Issue#45: Building $1K - $10K MRR Micro SaaS products around SEO, Keyword Research & Backlinks
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No fluffy content. If your goal is to build a $100m ARR business, this is not the right post. Here I am are NOT going to talk about building the next Facebook or Twitter. If your goal is to make a $1K to $10K MRR, continue reading.
This post will cover one SAAS area and talk about multiple niches in this space. This post also explains how to do tech implementation, do market analysis, how the current players are doing, and ends with a cost analysis to understand the overall cost for 100 users.
Let’s see some of the products around SEO (Search Engine Optimization), Keyword research ad Backlink analysis.
Ubersuggest: Ubersuggest allows you to get insight into the strategies that are working for others in your market so you can adopt them, improve them, and gain an edge.
SerpApi: Scrape Google and other search engines result from one easy API using SerpAPI.
ValueSERP: Fast, reliable API to power your SEO apps and services. Create SEO apps and services just from one single API that can provide SERP data.
Mangools: Mangools is a bundle of 5 simple but powerful SEO tools made for an effective SEO workflow.
SEMRush: Provides 50+ tools on SEO, content marketing, competitor research, PPC, and social media marketing to help you attract and grow your audience online faster.
Ahrefs: Ahrefs is an All-in-one SEO tool set. Ahrefs is used by marketers from some of the world’s leading companies.
SEOProfiler: SEOprofiler is a full-featured website promotion tool that offers SEO tools for keyword research, web page optimization, link analysis, link building, ranking checks, SEO audits, website monitoring, website analytics, and much more.
Moz: SEO software and data to help you increase traffic, rankings, and visibility in search results.
Backlinko: Backlinko is the place for next-level SEO training and link-building strategies.
SEOSiteCheckup: Search Engine Optimization Made Easy. SEO Site Checkup runs through a fast audit of your site, checking for proper tags and surfacing any errors that might come up.
SEOptimer: SEO Audit Tool that will perform a detailed SEO Analysis across 100 website data points, and provide clear and actionable recommendations for steps you can take to improve your online presence and ultimately rank better in search engine results.
AuthorityLabs: Monitor SEO performance with reliable and accurate keyword data. Track rankings with the most comprehensive set of daily SERP data points.
LinkGraph: Supercharge marketing with cutting-edge SEO software and award-winning services.
Userp: A full-service PR, SEO, and link-building agency. Conducts site analysis to determine your fastest route to organic visibility, analyzing SEO variables like core vitals, backlink profile, and more.
KeywordsEverywhere: The Keywords Everywhere browser add-on shows you monthly search volume, CPC, and competition data of keywords on multiple websites.
KeywordTool: Keyword Tool is an alternative to Google Keyword Planner and other keyword research tools.
WordTracker: Find new keywords for markets. Create your own products or services using the Wordtracker API.
SEOTagg: AI-powered content marketing & SEO tool. Dramatically improve your SEO and content marketing workflow An all-in-one platform that will streamline every part of your content marketing and SEO pipeline.
KatLinks: KatLinks helps you find, manage and monitor your backlinks so you can understand how they are helping your rankings and how you can improve your organic visibility.
Squirrly: AI Marketing Tools from Squirrly that help you triple your traffic. Brings A.I. that automatically activates and configures over 450 features.
SEOTesting: Grow search traffic through testing & experimentation Get easier access to valuable data. Run SEO tests to see what works.
80% of these companies make thousands of dollars per month in revenue while the rest are profitable too.
Negative Nancy says - “Why should I be worried about SEO so much? I can rely on cold email and Ads too”
Me - Yes you can. Cold email and ads take time and money. It’s not that SEO doesn’t need time or money but whatever you do for SEO, it compounds over time and grows your product organically. SEO is more like a long-term game with high returns.
Negative Nancy says - “To find my SERP ranking, I can just type in my search keyword on Google and look through the results to find my website”
Me - Not a scalable approach if you want to do it every day with thousands of keywords. Also, SERP rankings are based on location. Your search results vary based on the search location. By manually search, you can only find the results from your location and you wouldn’t know how your site is performing for the same keywords in other countries. Automated SERP tracking tools do this at scale for thousands of keywords and hundreds of locations.
Deep-dive & Some niches
Deep-dive analysis report of SEO, Keywords & backlinks: All most of all founders need this tool that can help them with a deep-dive analysis of their start-up specifically related to backlink analysis. Many tools do SEO & backlink analysis but there is still a large gap as existing tools merely look at the links only. But there is a need for deeper analysis around multiple other platforms like Quora, Youtube, TikTok, etc. You can add data round Quora questions related to the startup and list the questions that could give the highest return if the founder could add an answer to the question. The same is the case with Youtube videos. Look for related videos, gather data about the views, and suggest what kind of video can help the founder raise awareness about his/her product. The report could be as granular as it can. For example, it can list out the top posts on IndieHacker, Reddit and suggest adding an answer to the questions. Another example would be to list the links/blog where the founder can add a comment at the bottom of the blog post. Traditional backlink software cannot provide this data. You can either charge a one-time fee and send the report or you can charge a time base fee and then charge a very minimal amount every month for any updates. The report should also include various other parameters like how is the current SEO doing for the website, on-page and off-page SEO suggestions, influencers in this space to be reached out for paid posts, etc. The report is not just about the questions around a topic on the internet. It should be like a full-blown report saying - “Ok, This is what you need to do right now to improve your entire SEO and Backlink strategies”.
Keyword research tools: Keyword research and deep-dive analysis are some of the most important steps to drive traffic to websites, specifically if you rely on SEO for traffic. Instead of blindly writing a blog post, most founders look for stuffing the required keywords into the blog post so that Google can index these blog posts for those keywords. To do this, founders need to know the data around search traffic for various keywords. Create a tool that can help with this. The tool should do one thing but should do its best to give data about search volume for various keywords. You can either build this as a SaaS tool where people can search for keywords and find the volume or upload the excel sheet with keywords to search in bulk. Another alternative is to build a chrome extension that shows the search volume data directly on Google search results/pages.
SERP tracking for keywords/websites: If you haven’t heard of SERP, it basically tells you on which page a given website is found for a given keyword during a search. For example, if you are searching for ‘California’ and your website is coming on the 5th page in Google results, that is your SERP ranking. See more here if you are new to SERP. Create a tool that can give a daily status of the SERP rankings for a given search keyword and website. Tracking this daily/weekly will help founders understand how their SEO efforts and Backlinks efforts are helping drive the traffic. Companies spend hundreds of dollars on this data as SEO is one of the primary traffic sources for most websites. Create a tool that tracks the keywords and search results for a website and updates them in a dashboard in a forum of the consumable report. Make sure the tool should provide options to share the daily/weekly/monthly reports with other users too or the tool should at least provide an option to download the report and send it via email.
SERP results via API: This is the same as above except that here this is going to be a headless SERP. In this case, there is no front-end UI or dashboards but you will provide the entire SERP functionality in the form of an API. The API accepts parameters like “search keyword”, “location”, “page number” etc and the SERP API returns the data in a JSON format that will be consumed by users in their applications. Users can build various types of applications around this functionality and can serve their customers with this data from SERP API. For example, agencies can build dashboards for their customers. Micro SaaS builders can build an entire SaaS offering by using this API. See SerpAPI for some inspiration.
SEO agencies: Agencies aren’t dead. SEO agencies make a lot of money by sending weekly, monthly reports around improving the SEO and backlinks. There are many types of SEO agencies. While some agencies work with the founders and just send the weekly/monthly reports, some agencies actually charge more and also write content around the company and help build the SEO organically. The agencies that write content, build brand and reputation change in thousands of dollars per month. With something like this, you just need a handful of clients. Start low and offer SEO services around $50-$100/month and productize your service. You can leverage ads or you can organically reach out to founders and show them how well you can improve their SEO. Show the founders what you can contribute and how you can do it and most founders would be happy to pay for SEO. Once you start getting clients and get some social proof, you can start increasing the price. You can start something like this without a lot of investment. You can use the existing SEO/Backlink tools to build the reports too but make them as ad-hoc as possible with your research and add actionable points.
Newsletter with just SEO Tips and Backlinks strategies: Start writing a newsletter around various SEO strategies, tips, and tools in this space. No matter where they are in the journey, it is a dream for every founder to improve SEO for their websites and products. There is a lot of content around SEO, Backlinks, and Keyword analysis. All you have to do is to digest the content and write in consumable format with quick bites. Show users where else they can post their products to get more traffic. You can up-sell various SEO products for these audiences. Most of these SEO tools provide affiliate links. You can use affiliate links in newsletters. SEO is a big space and there is a lot of competition. Most companies would be happy to sponsor your newsletter if you have a decent amount of audience and engagement.
Influencers discovery and connectivity tool: The fastest way to reach the audience these days and build backlinks is going through influencers. As per InfluencerMarketingHub, an influencer is someone who has:
the power to affect the purchasing decisions of others because of his or her authority, knowledge, position, or relationship with his or her audience.
a following in a distinct niche, with whom he or she actively engages. The size of the following depends on the size of his/her topic of the niche.
It's vital to remember that these people aren't just marketing tools; they're also social connection assets with whom organizations can work to achieve their marketing goals. There are all kinds of influencers - who make a video post, make blog posts, Tweets about your product sends a newsletter about your product to their audience, creates a TikTok video.
Create a Micro SaaS tool that can connect to influences across various platforms like Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Youtube, Quora across various topics. Make sure you also capture the audience reach for each influencer for the platforms they are on. As an add-on, create your own estimated/algorithm to calculate the ROI if there is a published cost for the influencers. Founders can use tools like this and use them for advertising their products. Over a period, many people will go through the content (video, blog, newsletter, Tweets) from these influencers and mentions your product in their content. This way you will start getting quality backlinks for your product or website. You can charge users either a monthly price or use a credit-based system where people can buy the credits with 1-year validity and unlock the influencer data by using these credits anytime during the one year.
Programmatic SEO-based tools: If you are new to the concept of Programmatic SEO, see here and here. Basically, Programmatic SEO is a new pattern where you create hundreds of pages programmatically based on required keywords and data combinations. Create a tool that can ease out this process either using a No-Code tool or using an API or just with a GUI editor. Make sure you research and study the concept of Programmatic SEO fully and see how you can bundle this into a product or a productized service.
Ubersuggest kind of tools: Create a single platform to see the SEO, Backlinks, and Keyword data - all in one place. This is something similar to UberSuggest and Mangools. Tools like these are extremely powerful that can help founders analyze the data around competitor websites and help them understand what keywords they should concentrate on and what kind of backlinks could drive more traffic to their websites. These tools give a 360-degree view of everything required around SEO, Backlinks, and keywords. It is not often easy to build tools like these are you need a lot of infrastructure and automation. Use cloud vendors like AWS, GCP to build your infrastructure and automation. The more time you stay in the industry, the more data you can accumulate.
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