{"id":4961,"date":"2022-02-11T08:26:38","date_gmt":"2022-02-11T08:26:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/seobuddy.com\/blog\/?p=4961"},"modified":"2022-02-11T08:27:14","modified_gmt":"2022-02-11T08:27:14","slug":"my-seo-journey-aplano","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seobuddy.com\/blog\/my-seo-journey-aplano\/","title":{"rendered":"My SEO Journey: Hayk Gregorian from aplano.de – Organic traffic is a difficult topic but here is our first SEO victory"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

My SEO Journey is a series where entrepreneurs and Indie makers share their honest SEO Journey filled with failure and success, and most importantly proven results.\u00a0Episode #69 features Hayk Gregorian from Aplano<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

I am Hayk Gregorian, one of the cofounders of Aplano. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aplano is a SaaS startup from Germany. Our software is an employee management system which covers features such as time tracking, a vacation planner, shift scheduling, employee chat, and much more. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our customers are businesses of various industries, from factories to hotels, hospitals, and restaurants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What’s your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The idea came from one of our founders who used to work in a pharmacy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They were using Excel to manage working hours and schedules, which made everything quite complicated and time-consuming. After doing some research and comparing existing solutions, he came to the conclusion that the software available at the moment wasn’t really appealing and seemed quite bloated with unnecessary features and therefore had an overwhelming effect on the user. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So he decided to create an easy-to-use software to make the management of employees easier. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through the success of a previous startup (a software agency), we were financially able to launch Aplano by ourselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since launch, what has worked to attract more organic traffic?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"Aplano.de<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Organic traffic has always been a difficult topic for us. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because of the strong competition and the amount of ads being displayed on Google when it comes to employee management (especially in Germany), most traffic isn\u2019t organic, but we do gain more and more customers through word of mouth. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our product is becoming more popular because it\u2019s simply better in many aspects compared to other employee management software, so we have been told by many customers who switched over to Aplano.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So what did we do to get more traffic? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, we started to focus on SEO but meanwhile also set up ad campaigns and tested the effectiveness of those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We tried to appear on the web when it comes to the topic \u201cemployee management<\/em>\u201d. For this we commented in forums, answering questions related to the topic, and of course placing a backlink in the comments. We approached bloggers with the hope that they would include us in some articles, or would write articles ourselves and upload them on websites where we would get a doFollow backlink in return. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of those articles ranked pretty well, which would then generate lots of traffic for us. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was a blog article listing the top 14 best employee scheduling software<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"aplano.de<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

We also tried cold calling companies, working with email campaigns and such, but realized that in our case, it was very difficult to win new customers like that. The majority of our customers are already looking for a tool to manage their employees, there were barely any cases where we would actually get someone to use our software without him\/her having thought about it in the past.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To optimize the ranking in Google takes some time, it was a slow but steady process for us. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trying lots of different things, many of which would end up not delivering the desired results, but at least they gave us more insight into how SEO works.<\/p>\n\n\n

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There\u2019s more\u2026<\/div>\r\n

Now it\u2019s time to discover the other 102 steps that will get more organic traffic flowing to your website. Get the SEO Checklist here.<\/a><\/p>\n

Want to get a sneak peek of what it looks like?<\/strong>
\nEnter your email and get a free demo version of the SEO Checklist.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\r\n

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