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TL;DR & Summary

If you’re a startup founder, you’d need eyeballs on your product(s)/service(s). You’d need a channel through which your ideal customers would discover you. Will that be SEO? You’re confused if you should invest time & money in SEO. If all this sounds like you, this issue is going to help you a lot.

Using SEO is sustainable in terms of investment, unlike PPC or social media. As long as you keep investing, social media & PPC will work for you. Like a gamble.

SEO on the other hand will work even if you stop investing (I recommend no to & I’ll explain why)

By the end of this issue, you will be able to:

1. Make calculative decisions regarding SEO
2. Understand the importance of SEO
3. Create a plan & set the right expectations

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Using PPC for your benefit is easy, you set a budget, add creatives (text/images/videos), list keywords you want to target & sit back. There’s very little optimization you can do.

This issue will not only educate you on the importance of SEO but also help you set a budget for your marketing.

The problem with most startups is that they want traffic immediately, that too by putting little to no effort. If getting traffic was that easy, 91% of all websites wouldn’t be living without any traffic from search.

If you understand SEO wrongly, you may not be able to build a marketing channel that’s sustainable and significantly more affordable than any other marketing channel. When you have a strong SEO, it gives you incredible power to build a list of people who actively search for your brand or the solution you provide.

Canva is an SEO powerhouse getting millions of users from searches. SEO is helping Canva create a channel of new users (paid & free) and advocates of how awesome the tool is. The same applies to Adobe, Oyo & more.

Many users have realized the importance of content marketing (audience-first SEO) and now have started investing in SEO. The search has become even more useful and a source of qualified traffic. Times of rubbish content have gone and what people will search for is going to be more refined. Thanks to AI search, most of the generic questions will be answered on the SERPs themselves (quality is questionable)

This tells me that people are going to search more and the ones who take their search further onto websites with specific results, are going to convert well.

Most important steps to make SEO an effective way of marketing

SEO is surely the most sustainable way to promote your business, but what about action items? Here are the most important steps for the same:

• Identify target audience (if you’re in B2C, analyze if customers are the right audience of distributors/retailers are)
• Research what are the problems they have in their daily lives. Pick relevant ones & create content around that (Ex: AirBnB creating travel guides, Canva creating marketing guides) & subtly promote your products/business
• Use Google search console to find keywords that your pages are getting impressions for and optimize around those keywords
• Build a list of people who’re interested in your content. These are people who have chosen to be with you. Never lose them.

Now that you’re aware of the framework, let me help you calculate the benefits of SEO.

#1 Cost of exposure

Attention is the most expensive thing for brands these days. If that wasn’t the case, why would brands want to have people on their platform as long as possible? At the time of writing this issue, nearly 60% of human beings are connected to the internet.

If you were to get even 0.1% of those people to visit your site, you’d need to spend a bomb of money on ads and only a fraction of it if you choose the SEO route. Can’t believe it? Checkout the screenshot below:

Semrush has this feature of traffic cost where they If lifewire were to get 4.9M visitors every month, they’d need to spend $3.8M every month. Although this is an estimated number, this gives an idea of the value of the traffic you get via SEO. Lifewire would’ve spent a fraction of $3.8M to get this traffic.

#2 Traffic potential of SEO efforts

Continuing Lifewire’s example, the traffic potential can be determined by considering the conversions for the following monetizable entities:

1. Webinars
2. Sponsors
3. Ads
4. Email subscribers
5. Subscriptions etc

Assuming Lifewire has all these entities across the site and each page has either of these entities. Considering the traffic to be 100% accurate & at 2-3 percent conversion for all the entities, Lifewire would see a ton of goal accomplishments.

If you want to achieve similar results on your site you can begin with:

1. Identifying topics with search volume from your potential audience
2. Create content targeting those keywords
3. Find directly or indirectly relevant topics related to the keywords in step 2
4. Create the content on those topics and internally link all those pages (create topic clusters)

Create a funnel where the visitors are driven to the page where you fulfill your goals. Play the percentage game.

#3 SEO for sales

Utilizing SEO purely for sales is a great strategy very few startups are doing. Canva is one such startup I see using this strategy. The content that ranks SERPs has elements that urge people to try a paid version of the tool. Again, percentage game into play. Imagine 100k visiting a page every month and 2% converting into paid customers. That’s 2000 paid users & new revenue every month. FOR FREE!

You can begin with listing categories of content you want to target, then creating content clusters (which can be used for internal linking). Once you have the traffic coming in, you can keep on improving the content that’s ranking using the impressions data from the Google search console. Optimizing the page for sales is highly important, it’s a story for different issues.

When you compare the cost of acquiring 100k visitors via PPC & SEO, your mind will be blown away. If that’s not enough, comparing the cost of conversion will blow away what’s remaining. Once you switch to SEO, there’s no going back to PPC. Good content is always rewarded & if you stop investing in SEO the growth will flatten. With SEO, the sky is the limit.

Note: Sure, these steps are not perfect and won’t work for all scenarios. But this is a great start to finding a direction of growth.

SEO this week (News Updates)

1. 3 ways Google is upgrading the search game (AI Search is getting into the mainstream)
2. Google has finally openly talked about Topic Authority (I’m waiting for Google to talk about Domain Authority)
3. Bing isn’t losing the search fight. Thanks to ChatGPT’s mind-blowing performance in search
4. Google has made ecommerce better with Merchant Center Next. Good news for all?
5. How search will be 10 years from now? DeepMind co-Founder makes shocking predictions

Clickworthy resources (from LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube & web)

1. How to generate six-figure leads from LinkedIn?
2. I won’t be surprised if you self-talk. Make these small changes if you do
3. Not sure if LinkedIn is the right place for you? Here’s a success story you should check out

How can I help you?

I put a lot of effort to come up with a single edition of this newsletter. I want to help you in every possible way. But I can do only so much by myself. I want you to tell me what you need help with. You can get in touch with me on LinkedIn, Twitter & Email to share your thoughts & questions that you want to be addressed. I’d be more than happy to help.

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If you’re looking forward to winning online, here’s how I can help:

1. Sit with you 1-on-1 & create a content marketing strategy for your startup. Hire me for paid consulting.
2. Write blogs, social posts, and emails for you. Get in touch here with queries (Please mention you found this email in the newsletter to get noticed quickly)
3. Join my tribe on Twitter where I share SEO tips (every single day) & teaser of the next issue of Letters ByDavey.