This Startup Got Results Without Paying For Google Adwords

Find out how this company stopped paying $10,000 yearly to Adwords and launched their Startup that’s starting to making waves.

The founder of ConnectUpz is an avid believer that marketing is one of the key ingredients for business success. Using online marketing mediums has helped to grow his small online retail business, from selling in forums 11 years ago in 2006, to become an exclusive brand distributor for 4 brands in Singapore and supplying to over 50 retail stores island-wide.

Below is a summary of the SEO trends over the years, and why the founder decided to launch a startup to change this trend.

SEO Trends 10 Years Ago — 2007

10 years ago, the online marketing scene was very different and was an easier playing field.
Websites were considered luxuries for small businesses and not many companies had them, thus it was less competitive and the online space was less crowded.
Search engines were mainly dominated by Google and Yahoo and the algorithms for both Yahoo and Google were much simpler and it didn’t take much effort to get good ranking for your website on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

Since there weren’t as many websites to compete with as compared to this day and age, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was relatively easy and techniques like keyword stuffing and creating a ton of backlinks to your website would rank your site easily on the top few pages of either Google or Yahoo.

SEO Trends Today — 2017

Moving forward to 2017, more people are going online to search for things they are looking for and have even coined words like ‘Googling’ which simply means searching on the google search engine portal.
Needless to say, Google is by far the largest shareholder in the Search Engine Market as of today. With the multitude of new websites being launched daily, this competition has given birth to an ever increasing cost of advertising online and on search engines. Be it paid advertising through Adwords or organic ranking by hiring SEO Companies.

Google has also made improvements periodically in the search engine algorithm thus making it harder to rank well if your site is not maintained by a SEO professional.
Personally, following the SEO trends throughout the years, it is dawned on me that the cost of advertising online has been increasing and will inevitably rise further. This is because of the growing trend of searching for products or services online. This just makes it harder for small businesses to compete on the digital space due to the budget.

Google Console: First 90 day traffic on ConnectUpz

Changing SEO Trends

To change this trend and to bring down the cost of online advertising, the ConnectUpz team positioned the strategy of getting businesses noticed online through thier business directory startup, ConnectUpz. With their team understanding of SEO, they structured thier startup around what was needed for Small Business to get traffic from Search Engines. Also with the main purpose of helping SMEs, they wanted to keep cost low by charging from as low as USD $10 per month / USD $120 per year. They hoped that with this low price point, business owners now have a fighting chance to drive the online traffic to their businesses even if they don’t have a website of their own.

As expected, when they first launched this initiative, it created much anxiety amongst potential users for they were worried that Black Hat techniques were involved. But as soon as they were able to show tangible results and prove the feasibility of the strategy. The differentiation and effectiveness was soon visible to the users versus traditional SEO. What came as a surprise to them was that within the 1st month of launch after beta testing, it made over $5,000 in revenue, which highlights the demand of small businesses getting found on search engines.

Currently, the team is focusing on increasing their reach to small business owners to build awareness of what ConnectUpz “We Drive Customers to your Business” can offer. It is FREE to join and to get your business listed on the portal, which helps businesses to Connect, Collaborate and Capitalize. They have been steadily growing visitor traffic to the site to benefit all businesses listed on the portal. For those who opted to pay for the SEO Business Listing, they also get potential customers who are searching for keywords from search engines as well.

Originally published at Grant Uncle.