3. Leveraging Community and Founder Voice for SEO Growth
- Deepak Kanakaraju Founder & CEO, MicroStartup Studio
In this snippet, Deepak emphasizes the power of founder-driven content in building SEO, including the importance of writing articles, launching podcasts, and leveraging platforms for backlinks and domain authority.
Organic search marketing and SEO are mostly content marketing. You identify long-tail keywords, create related content, and distribute it in the right channels.
No matter how much outbound, inbound and content marketing you do, nothing can beat the voice of the CEO when shipping content. Especially content that communicates what a company does and why they’re doing it.
Founder marketing has to be part of your early-stage GTM, and I think more and more people are realizing that when founders talk, people listen. This is also one of the best ways to get backlinks.
I definitely recommend writing at least one article a week as a founder. Also, all founders should have an industry expert podcast as a side project because it attracts customers, investors, and the right team members.
I remember one such channel that I discovered was Entrepreneur.com’s Leadership Network. You can apply for it, and it costs about $1,000 a year. But once you pay the money and they approve it, you can start publishing articles as a company founder, thought leader, and expert.
Platforms like these give you reach. They give you the backlinks you need, and domain authority — all of which turbocharge your SEO.
Deepak explains how integrating community-building with content marketing enhances SEO efforts, providing valuable keyword research and content ideas through direct engagement with community members.
Whatever funnel you have, I would recommend that you eventually feed that funnel back into creating an online community. When you do this, what happens is that you are going to help your SEO and the entire content marketing because it has a better distribution, a better way to spread.
The usual suspects are content marketing, blogging, video marketing, e‑books, and books. Whatever it is, feed it back into the community.
Back in 2016, I created this group on Facebook called Learn Digital Marketing. At that time, we had 1000 members, and since then the community has grown to over 200 thousand members as of now. We have grown this community with our paid ads funnel and this has been helping our SEO as well.
These forums and groups act as a great resource for keyword research and content ideation.
When you think about keyword research, it is essentially trying to find out what content people are looking for. In a community, you can just ask members questions and you will automatically see the pulse of the people and a lot of new content ideas will come from the forum itself.
That’s what we do. We have picked up so many content ideas this way.
I would just ask everyone in the group an open-ended question or do an AMA, and without any keyword research, go ahead and post an article with the answers to all the questions they ask. These articles have gone on to start raking and getting us SEO traffic.
This is something that most of the digital marketing agencies out there do not talk about. They use tools, AHREFs and what not, to do keyword research. But there are some things that tools just can’t capture. Creating a community can be a goldmine.
We think of it as integrated digital marketing, where every component is helping the other component.