{"id":1960,"date":"2021-04-12T12:15:30","date_gmt":"2021-04-12T12:15:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/seobuddy.com\/blog\/?p=1960"},"modified":"2022-07-30T04:23:42","modified_gmt":"2022-07-30T04:23:42","slug":"my-seo-journey-james-rose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seobuddy.com\/blog\/my-seo-journey-james-rose\/","title":{"rendered":"My SEO Journey: James Rose from contentsnare.com – Building Relationship is our best link-building hack"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

My SEO Journey is a new series where entrepreneurs and Indie makers will share their honest SEO Journey filled with failure and success, and most importantly proven results. Episode #9 features James Rose from Contentsnare<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"James<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m James – but most people call me Jimmy. I\u2019m a founder of Content Snare, a kind of client portal<\/a> that helps businesses collect content and documents from clients.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SEO and content marketing has always been my favourite marketing channel. My first foray into online business in 2009 was building websites, ranking them in search and making an income from ads. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We have since built 3 software products (Chimp Rewriter<\/a>, Silver Siphon<\/a> and Content Snare<\/a>), and SEO has been the main channel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s such a high \u201cbang for your buck\u201d marketing channel. SEO continues to drive traffic long after you\u2019ve done the work, as long as you continue to build up your domain and pay attention to the right things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Building a real business<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

As you probably know, SEO isn\u2019t for people who want results quickly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our SEO journey has probably been even slower than usual. We\u2019re building a business for the long term, not just trying to rank at all costs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Last<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Very little of what we do is scalable, and that\u2019s fine. Over time, it\u2019s building a domain and website that makes it fairly easy to rank for new terms, because Google likes it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Out of the box keyword research<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019re in a software category that people don\u2019t really search for. It\u2019s not like a proposal tool, where you know loads of people are searching for \u201cproposal software\u201d. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of our use-cases have little volume. For example, very few people are searching for “get website content from clients.<\/em>” So we\u2019ve had to look far and wide to find keywords that are worth ranking for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even then, most of our traffic comes from the most random, longtail things that people type into Google – they don\u2019t even show up in typical keyword tools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Domain<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Given that you\u2019re here, I assume you know a little about keyword research<\/a> already, so I\u2019ll just briefly go over what has worked for us. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Researching other sites<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

We created a list of just about every tool, blog, website or community we could find that shared our target audience. I don\u2019t mean competitors – I mean sites where their audience are potential customers of yours. So if your target audience are YouTubers, there are plenty of sites out there aimed at helping YouTubers grow their channel etc<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then we ran every single site through Ahrefs<\/a> to find all their top keywords. Those keyword lists were scoured to find anything that aligned with what we do, so we could write a blog post about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Asking your audience<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

When people sign up for our product, they get a 14-day trial. We offer to extend it to 21 days if they tell us how they heard about us. If they choose \u201cGoogle<\/em>\u201d, we ask what they typed into search. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Extended<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

We also regularly talk to our audience on Zoom, and send surveys with open-ended questions, asking them what they use our product for. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both of these have been a goldmine for the actual <\/em>words people use to find our product – including many we had not thought of. You\u2019d be surprised how many different ways there are of saying the same thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brainstorms<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

We also spent some time just listing out tons and tons of things that our audience might be interested in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I found it best to think about an entire process for something. So with that YouTube example again, start from the very beginning of what someone does on their YouTube journey. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

  1. They want to start a channel. They might search \u201chow to start a channel<\/em>\u201d<\/li>
  2. The need to record a video. Maybe they\u2019ll search for \u201ccamera gear for recording videos<\/em>\u201d<\/li>
  3. The need to edit the video. They could search for \u201cediting videos for YouTube<\/em>\u201d<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    And so on. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Walking through every step of a process can spit out a huge list of ideas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Then you push every single one of them through a keyword tool to see if it comes up with any related ideas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Creating content for those keywords<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

    We haven\u2019t done anything extraordinary here, other than just writing good content, consistently<\/a>. You don\u2019t need yet another guide on writing content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    But this was the process for getting to where we are today with content production:<\/p>\n\n\n\n