![Fiona Adler On Why You Should Invest Early In SEO [Interview]](https://mygrowthgorilla.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/fiona-adler-featured-min.jpg)
As part of my “SaaS vs SEO” Interview Series, I’m talking to founders and marketers on all things SEO, content, and growth for SaaS companies.
“I was so frustrated when I’d see listings from our competitors ranking higher than us…I swore I would invest in SEO early.”
I recently caught up with Fiona Adler of actioned.com to discuss her approach to SEO.
Can you give us a little background on yourself and what you are working on?
I’m Fiona Adler and I’m currently working on Actioned – a productivity tool for teams and individuals.
The competition in this niche is fierce, what’s your USP? What’s unique about Actioned?
There are a lot of tools in this space but none of them take the approach of getting people focused on daily actions.
Most of the task management systems and project management tools are so complicated, and yet they still don’t really help us know what we should be doing today.
When I’ve researched the top productivity thinkers, almost all of them recommend a system of deciding on a few small, but important actions each day. And I know this is what the most effective people I know do too.
From a team perspective, I’ve been working with remote teams for many years now and I always wanted a simple way for us to share what we were doing – without invasive time-tracking.
A little accountability can help teams pull together and achieve great things!
So, Actioned is designed to optimize the productivity of us as individuals, and help us work with teams more effectively.
Why did you decide to use SEO to attract users and grow your product and what results did you achieve?
I’ve learned from experience not to ignore SEO! My last business was a business reviews platform which eventually grew to become the largest in Australia (my home country).
At the time I believed the high-level advice from Google that said that content is king, and we had a LOT of great content. But despite this, our Achilles heel was always the SEO.
I was so frustrated when I’d see listings from our competitors ranking higher than us when all they had was a business name, phone number and address, and we would have all of this rich content about customers’ experiences.
So anyway, when that business was acquired and I started another, I swore I would invest in SEO early.
What’s been working well for you and why?
We’re a fairly new online presence so we’ve been focussing on building some domain authority.
We’ve targeted keywords with decent volumes and low difficulty scores to get some momentum going.
Can you elaborate on this? How do you find these keywords? What tools do you use?
Though there are a ton of other tools, I used Ahrefs to discover keywords that were related to the topics I really want to rank for (eventually).
For example, I discovered phrases like “work from home meme” and “teamwork makes the dream work” had good volumes and were tangentially related to my team productivity app – but they are not necessarily phrases I would have thought of otherwise!
We’ve also been responding to HARO and Sourcebottle leads to be featured in press articles.
And finally, we’ve been doing a lot of guest posting – it’s time-consuming but it seems to be working.
What have you tried that hasn’t worked very well?
Well, I’m aware that while I write a lot and create a lot of content, I tend to write with the reader in mind – which is not always ideal for SEO.
I’ve also realized that there are many issues / opportunities to improve onsite SEO. I’ve made some mistakes there for sure!
We also have not had much success with social media (yet). We’ve been doing this purely organically and the reach is so low I wonder if it’s worth bothering with anymore.
What kind of link building or promotion have you tried if any?
Just guest posting and responding to media inquiries.
Have you ever hired any external SEO help? If so, How did that go?
In my last business, we hired various consultants but none were able to help. It was quite a frustrating experience.
In hindsight, they were out of their depths dealing with a huge site like that and we should have chosen a more established SEO firm.
What would you like to know more about regarding SEO that you currently don’t know?
How to prioritize all the different things we know we should be doing! Link building, content creation, restructuring the site, etc. I’m not sure which is more important at this stage![/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1541173277193{border-right-width: 3px !important;border-bottom-width: 3px !important;padding-top: 30px !important;padding-right: 50px !important;padding-bottom: 30px !important;padding-left: 50px !important;background-color: #eae5e6 !important;border-right-color: #eae5e6 !important;border-bottom-color: #eae5e6 !important;border-radius: 10px !important;}”]
ALAN’S NOTE
I know the feeling!
SEO is made of so many moving parts that it’s often challenging to know where to begin, especially for a time stretched solo founder (or even for a small team).
Ultimately, I believe it comes down to 3 things:
1. What goals do you have in your SEO campaign?
What do you want to get from your SEO efforts? Do you want more search traffic? more referral traffic? What KPIs are you measuring that tie into your business goals? You should get clear on these before you even start.
2. What resources do you have available?
Is it just you and a few contractors or do you have a small team?
The answer to this question strongly influences what you are actually capable of doing.
3. Stay away from shiny objects and don’t panic.
One of the best advice anyone can give you in SEO is to focus on one thing only, get really good at it and do it until it doesn’t work anymore THEN try something else.
With these things in mind, for example, if you get really good at guest posting and it’s working well, there is no reason you should start doing broken link building.
That would only spread your chances and have you lose focus and momentum. This is especially true if you have a very small team.
All in all, I recommend the following approach, in order:
1) get a solid technical foundation and structure for your site.
This means having all your core pages in place and fixing the on-site.
2) Identify or create your most important (high conversion) pages.
These are your power pages, could be ultimate guides, or “alternative to” pages or “use cases” pages. These should be super high quality and in-depth.
Take a look at what’s ranking in Google and make something similar but better, more comprehensive and make sure it satisfies the user intent.
3) Create supporting blog content for those pages (create topical relevance) and interlink them.
These can be shorter articles that expand or go deeper in specific topics mentioned in the bigger articles.
4) Build links to your top pages until they rank on page 1.
If guest posts work for you, awesome! If not you can try something different based on your resources (some tactics take more time and effort than others).
Remember if you get to a point where more links aren’t moving the needle, focus on how the article satisfies the searcher intent for its keyword.
5) Rinse and repeat.
No need to go crazy with content creation either, remember: quality > quantity :)[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1541175979703{background-color: #ffffff !important;}”]
Is there anything I can help promote for you?
Actioned is a new productivity tool for teams. It’s currently in Beta and will be kept free for anyone that joins now 🙂
Any other places where readers can find out more about what you do or just get in touch with you?
In addition to Actioned.com, I also blog at DoTheThings.com , I can be found on LinkedIn as well.
Click the image below to sign up for free :)[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”8383″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://app.actioned.com/sign_up”][/vc_column][/vc_row]