 multiples. For a SaaS with good moat and retention it should be closer to 10-20? So you could possibly exit at > $20m ... ever thought about it? Surely makes a comfortable retirement or enough free chips to play.

Based on the slow rise I guess you also use search traffic or any other channels that work well with SaaS products?

The colors are based per-customer in that chart. I wrote the code for it using Google Charts. It was a lot more helpful when I had 15 customers, now with 500+ it's a lot less helpful to separate that way (I do have another color-by-product, but the by-customer is more useful for me in observing/preventing customer drop-off, especially since I have customer/month table after the chart which highlights drops).

I can't speak to valuation since (1) a company is worth what someone will pay for it, (2) I don't run ads, neither on my platform nor to sell my platform (honestly I'm a shit marketer, and my customers tell me that; it's room for growth for me) and finally (3) this business is B2B and based on someone being a customer of another company (who I do have a written partnership agreement with) so there's somewhat of a market cap. I'd love to say my company is worth $20m (we should do $1.3m this year, 76% profit until Uncle Sam asks) but even despite my ask here I have no answer. And until someone offers me something I like, I guess my company is just a cash-printing machine. Nice problem to have though.

 

[seomatic]

Nice, I'm sure your dad will have an even better impression!

I don't get the joke.

 

[heavy_industry]

I don't get the joke.

MoM impressions.
DaD impressions.

 

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[seomatic]

MoM impressions.
DaD impressions.

hahah good one. Wasn't even thinking about it. MoM is month over month of course

 

[heavy_industry]

hahah good one. Wasn't even thinking about it. MoM is month over month of course

Then we can have "Month over Month" and "Day after Day" and both will be happy.