Search Engine Optimization

While our early content marketing efforts were certainly more focused on building our brand than optimizing content for search engines, I want to be very clear that I’m not downplaying the importance of SEO. Organic search has been one of the most important pillars of our growth strategy at every successful SaaS start-up that I’ve worked at and Outseta is no different. In fact it’s been the single most effective customer acquisition channel—nearly 37% of our account sign ups are driven by SEO!

This is really interesting for a couple of reasons.

• This clearly demonstrates that you can grow both search traffic but also product signups without a heavy emphasis on content created solely for the sake of search.
• While our site traffic is still quite modest, this approach allowed us to build a site with fairly high domain rank (a measure of the credibility of a site) without a lot of traffic. 

I am the first person to tell you that throughout our early years, I always knew that it was a bit of a missed opportunity not to be spending more time on SEO—I knew that a little link building and being a little more deliberate with target keywords would go a long way. Not investing in this earlier was solely a matter of time and resources—I focused more on brand building than link building.

That said, I did sign up for Ahrefs site audit tool. It’s completely free and it sends me a weekly email that calls out any search related issues with our website. This is a fantastic way to make sure that your site is as accessible as possible to search engines—and generally to tighten up your technical SEO.

This tool catches small things like newly broken links and provides clear guidance on where the issues are and how to fix them—it’s a really simple and fast investment that you can make in the overall health of your website.

While these types of changes certainly don’t have the same impact as more deliberate link building, good website hygiene is a great practice to embed in your start-up early on.  

Key Takeaways

• 37% of our sign ups come from SEO without much deliberate effort spent on targeting keywords or building links.
• Investing in your brand is actually an investment in SEO! Look for searches related to your brand name to increase over time.
• Building a site with a high domain rank makes it much easier when you do turn your attention to optimizing content for SEO.
• Ahrefs site audit tool is an awesome and low effort way to make sure your site is search engine friendly.