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The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast. A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts. Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search podcast, Tyson Stockton.
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Hey, what's going on? Welcome to the Voice of Search Podcast. My name is Tyson from Previsible IO. Joining me today is Drew Moffitt, who is head of marketing at Kumospace. Kumo Space is a unified communication platform for remote and distributed teams that centralizes all your people and their communications in one place. Yesterday, Drew and I talked about leveraging AI to scale content marketing. And today we're continuing that conversation and we're going to discuss SEO for startups.
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This podcast is also sponsored by Ahrefs. What if I told you that you could monitor your website's SEO health backlinks and organic rankings at no costs? Sounds too good to be true. Well, it's not, because my friends at Ahrefs just launched Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. Ahrefs new Webmaster Tools product quickly helps you improve your site's visibility by pointing solutions to over 100 technical issues that might be holding your search performance down. Plus, AWT monitors for backlinks so you'll know the most linked to pages and how those links are affecting your rankings. And AWT shares what keywords your website ranks for and compares how you stack up against competitors for key metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty and traffic value. Look, monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools, and now, thanks to Ahrefs, that's not the case anymore because AWT will help you monitor your SEO, health, backlinks and keywords for free. And no, it's not one of those 14 day free trial offers. It's a powerful site audit tool that will keep working for you for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.comAWT that's a h r e f s.comAWT so.
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Here'S my conversation with Drew Moffett, Head of marketing at Kumo Space. Drew, welcome back to the podcast.
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Yeah, thank you for having me again.
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B
So today we're talking, we're talking startups. And like, we Were chatting right before the episode. I feel like there's a common question of like, when should startups be looking at SEO? And so like maybe to just start there, like what's your perspective? You've been involved with several different startups, so I feel like you've, you know, you've gone through some of those pain points. What advice would you have for others that are either at a startup, you know, just starting up a business or like what recommendations can you give for those in the early stages of how they should look at SEO?
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I think the important thing for people that are a founder to really think about is that there isn't a blanket answer. It's really going to be driven by what type of business you are engaged in. So if you are a D2C business, direct to consumer business, then SEO is probably going to need to be one of the foundational items of your business. So that makes a lot of sense for that business. Now if you are a business to enterprise, so I'm talking like really large contract, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars kind of deals, really long sales cycle. Typically the way that those startups are going to start off is that the founder has some domain expertise and is good at navigating that enterprise sales cycle. So early on it's going to be likely a lot of founder led sales and SEO may never really develop as a foundational kind of component to that business until very later on. And really only from a perspective of branding. Right. You need to show up near the top of the page for the topic or the service or the thing you're selling just as part of the due diligence process. That long sales cycle you need to be out there. But early on from a content perspective, the focus should be more around sales enablement, footer content and less about having that be filled with keywords and blog content that is supporting those spokes that are supporting those pillars, those hubs, I should say, I think it really just comes down to your business. In the case of us, the fact that we're B2B business, the fact that there's just a ton of search volume for the topics, team, chat, video conferencing, things like that, then it makes sense to invest in that. But even for us, we ended up really heavily investing in it about halfway through my time so far at Kumasmith. I've been there for about three and a half years and about the last two years it's been a channel that was very focused of ours.
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B
Yeah, it's a, it's a great Call out. And I think it's tempting to be an SEO and like, you always want to say like, yeah, everybody should invest in SEO, but I think that's a really honest answer is there are those situations where it's like, yeah, maybe it's not the best starting point for it and there should be that management of expectations as far as, like, how profitable of a channel can this be? And I've, I've also like, had, you know, different workshops with like investment groups and I've had to kind of say to them, like, hey, every company in your portfolio is not going to have the same impact potential from SEO and it shouldn't be just like a blanket, as you said, like, yeah, we're going to apply this across the board regardless of the business or the space that it's in. So I think that's a really good kind of first recommendation is for those startups to be honest about what their business is, who their target consumer group is, and how viable of a channel this can be before even embarking on it. But let's say a company, you know, checks the boxes, there's a fit as far as like, impact potential for SEO for their consumer group. Most cases startups are going to be the David and Goliath scenario. And so obviously you're coming in, you're a startup, maybe there's some big players in the space that you're up against, can be quite challenging. Also from like an SEO front, how, how do you kind of manage those expectations or like, how do you kind of feel about that scenario of like a startup kind of trying to compete in a, in a larger arena in search with these bigger competitors?
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C
Yeah. So I think the first thing is a lot of success in startup is just execution. Right. There's a component of success in startups that's luck, meaning timing or macroeconomics kind of going with you or unluck where they're going against you. And then there's a piece of. It's your idea, but the thing that you can really control is execution. And in that David and Goliath's story, you're not typically competing against people who are thinking about competing. So you already have that inherent advantage. The content team at Microsoft, responsible for teams, is likely not out there creating content, thinking about how they're trying to squash competitors. I think about it from that perspective because we are a startup, right? It started off as a very crowded field. There was probably like 25 companies doing this thing. It's pretty whittled down now. We've fought tooth and nail to become the number one player. We're also not the best funded player in the space, right? That really comes down to execution, frugality, right? There's a lot of good things that we were doing as a business there. There are some players that have raised more money and there's two other companies, one that's raised two times the funding and one that's raised three. But to say, hey, we're ahead of those companies, that comes down to execution. So you just have to kind of approach this from a, hey, this is like a fun sport, right? Like you think about someone who's young and very good in sports and they're going up against the team that's just kind of, hey, they partied a little hard last night and they got the championship last year. So they're kind of just like chilling. You can go out there and really run laps around them and have fun with it. So you just want to enjoy what you're doing and approach it from that perspective and that'll really help you mentally in that David and Goliath fight. And you also have to just think about expectation like it's not going to happen instantly. Really think about putting tiny little chinks in their armor and watching those grow and getting excitement out of that.
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B
Absolutely. And I, I think in that regard especially like in like the content arena and the content component of SEO, it's like as a startup you have that like passion component where it's like this is going to be near and dear and a lot of times when you are going against those big players, whatever aspect that you might be providing or like your service that you're providing as the startup is probably going to be a minor or a piece of what their overall kind of strategy and vision is. And so you have the advantage of more than likely you are going to be more passionate about that subject and about that product problem that you're solving and paying more attention to those real pain points of the user and being able to connect with those pain points and speak directly to the user where you're going to have that line of sight that like you said, the bigger player, the Goliath may not have, it may not even be on their radar because it is just an aspect of the business versus kind of like the core focus. But I feel like we can't talk about startups and ignore kind of the challenge of like the resources or the wearing multiple hats and every startup that you talk to and it's like an area that I would say is kind of like near and dear to myself on the resourcing and like recruiting front. But it's like any startup's going to have these challenges from like resourcing with like this channel and like with like the long term strategy and investment of it. How do you handle kind of like that constraint or that factor maybe on like resources available or people juggling multiple channels and aspects of the business.
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C
Yeah, so I think it goes back to kind of what we were speaking about before, which is you need to just make it resource effective. That was the first kind of topic I was like, is SEO important for your business? So then you can put that in a prioritization and I would suggest developing a strategy that slots that in. So in the case of Kumospace, we do influencer market. We do kind of a very uniquely. We figured out how to scale that process pretty well and we're pretty successful at catching lightning in a bottle. And what I mean by that is getting someone to create a piece of content for us that goes viral in a short form video content platform. So TikTok, Instagram, Reels, YouTube shorts, et cetera. And that just drives a ton of traffic and that traffic ends up at the bottom of our funnel. So a very high value. But in between those periods of catching lightning in the bottle, we need to still fill that pipeline and that's where SEO fits in for us. So for us, everything else is kind of not important from a resource perspective because there is always more problems to solve than there are resources. And that is the two things that work for us hand in hand. They are complementary because one has spikes, one has long term gradual growth. So that's the way I kind of think about your resource management because it is very tough when you're in a leadership role at a startup. You're a co founder of a startup, you are always having the opportunity. We could do better on social media. We could do, you know, sponsor this conference, we could do that. And you just need to get very diligent at like prioritizing and trying to think some logic to your prioritization. And you're often not going to maybe have the data to or especially early on to make that decision and say hey, like I know for a fact because of this very high quality data reason, you just need to make that decision. Then the second piece of that is just start small with things. And often what we will do is we'll have something and in the other episode I talk a lot about how we built our content process but we start small and then once we start seeing some success we maybe bring in a part time resource or an offshore resource to support that and then if that success continues to blossom, maybe we bring in a full time resource. I think where a lot of people, especially at early stage in a startup or in series, precede to kind of a range where you're still figuring out what are your channels, what is your business is. Sometimes you're just like I need that person and you're hiring that person before or you maybe need them. I think it's good to hire someone who's leading your kind of go to market activities that's really good at just testing a lot of things and then ruthless at prioritizing and then figure out how to from the most cost effective apply resource to those bottlenecks. So yeah, every day I have to tell no to team members and I'll often kind of say hey, here's the five priorities. You've got a slot, like you decide what to put in that slot and it's a good mechanism to get other teams, other departments to really make a decision. And then you know, you never want to go back and be kind of like toxic towards anybody. But you can Just go back and say, hey, like 45 days ago, this is what we decided. That's why that one is happy to reshuffle. But you know, it's not a, there's not a sixth priority here. There's five and we're going to work from one to five and then we're going to go six to 10. So we just have to pick these things and try to pick the things that we think have the most impact. Ideally in the shortest period of time. In case of SEO, it's not going to be a short piece of time, but you believe it's going to have a lot of impact, especially over time.
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B
It's a great call too. And I like the analogy that you gave earlier of talking about, hey, with these influencers it's more of the, the spikes and like it's the, the sugar rush jolt that's coming. But then you have this long and steady kind of SEO and it's almost like, you know, you're, you're building like a batting lineup in bat, in baseball and you're not going to just have an entire team or an entire lineup of sluggers. You're going to have those, you know, just get at, get on base, get on base, get on base and then layering in those kind of, you know, bigger, bigger shot initiatives to have that larger impact. And I think it's also clever, like smart to have the recommendation of, yeah, start slow, be ruthless on the prioritization because there's always going to be more things than you can get to. But maybe like leading into that, like how do you look at kind of for startups, this balance of, you know, agencies, freelancers in house. Like this is like an area that I feel like I've had a lot of questions with companies of like, should we go with an agency or should we go in house? And you know, I've had to give, even though being an agency, it's like I've given the recommendations to businesses like, you know what, I know you came to us for consulting, but I really think that I can in like you're ready for an in house role. What's your perspective on that? Kind of like in house versus external in this startup world?
- [18:25]
C
Yeah, I think like everything, you can't just blanket answer it. I think it's about where you are in your cycle of kind of evolving a channel or doing some type of tactic. So we found a lower cost resource in Europe to quickly do a technical audit just so we knew what was wrong with our website. And at the same Time we decided to slot in a external agency to help us through this journey and we stayed with that agency for I think about nine months and then we brought that kind of expertise in house and basically like we're going to start owning this, we're going to get better at this. So I think it's just pieces of that journey. You want to be like conscious of the resources. I think the mistake that companies can make is when you hire a lot of agencies or a lot of freelancers or a lot of part time people at once. It's the same reason. Limited resources. You need to do prioritization of what channels, what things you're going to do. So just have in your mind, okay, we're going to not just hey, I want to do social media, so that's not a top priority, but I'll get an agency for that. I want to do this, I'll get an, it's easy to do but all of a sudden the person managing that is just too spread too thin. It's a lot better to say, okay, there's two channels. We know these work. This is what's going to get us to our next funding round or our next milestone or our next inflection, whatever it might be, and then just figure out how to get better at that. So bring an agency to help you or a freelancer to help you. And yeah, we at the end of things typically end up building these processes entirely in house just because that's our strong suit. I'm pretty good at imitation and I'm very good at scaling imitation so we can figure out with right direction. It's the same like learn from wise men's mistakes, right. Someone else wise men like their mistakes versus your own mistakes. So it's like try to capture upon that as much as you can and then build a system that works uniquely for you because ultimately that will be the most efficient application of resource. But early on you don't know what you don't know. So get really good at accepting that reality and looking for outside help often.
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Absolutely. And I think it's a really strategic and I think thoughtful approach to this, like hearing about how you've grown kind of the impact of SEO at Kumo Space also really respects kind of like that approach of like know when to tap outside, keeping the priorities set, but then also keeping in mind like the long term strategy of how are your efforts today going to be setting yourself up for those benefits tomorrow. And I think especially in the startup space, that's where they evolve very quickly and so there's always a timeline, but that timeline could be totally different depending on the business and kind of how things are progressing and developing. But with that, that wraps up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Thanks again to Drew Moffatt, head of Marketing at Kumospace, for joining us. If you'd like to contact Drew, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in the show Notes or check out his company's website, kumospace.com okay, thanks.
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To Tyson Stockton, our guest host. If you'd like to get in touch with Tyson, you could find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can contact him on Twitter where his handle is TysonStockton. Or if your team is interested in SEO consulting or organizational education, you can always head to their company's website, which is Previsible IO that's P R E V I S I B L E I O and a special thanks to Ahrefs for sponsoring this podcast. Monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools, but that's not the case anymore. Thanks to Ahrefs, because they just launched their Ahrefs Webmaster Tools product, which monitors your SEO health, helps you keep track of your backlinks, and gives you the insight into what keywords are performing for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.com AWT that's Ahrefs A H R E F S. Just one more link in our show notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voicesofsearch.com where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which we'll answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is voicesofsearch on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Facebook. Or you can contact me directly. My handle is Ben jschapp B E N J S H A P and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed. We're going to publish an episode every day during the work week, so hit that subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, remember the answers are always in the data.