8. Standing Out with Content by Going Deep
- Aditya Shankar Growth & Marketing Leader, xto10x
- Mohit Kumar Founder and CEO, Ultrahuman
In this snippet, Aditya emphasizes the importance of starting small and focusing on niche content when building an SEO strategy for early-stage startups, with attention on middle and bottom-funnel content to drive relevant traffic.
“The key idea for early-stage startups doing SEO is to start small. Do a few things, but do them good. Don’t try to do 10 different things for SEO. Take your pick and go deep into it.
If your market already has brands that are ranking on top, it is critical that you figure out what your niche is.
Maybe your niche is in long-form content, or maybe it's making video content. But you need to find it. And at the start, focus on doing that one thing very, very well.
Start building a community around it, and only then branch out to another channel.
For the first 15 – 20 articles, it feels better to not look at the keywords and all and focus on what you know, what you can actually speak about. Just do basic SEO seeding, like the parent keyword should be in the headline.
Also, as an early-stage startup, focus more on your middle and bottom funnel content at the start rather than going all broad and shooting for top-of-funnel.
For example, if you are building a customer retention tool, SEO articles on “Seven Buying Strategies” or “Seven Parameters to Evaluate your Customer Retention Tool” instead of simple customer retention top tips and whatnot.
Starting small can go a very long way. I cannot remember the name, but I remember working with an up-and-coming B2B brand. They did nothing much, but the founder himself used to write one detailed blog every fortnight. And over 6 – 7 months, just that incremental effort added so much weight to the website.
Mohit, from Ultrahuman, shares how being highly specific and science-driven in marketing content can attract an audience seeking detailed, specialist knowledge, differentiating products from generic brands in a crowded market.
At Ultrahuman, we have a complex product. While trying to market it, we realized that even with the newest product, if you’re generic in your marketing, the new consumer doesn’t really care because they are being bombarded with generic stuff from all corners.
You want to be very specific about your marketing. Once we learned this, we started getting more and more scientific in our content. We went deep into why we track glucose and insulin resistance, how the pancreas works, how insulin affects your chances of developing anabolic diseases, and how you can modify and influence these markers with your lifestyle.
The more specific and closer we got to science, the more specialists started looking at our content. This was on Twitter first, and then on other channels. We learned that power consumers really like a high level of nitty-gritty and dirty detail and that there is an audience for the science, precision, and engineering behind making a product.
Evolving audiences use this as a filter for noise. They don’t want generic brands. They want more science-focused, specialized products made by people who care about their work and domain.
Aditya further stresses the need for founders to provide their unique viewpoint to differentiate content, while warning against overusing blackhat SEO tactics or AI.
There are many AI tools for refining your copy now. For example, you can use ChatGPT or you can use something more specialised like Copy AI. Copy has become a commodity content in the last six months.
If you are not confident about your literature or your grammar skills don’t fuss about it, you have all the value written somewhere just run it through it and make it something presentable. create that content as a starting point.
But, the key thing with using all of these tools is that you have to have your own viewpoint before you go and ask the tool to write for you. Don’t rely fully on the tool, because for all you know, all your competitors are also doing the same. Your viewpoint is your differentiator and that needs to go as an input to these tools.
Make sure you use your keywords but don’t over do it. Back in the day when SEO had just started. people used to spam by force fitting their keywords everywhere. For example, if they wanted to rank for net banking services, all their titles would be ‘Net Banking Services’ something.
For a brief time, this worked. Google would actually start picking these up. Over time the crawlers have all become smart to say that “if you’re overdoing it, you’re spamming people.”
With AI, you will have more such blackhat tactics. Don’t get into them. Often consultants will tell you to do these but do not listen to them.