Data Driven SEO for Start-ups

Krishna Damaraju

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Published in

HelloMeets

6 min readDec 17, 2018

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“Better marketing often trumps a better product. Invest in both.” — Rand Fishkin, Founder, and CEO of moz.com

This is missing in case of a few bootstrapped startups. Having a kick-ass product alone is not enough. Customers are crucial and it is not so new to see bootstrapped startups failing in this point of their business execution. Might be due to lack of funds or a bad marketing strategy.

Building organic traffic is the missing piece here. Ashok K Kammara — Head of Marketing, at klenty shared his experience from improving organic growth by 9X in 18 months at a HelloMeets SAAS Marketers Meetup held at the Paperflite office.

Here’s what Ashok discussed during the session:

Basics of SEO & How does SEO work
Different Stages of SEO
Creating SEO optimized content
Optimizing your existing content for SEO
Metrics you need to track your performance

Basics of SEO and How does it Work?

SEO is a marketing strategy which aims at getting organic (unpaid) traffic from search engine results.

Simply put, SEO is a process to make your website loved by Google and other search engines.

How does SEO work?

Let’s say, Google has an agent whose work is to get the information available on the internet with-respect-to the given techniques, make a list and answer users’ queries — contextually. This agent is called a crawler/spider, the list is called index and techniques it follows is defined under Rank Brain.

A crawler is an intelligent program which is evolving every day and it decides to show a page in the search results based on the following factors:

Domain Authority
Quality of the Content
Content Relevance
On-page SEO
Off-page SEO
Page load times, Etc

Stages in SEO

Klenty has played-around and established a five-stage SEO procedure that would be of great help to any B2B start-up.

Website audit is a full analysis of a website from SEO point of view. A complete audit will give you deeper insights as what are improvements that are needed on your website to increase ranking.

Timeframe: 1–2 Months

Helpful links:

2. Optimizing the website as per the results of the audit

Timeframe: 1 Month.

Helpful links:

3. Start creating content — Do your keyword research and start writing fresh content.

Timeframe: 5–6 months (start seeing results)

Helpful Links:

4. Optimising SEO work — More content creation, technical optimization, attracting high-quality backlinks, etc

Timeframe: 2–3 months (huge improvement in traffic)

5. Improving the conversion rate optimization of your website

Timeframe: 3 months (More traffic and leads)

Creating SEO optimized content

Sailing without a compass takes you nowhere. Similarly, SEO without Content is a lost ship that won’t reach the final destination. Content needs SEO to standout in the din of mediocre blogs. According to Google “Content” is among the top three ranking factors for any page.

The following four steps can help you in content optimization:

Generating a list of keywords: Every business has a WHY associated with their goal. This is sometimes referred to as the goal/part of the App or Business. That should be your starting point for keyword generation.

Example: You have a follow-up email templates blog that you want to index. Now your keyword for this is”Follow up email”.

So, generate a list of related words. You can Brainstorm, use the Google search console or maybe refer to your competitor and put them down in a list.

Helpful Links:

2. Find high opportunity keywords: Now that we have a list of possible keywords that we want to use in content, the next step is to filter them by search volume. Search volume is the number of users searching for a specific keyword variation.

Any word that has a search volume between 10k — 1M is considered great.

Helpful links:

3. Deciding Content Type for each Keyword: There are multiple content types like Blogs, Product pages, Comparison pages, Videos that are available and it is very crucial to decide the exact keywords to match every content type

The keywords can be categorized under the following categories:

Informational
Valuable
Too broad
Irrelevant

But how to decide on the categorization? Well, There’s one hack shared by Ashok — For the chosen keyword, look at the top 10 search results and see what content type is most popular. Take your decision based on that!

4. Hit the docs: Now that you have finalized keywords for every content type, connect the dots and start writing the content. But do remember one thing, — Experiment, Learn, Repeat. Sometimes users are more enticed towards specific words & you can find these words only by experimenting.

Optimise your existing content for SEO

To be amongst the search results is quite a difficult task, especially for unpaid listings. This could be due to competitors trying to beat you with more polished content and improved SEO strategies. So, it is very important to update your content occasionally. You can use the following steps -

Use search console to find your low ranking content (choose the ones with avg position of 10–15)
Choose just one high volume keyword to optimize for
Check if the existing content type is relevant (compare with top 10)
Re-write and re-publish

Finally, Metrics to track your performance

“ They say that if you can measure it, then you can improve it. In search engine optimization, measurement is critical to success. Professional SEO Experts track data about rankings, referrals, links, and more to help analyze their SEO strategy and create roadmaps for success.” — MOZ.com

Let’s see the crucial metrics that you need to keep an eye on:

Organic search traffic
Page-by-page performance
Keyword ranking
ClickThrough Rate
Bounce rate
SERP ranking

FAQs

Q: Does Wordpress or any CMS provide added advantage over static websites in SEO?

A: WordPress is search engine friendly but you still need to do manual SEO for best results.

Q: What is an ideal keyword density percentage?

A: There is no ideal keyword density percentage, but keyword stuffing might reduce your ranking

Q: What is the minimum blog publishing limit?

A: Ideal limit klenty follow is 8 blogs per month.

Some helpful resources

This is my takeaway from a HelloMeets session on Data Driven SEO. If you’d like to attend their sessions, check out www.hellomeets.com for the interesting events they do.