EPISODE SUMMARY
In this episode of SaaS Story in the Making, B2B SaaS Sales Coach and host Matt Wolach and Respona’s Co-Founder and Lead Innovator Farzad Rashidi talk about how SEO can significantly impact your company’s success and failure.
Search engine optimization is crucial if you’re looking to create long-term brand awareness, expand your target audiences, and earn more revenue. Let’s look at the significant benefits of SEO for your business and how you can realize them with these insights from Rashidi.
PODCAST-AT-A-GLANCE
Podcast: SaaS-Story in the Making
Episode: Episode No. 213, “Why Your SEO Strategy Failed”
Host: Matt Wolach, a B2B SaaS sales coach, Entrepreneur, and Investor
Guest: Farzad Rashidi, Co-Founder & Lead Innovator of Respona
TOP TIPS FROM THIS EPISODE
Utilize Backlinks to Boost Popularity
Getting your company on the first page of Google requires extensive hard work and popularity. Ideally, it is either you produce lots of content or get other websites to talk about you. However, up to this day, Google uses PageRank where keywords and web page popularity are the top criteria for your web page to get a higher ranking. And this cannot be solely achieved by content creation. Instead, the key is to generate backlinks to your websites.
Backlinks are also called “inbound links,” these are links from a page or website directing to another. Google and other search engines look at the amount of these backlinks on a certain page as “votes.” Meaning, that the higher the backlinks, the higher the search ranking of that page will be. However, creating content on your own and generating your backlinks would not be enough. Instead, you need to make connections, appear on different websites, and make sure that they use your page as a reference. Having a great site and quality content is still important, but smart tactics in extending your reach can help your web page stand out.
Understand the Right Keywords
Finding the right keywords for your business increases your visibility. With a lot of keyword-generating tools, it is difficult to throw a bunch of them on your web page hoping it will work. Instead, you need to understand the right keywords you should use no matter what industry or topic it may be. Rashidi gave three important points to meet:
- Prioritize keywords that have the highest amount of volume possible, but;
- With the lowest amount of competition possible and;
- Commercially valuable for your business.
The overlap of these three is what he calls “opportunity keywords.” With the help of your preferred SEO tools, generate a bunch of keywords from your parent keyword that are specific to your agency. Follow the metrics above and track the number of clicks it gets. This is how Rashidi explained their process, along with unique formulas that help them identify its efficiency and future potential.
Understanding the right keywords makes it easier for you to identify which works for your industry, along with what your customers are looking for. You may have to go through trial and error, but once it is accomplished, the process would be much easier.
Have a Solid Foundation for Your Website
SEO can be a costly process. Most companies are throwing out resources by putting a bunch of keywords in their content. But before employing more complex strategies, you need to start building a solid foundation for your website first– to identify the right keywords. This can be according to the criteria mentioned above, carefully assessed using the right metrics, and what works well for your website. This step makes link building easier and more efficient. Now that you have established the basics, you can utilize your resources, save time, and possibly stand out from your competitors by putting your web page in a much more visible space.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Necessity Is the Mother of Innovation
The most effective driving force of creation is the need for it. Whether it is a new process to be employed or an entirely new product to streamline the process.
Link building can be time-consuming. For a small software company, it can also take up quite an amount of resources. But it is an essential criterion to increase page ranking. Rashid told us that this need for a more efficient way to generate backlinks drove them into making a tool for it which increased their productivity by ten times.
SEO Is Hard Work
Once you have secured your list of keywords, you might think that you are all set and ready to go. But these are only part of SO which covers a bigger scope of work to help your page visibility. Search Engine Optimization is the process of generating organic traffic to your website to improve your search engine rankings. But it takes quite a lot of time and resources to establish the process.
There are a bunch of SEO tools to help you get the metrics needed to assess keyword ranking. And these can also help you decide whether to continue using such. In building your SEO strategy, remember to understand your keywords and carefully analyze their potential over time. There are certain metrics such as Keyword Difficulty and Commercial Intent that can help your process. But like any other tactic, it needs to be studied and employed properly.
At times, SEO may not be for every business. Those in a specific industry or who cater to a very distinct niche in the market may be better at finding ways to reach out to their clients. This means, that the use of SEO always depends on where and how your customers or clients will find you. SEO can take up much of your time, effort, and resources. Put yourself in your customers’ perspective first before considering it.
Customer Intent vs. User Intent
Customer and user intent are somehow similar but have very different drivers of action.
Customer intent is when a prospect is ready to make a purchase. The keywords placed in the search engine are directed towards specific descriptions of what they would want or would like to purchase.
User intent, on the other hand, is composed of keywords where the prospect is interested in learning about something– often, a query about a specific topic. This is where prospects are in the awareness stage, where they are looking for content that would educate them about a topic.
Learning the difference between these kinds of drivers and the keywords that come with them helps you understand what stage your market is in. Looking at the metrics of the keywords, you can create more content geared towards what exactly they are looking for. And the more you cater to their needs, the better traffic will be directed toward your webpage.
TOP QUOTES
Farzad Rashidi
[23:33] “Over 90% of companies, I see that focus on SEO, only stick with on-page stuff. The reason being is we’re human beings. We don’t like things that are not under our control. So we like to have a sense of control.
Matt Wolach
[22:46] “Based on what they’re searching for, they’re at different levels within their journey. And, and it’s really important to understand how to service them and feed them the right material at the right time.”
LEARN MORE
To learn more about Farzad Rashidi and Respona, visit https://respona.com/.
You can also find Farzad Rashidi on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/farzadrashidi/.
For more about how host Matt Wolach helps software companies achieve maximum growth, visit https://mattwolach.com/.
