I’ve had some fuckups with our startup’s content strategy. But nice and cute fuckups. Poo poo head fuckups.
Seems like I’ve grown to really love fuckups.
When we started building Uvodo after Nextsale, I said to myself “I am not gonna make the same mistakes.. this time is gonna be different”
Yes. This time I didn’t make the same mistakes, and this time was different.
A brand new mistake I made just for Uvodo ☺️☺️☺️
I’m saying just content here, but in this context, I roughly sum up SEO, branding, and a couple of things.
When content strategy might fail
At Nextsale, I had many articles that went on the first page of Google. What was the mistake? The traffic was not our customers; I hadn’t considered the search intent.
A BIG FAT ASS NOTE: search intent includes informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional types; based on the search intent of a keyword, we create content to meet the searcher’s intent: do they want to get information? or do they one to buy something? However, however! I don’t give a shit about these categorizations (I can be wrong, yes). So, I go beyond the categorization of this shit that every SEO gurus love to consider it GOD, and call it here as solution-oriented search intent, a specific use case of a solution your product offers for a certain difficulty target profile face. In my definition of solution-oriented search intent, it’s the combination of several search intents put into one piece of copy that both gives information while also guiding the user toward a solution.
At Uvodo, the reason that I had fuckup over the last year is rushing to create branded & product-focused content for the ICP (ideal customer profile) I had in my mind without considering a couple of things which I’ll reveal later on this article.
That’s why creating content for MVP (minimum viable product) is likely to fail. The reason is that your MVP might be 90% different from what it will be 3 months later.
Yes, I considered (my) solution-oriented search intent and was targeting our customers, but customer profiles can change. At Nextsale, we knew who was our customers: retailers using Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce. At Uvodo, it’s different.
When we started Uvodo, it was self-hosted. So, the content I built was targeting developers, agencies, and tech-savvy entrepreneurs.
After a year, we transformed the self-hosted version into a SaaS platform. So, I removed the content (alongside deleting web pages, redirecting lotta URLs, etc.), which affected rankings.
Check my other article for details: “Our startup pivoted..what happens to content?”
What could be done differently?
A lot more things, but there’s nothing different I’d do what I’ve already done.
It is what it is: in an environment where your product must grow fastest possible, you have nothing to do but try to contribute and go with the flow.
You might think that I shouldn’t have created branded content at the MVP stage. Rather, I should have focused on just “eCommerce” for one thing was clear; Uvodo was an eCommerce platform.
But since this was too broad and I wanted feature-focused content for Uvodo, considering solution-oriented search intent, I refused to do so.
Before you craft a content strategy for your startup..
When in the early stages of marketing, create a focus group—your early adopters, a tiny group of 1-10 people. Engage with them so much as it’s your only job. You will find common points and insights.
Then, start building your content to retain them, keep them engaged and move them from one stage (i.e., engagement) to another (i.e., user).
Remember that people don’t search for a feature, and they don’t care which feature will solve a problem. They are looking for a solution.
I had many articles at Nextsale that reached the first page or became the 1st result on the SERP. But the traffic was somehow unrelated to our customers: the readers were not our customers.
I could do the same for Uvodo. But why? Who cares?
Reaching the first page of Google for a keyword may not hold much value if the resulting traffic doesn’t convert.
Cheers.