Josh Duffy On The Pros And Cons Of Going Niche [Interview]

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]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.

“we just had to keep reaching out until someone took a “gamble” on us.”

I recently caught up with Josh Duffy of DigiQuatics to discuss his approach to SEO.

Hey Josh! Can you give us a little introduction and background on yourself and what you are working on?

Hi, I’m Josh Duffy, Co-Founder & CEO at DigiQuatics, found at digiquatics.com.

I was a lifeguard in high school and college and realized an opportunity in helping managing swimming pools more efficiently, so I co-founded DigiQuatics to help pool managers increase efficiency and eliminate paperwork.

Nice! Looks like you went really niche. How did you validate the idea in the early stages? Was it hard to get your first customers?

We reached out to pool managers in our area to do interviews with them and see how they would respond to the idea.

We really used Ash Maurya’s approach in the Running Lean book to try and better understand the problems that our target audience faced and how we might be able to help.

It was extremely hard to get the first customers. Everyone in our niche works for governments and they talk to each other a lot, so since we didn’t have any track record, no one really wanted to be the first.

We had some early “beta testers” but had a difficult time trying to convert them to paying customers once we got further down the line and it seemed like they didn’t really have skin in the game.

We had a lot of trialists but not heavy users or paying customers, so we got good product feedback, but had a hard time validating the business model behind it.

I think the key we learned was that if you look at the lifecycle adoption curve really only a couple percent of your audience is willing to be the first, so we just had to keep reaching out until someone took a “gamble” on us.

Once we had a couple, early adopters, it was easier to get the next few based on referrals and word of mouth from the early adopters, but it was still a challenge to get a slow industry to change.

Why did you decide to use SEO to attract users and grow your product and what results did you achieve?

Everyone is “googling” what new tools are out there to help them. I would say around 25% of our customers say they have found us by doing an online search.

In what phase of the business lifecycle have you started your blog and when did you start to see a significant ROI from it?

About 2-3 years in we decided to make it a priority in our long-term strategy.

It’s still hard to directly calculate the ROI but I would say within a year we started to see more customers finding us in online search.

What’s been working well for you and why (with SEO)?

Being a part of the community, facebook groups, etc and listening to what hot topics people are talking about then writing around those.

Also, just fun and interesting activities and ideas that people are sharing have gotten a decent amount of engagement as well.

For example, there are some Facebook groups for pool managers, aquatics supervisors, and the like. They often will share with each other their challenges, one being staff shortages and retention.

We used that to write some content around some creative ideas for recruiting lifeguards and how to improve employee happiness.

These have been some of our most successful blog articles so far.

What have you tried that hasn’t worked very well (with SEO)?

Since we are a smaller niche, we haven’t really been good at doing keyword research and trying to find high volume search terms to write content around.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1541504140015{padding-top: 30px !important;padding-right: 50px !important;padding-bottom: 30px !important;padding-left: 50px !important;background-color: #eae5e6 !important;}”]

ALAN’S NOTE

I actually believe you are on the right track here. You’ve been doing keywords research, just not the traditional way 🙂

Listening to your target audience and potential customers, being active in the community and social media groups is one of the best ways to find some really good and very targeted low-volume keywords.

These keywords are low competition and often really specific. If you can rank for them and “move people” from that article through your funnel in a natural and consistent way, you’ll most likely get yourself a customer.

Best thing is that these keywords are also low competition, making it easier to rank for them with very few or no backlinks at all (depending on the niche).

I’d dive deeper with this kind of phrases. Try Quora, Reddit, niche forums etc. survey your customers, take a look at your support messages, try free tools like Answerthepublic, Keyword shitter, LSI Graph and you’ll have a gold mine of problems and issues that people need help with.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]

What kind of link building or promotion have you tried if any?

None.

I’m assuming your content just started ranking organically, you probably don’t have a lot of competition in the niche writing content?

Yes, there hasn’t been much content written around lifeguarding, training, and staffing specifically for pools.

Although the search volume is extremely low, we think that having the content if someone does for that niche keyword, they will find what they are looking for and find it relevant.

Have you ever hired any external SEO help? If so, How did that go?

We’ve hired a freelance writer, actually one of our customers to write content for us. It went okay, just managing the process, editing, finding photos, etc is time-consuming and challenging.

It’s been hard to find someone with the technical background in swimming pools that can write good content on various topics as well.

What would you like to know more about regarding SEO that you currently don’t know?

What the 80/20 of SEO is.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1541504316647{padding-top: 30px !important;padding-right: 50px !important;padding-bottom: 30px !important;padding-left: 50px !important;background-color: #eae5e6 !important;}”]

ALAN’S NOTE

Ultimately, SEO comes down to 3 main buckets:

1. Technical
2. Content
3. Links

Now, with most small to medium sites, once you have a strong technical foundation and structure (which usually doesn’t require a ton of effort if tackled from the beginning) the majority of the results usually come from content and links.

With this in mind, it’s just a matter of defining what the 80/20 in those 2 areas means for you. It’s almost impossible to describe a general 80/20 that works for everybody.

As Dan Shure says in his article here:

Use 80/20 to do two things really:

Figure out what’s working and do MORE of it
Figure out what’s NOT working and do LESS.

For DigiQuatics this might mean producing more long tail keyword targeted content and engaging in communities if that’s been working well for you.

It might be a good idea to try and create 1 bigger piece of content and use it as a linkable asset to experiment with link building. If that works well, you do more of it 🙂

With content, if you’re short on time, it’s probably best to focus on writing fewer articles, maybe avoid the product updates posts (or just send them to your customers), but make these few articles as high quality and as targeted as possible.

Hope this helps :)[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

Is there anything I can help promote for you?

blog.digiquatics.com. We recently launched a Custom Forms module! Think Google Forms for DigiQuatics.

We’re really excited about the opportunities for our customers to create unlimited completely customizable forms and reports for their staff to complete and retain![/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]