1. Balancing the Long and Short Term with SEO and SEM
- Sachin Uppal Ex-Chief Marketing Officer, Play Games24x7
- Aditya Shankar Growth & Marketing Leader, xto10x
In this snippet, Aditya explains the importance of balancing SEO for long-term growth with SEM for short-term results, highlighting that startups need to invest in both strategies early on, even without expecting immediate revenue from SEO.
Many companies ask me why they should even do SEO. They understand doing search ads because they deliver immediate results. With SEO, it isn’t always clear why they should think about it.
To answer this question, here is an example that I give to most people. Let’s say your goal is to keep yourself warm or light a fire. There are two ways you can do it. Either you go and light up some paper, or you go and light up some wood.
Now, the pros and cons for both are fairly well understood, but what it comes down to is that paper lights very quickly and will also go off very quickly. Wood will take some time to really create that warmth, but it will stay. It will see you through the night.
The truth is that you need both of these. You can’t just sit all night trying to light the wood while people are hungry.
This is a great analogy for balancing the short-term and long-term across many things in the initial stages of your startup. However, in the SEO context — lighting the wood is like doing long-term SEO. SEM and Programmatic SEO are all lighting the paper for instant results.
For example, if I started my business today, I’d really do it by starting with SEM, which is Google Ads, trying to improve performance and balance it with SEO, which is a long-term initiative.
You have to do both because before you know it, you will go through all your paper, and literally paper — money also in this case — and you’ll have nothing; you will be in a place wherein you will always be fighting. You will need a long-term hack or long-term strategy to grow. That’s why SEO is so important.
Initially, invest in SEO without any direct revenue KPIs. Don't even think about revenue at that time. I know it isn't easy to do anything without immediate money return as an early-stage founder. But it is important.
In the beginning, when you start with your SEO initiatives, think about being as value-driven as possible. Focus on your ICPs, think about the core content surrounding your ICP, and focus on delivering. Embracing patience and persistence is always good.
Sachin expands on the long-term nature of SEO play, sharing how getting landing page speeds and other technical aspects right take time but yield significant long-term results.
Don’t expect SEO to deliver results in the starting three months.
There are a tonne of things that have to be done to make it successful. For example, optimizing your landing page speeds and things like that. This stuff is very important in today’s time.
I still remember that when I was starting out doing SEO in the gaming business, at some point, I was so obsessed with landing page speeds that I was able to beat Google and Facebook on it too.
The Games24X7 landing page used to open in a sub-two-second timeframe. We were operating at 1.2 seconds, while Google and Facebook used to take like 1.5 or 1.7 seconds.
We were able to beat Google and Facebook at their own game. But it took us over a year to do that, and I dedicated tech resources because it’s a massive optimization.
A combination of multiple things will go into making the SEO work, but when it works, it works.
We still rank number one for some of the keywords that we started bidding for back then, and till now, we generate up to 40% of our monthly revenues through SEO.