#001 - I'm going ALL IN on SEO!

SEO - too good to be true?

"I'm all in on SEO" - I see this on X all the time.

It’s a mindset people have that is rooted in the idea of ‘free’ traffic which in their mind makes customer acquisition as cheap as it could get.

I would like to point couple things out.

Not all traffic is equal.

Not all traffic can lead to a sale.

Not all traffic is relevant to your offer.

However, to gain ANY of that traffic, you need to put in the work to do:

• keyword research
• competitive research
• idea generation
• copywriting
• internal linking
• external link (backlink) building
• performance tracking
• funnel setup (to move visitors to the next step)
• iteration based on results

 

It takes noticeable amount of time (and often resources) to do address this. And results from SEO are not immediate. It can take months to break into Top 10. And that often won’t even be enough because clicks are heavily biased toward the Top 3 positions. Let's look at the image below to get a better sense of it.

So you spend weeks in the dark, not knowing if and when your traffic finally comes in… and when it comes, you might realize there are no conversions!

What happened?

You didn’t consider the audience and the intent of the query that is being searched on Google.

If the intent is not commercial / transactional - the audience is very unlikely to convert. We might be talking about 0.01 - 0.1% conversion rate here. 1000 to 10000 clicks just to get that one $29 conversion. Time well spent!

What you also didn’t think about is the audience that is searching for it. Your API product is probably not particularly relevant to a designer. This, unfortunately, would again destroy your chances of converting a visitor.

So I shouldn’t use SEO at all!

That might be your immediate emotional reaction to hearing some of these things.

Good thing is - it’s not all that bad. SEO is a good (cheap) channel to drive more sales and expose people to your brand.

However, what you need to take into account for ANY marketing channel is that your products’ potential customer persona (or avatar, if you want to call it that) is the key to unlocking the success.

If you know who you are talking to:

- you can understand the language they use
- what associations they have when they think of the problems your offer is related to
- how they might approach solving the problem right now

This is your golden ticket with SEO. The process helps you reverse engineer the keywords and the intent, and focus on queries that are likely to lead to direct conversion - because your offer is the painkiller they immediately need.

But to wrap it all up - even the more efficient effort will take time. If you look at the opportunity cost of both - the time investment to do the work, and the time it takes to see results - you might realize that it’s cheaper to run Ads unless you’re living under the bridge unemployed.

Ads speed up the research process by providing an immediate feedback loop for your idea of audience+intent and offer match.

Personal story time (it stung!)

A client of mine was trying to grow their business by exploring owning their own ecommerce store, instead of relying on marketplaces like Etsy. From what I could tell - they were doing quite good there so I thought it would be a smooth sailing.

I was wrong.

While they had previously sold primarily to the European market, they wanted to try expanding to the US market with their own store.

It makes sense, same product - new audience, no conflict with existing channels.
The issue I did not realize existed, which was not communicated (and later found out they were clueless as well) - is that for these interior products the standards for measurements are different than in Europe.

So we run Ads with these products made for the European market - and guess what - they're converting at quite an abysmal rate.
I started going through keywords that Ads are showing up for - I started noticing the measurements in keywords and felt like there's something off as competitors do have different version as well.
I wasn't fully convinced at that point that it had to be that way so I also added the live chat to the store (which, by the way, is a great way to get some early feedback for product categories). Now with the chat you would get people asking whether the products can be custom made with the specific measurement values. Which confirmed the issue.

Because of the rather poor early results there was also a discussion that perhaps we should have just done SEO from the start. To which I pointed out - that at the conversion rates we were getting at the start would take quite a long time to get enough traffic to reach similar amount of sales.
And, we would still likely not have the feedback of what was wrong for much longer.

In fact, the conversion rate from before the discovery to after the changes were implemented tripled or quadrupled.

This is one of those things were burning some money with Ads can lead you to profitability much quicker.

Just make sure to act fast to feedback. I wasn't involved enough (in terms of time) with the project to notice the issues in perhaps half the time.

 

Returning to main topic - SEO is just another marketing channel. You are paying for it regardless - either in effort or time (and likely some money).

Next time... more on Ads?