Waveup reposted this
$10M+ raised each week | Seed, Series A+ | Work with the best founding teams across the globe | Founder & CEO @waveup
We purchased a new domain two years ago and decided to do SEO. It was a crazy ride that resulted in 10K organic visitors + 250 leads per month. When your average contract value is above $10k - selling is hard as f*ck. You need a solid flywheel of leads. Ads don’t cut it. PR is a gamble. Word of mouth doesn’t scale. For us, SEO has proved to be the most measurable path to consistent conversions. It wasn’t like this at the start. I was shocked to see that 1 year ago, after 12 months of doing SEO we were still close to 0. Things that worked and things that didn’t: -Tech was the main problem. Google totally ignored us until we redesigned the whole thing on a custom CMS and started using Pagespeed for performance tweaks. -The first 30-40 blog posts we’ve created never got to the first pages of Google rankings. That felt stupid. Deep keyword & ranking research - if you skip those, SEO won’t work. -I didn’t see much success paying for guest posts. It helped to build backlinks at scale but ended up being a money-waster. Two things that worked - partnerships and PR. One TechCrunch publication is worth months of tedious backlink building. -For us, 10% of pages generate 90% of traffic. General takeaways from this: 1) Do more 2 ) Ship fast, see what works, and double down on SEO edits. -Your niche matters. We had this crazy idea to cover 100+ industries we work with. Turns out, if you do VC consulting for Healthtech, doing a page on Healthtech will not help you to get the volume of Healthtech searches - there are 100+ companies that do actual Health and will be ranked first. -Initially, we were targeting low-volume searches with clear intent to buy our service. It ended up being a lot of work for a minuscule growth. Later we switched to high-volume info searches. Growing traffic got easy, but this traffic hardly converted. In retrospect, I think neither approach is correct. You have to hunt specific keywords, not implement SEO strategies. -Brainstorming with SEO experts moves the needle, but make no mistake—SEO cannot be fully outsourced. Without a team who gets the business deep into the process growth is not evident. Shoutout to Bogdan Ianatiev and Daniel Dramshev who helped us a lot. -Programmatic SEO and AI. We’ve built a VC platform that helps us & clients to find & reach out to investors worldwide. I was surprised that 3,000 pages without human input or unique text could generate a few hundred organic visitors in the first month. AI content works poorly with Google search, but human-curated pieces with the use of GPTZero and humanisers like Phraisly work as good as human written stuff. -I can see that almost 10% of our current leads come from ChatGPT and Perplexity. Looks like the next big thing. -Organic search is not an overnight miracle. However, two years later - 50% of our net revenue comes organically. Seeing other websites in domain with 10x traffic gives an idea of just how big you can grow this thing.