Punit Gupta on the Benefits of a Long-Term SEO Strategy [Interview]

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 are already seeing solid traction, traffic growing at 30-35% monthly basis.”

I recently caught up with Punit Gupta, CEO, and founder of EasyEcom to discuss his approach to SEO.

Can you give us a little background on yourself and what you are working on?

My name is Punit, I have been an entrepreneur all my life. Currently working on a SaaS solution- EasyEcom – for small to midsize brands. EasyEcom provides omnichannel inventory management solution to growing brands.

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

We started our inbound marketing efforts around 6 months back. SEO is one of our primary focus for inbound marketing as it provides long-term benefit. We are already seeing solid traction, traffic growing at 30-35% monthly basis.

What’s been working well for you and why?

Content marketing has been working wonders for us. It’s giving us sustained results with solid MoM growth.

In what phase of the business lifecycle have you started your blog and when did you start to see a significant ROI from SEO/content marketing.

We started with outbound marketing and it worked very well for us. Our initial focus was to build some traction quickly and ensure product-market fit.

That took us a little over two years. Once we saw a constant inflow of customers through referrals, we knew we were onto something.

At that time, we started investing in long-term marketing i.e. content-driven inbound marketing.

However, in hindsight, we should have started it much earlier. SEO / Content marketing takes time, anywhere from 18-24 months to show some colors.

Can you outline your content strategy?

Our content strategy is completely dependent on the pain points we are solving.

We are obsessed with educating our clients about how to take their business to the next level. We publish 4-6 content pieces every month and aggressively distribute them. That works for us.

How do you do keyword research?

The first step in keyword research is to know your problem statement.

Start with Google AdWords or tools like Ahrefs. Initially, in order to understand the keywords, we sometimes run limited ad campaigns as well. Once we know our keywords, we incorporate them into our content strategy.

What have you tried that hasn’t worked very well?

Even though traffic is increasing steadily, we are struggling with the conversion of traffic. Have tried many things to optimize the copy/design of pages and with time hopefully, things will get better.

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

We are trying an organic link building approach. Reaching out to known blogs/sites in our niche and offering to write guest blogs.

Any other link building strategy besides guest posting?

We believe in natural link building. Guest blogging is the most prominent. Besides we reach out to review sites for quality links. Overall contributing to the community through sites like Quora etc also can give you quality links.

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

Not for EasyEcom. We have hired outside help before but didn’t work well due to the poor quality of work.

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

Knowledge wise we are sorted. I think we need more horsepower for our execution.