SEO for Startups – Jonathan Zacks – MicroConf Growth 2019

0:00[Music] [Music] hello my name is Jonathan socks I run a SAS startup that targets small businesses everything from tattoo shops to financial advisors and everything in between it's an automated text and email reminder platform and I'm not going to talk about that at all but what I am going to talk about is an easy tactic for getting or more organic traffic from search engines so there's just so much information about SEO out there that I wanted to really focus on like a little micro tactic that you can that you can deploy with your existing knowledge and without a ton of work there is a fair amount of detail in this

0:57that I'll be talking about that's not on the slides and so I will make the slides and an outline available after that will include all the details so what I am NOT going to talk about are the some of the prerequisites for this and some things that should be done after so in terms of the prerequisites these are things like making sure your site is built well it's clean it has all the technical aspects that are necessary for SEO what I call a solid foundation for SEO you it's this is meant for people who are getting conversions through other channels on your website little to no organic

1:40traffic and that you want more traffic in terms of making this site in terms of cleaning up the site making sure it has that solid foundation I'm happy to have more about that I have a consulting company as well and that's one of the things we do there so if you have any questions happy to chat about that but I won't be covering that in this talk so in terms of who this talk is really geared toward it's geared toward people who have as I mentioned in the existing site all the organic traffic you're getting is basically going to your home page and you might not be getting any

2:18organic traffic at all I took a list took a look at the list of a 10 who had filled in their info on the spreadsheet for growth the other day ran it through the hrs batch analysis tool and about half to two-thirds of those sites had zero to 100 organic visits per month and so those are really the kinds of people that I'm targeting this this talk toward essentially what I'm providing is is a quick simple recipe to get your SEO efforts off the ground and in this process you'll also learn a bunch about your company and all you need in order to do this is is your

2:59existing knowledge about your products so the overview the synopsis of this is that you should add more pages to your website informational pages I'm going to give you a specific set of steps to follow that that I mentioned will be in the at the end of the deck when I make that available so the first step in this process is to really think about how you describe your product what words and phrases do you use what words and phrases your customers use what mean features can you talk about any angle you can come at your product other than just like the main main angle is what

3:41you should be thinking about so spend a half an hour coming up with a list of words and phrases and just jot them down and and and that's all you have to do for this first step so for the next step you're going to figure out what topics to write about and what other words to include on those pages so you're going to take that list and pop that into HRF keyword explorer and then just export that list put it aside for later next you're gonna go in a drafts and look at your site see what keywords you're already ranking for export that list keep it for later do that same process

4:19for a bunch of your competitors sites simply look at what keywords they're ranking for export them and so you'll end up with a bunch of different lists of keywords go back into a trust keyword explorer put all the lists in in one big batch and look through it sorted by volume and pick five relevant high-volume terms that you can you can build a page around for each of those terms once you have those five phrases then keep looking through the list and look for other phrases that are relevant to each of those terms so what you'll end up with is five topics each one you'll create a

4:54page around and a main keyword and a list of supporting keywords for each of the pages and then finally go and find a relevant image somewhere that you can put on each of the pages so when you create the pages you want to write between 500 and 1500 words and you basically just want to riff on whatever topic or angle you're coming at for each of the pages so you know get that get that all written use your main keywords in the the likely you know suspects for what I put those page title meta description h1 first paragraph URL and then the image filename alt tag and

5:33caption so then for the other words once you've written it you can incorporate those other supporting words and then go back through the list and and and add any other words that are on your supporting list as it would make sense to add so you'll get those key words in there and then finally you're going to be linking and announcing so in terms of linking add links to these new pages to your footer if you don't have a footer add a footer and then add these pages where relevant for each of these in each of these pages link between them to the other pages and then if you do have any

6:10other pages on your website go ahead and put links in the text between other pages to these new pages so this is all getting Google to be aware of these pages and and then just announce them on social media you don't have to have a lot of social media experience just tweet out the link every every few days tweet out the link to a new page post it on Facebook pin the image it's good enough for now so at this step you basically are done so you're done with this very slim tiny tiny tactic it's not that you're done with SEO it's nothing you're done with digital marketing it's

6:49just that if you are currently getting all your traffic through your homepage and you're not getting much organic traffic this is a way to sort of kickstart your efforts and and really just just get them going if you're at a point where you're thinking I just don't know what to do at about SEO or I really want to make SEO perfect so I don't know enough about it now maybe I'll hire someone maybe I'll do a bunch more research and maybe I'll get around to that in a year or two there's just no need to wait for that so when I say wait and check the results it's

7:23really about if you're deploying this tactic and not doing anything else about SEO then then you're done you you go on to whatever next steps that you're doing with your business which which might be a ton more of work related to SEO or it could be your other marketing efforts product development whatever else you're working on so as long as your site is clean loads fast that that SEO technical foundation is in place you should start seeing results how soon and how much traffic depends on a bunch of different aspects the current domain reputation how many links you have coming into your site what else you

8:03do to publicize these pages how much competition there is for the different keywords and and certainly the volume of the keywords that you pick but essentially if you do no other promotion other than this and you have the technical aspects of your site set up for a good SEO foundation you should see traffic coming into these pages similarly as I mentioned these pages need to be set up in a way that will convert but as long as you have another page on your website such as your home page that's converting then just use the tactics you used for your homepage for this new page these pages don't have to

8:38look different they don't have to have any special CRO efforts that you that you've done on them just just make sure that they're converting as well as your other pages so in terms of the technical aspects as I mentioned if you have any questions feel free to to chat me up find me at the conference I'll be here actually it's all Friday slacker twitter @ @ jo docs thanks for your time