Nick Sawinyh is the co-founder of Seomator, a technical SEO tool that is making over $4,000/month. He started the business to avoid carrying out the same SEO tasks over and over again. He and Eugene have grown the tool to hundreds of customers. Seomator will make life easier for freelance marketers and marketing agencies.
Seomator, a technical SEO tool that generates over $4,000 per month, was co-founded by Nick. He created the company since he didn’t want to keep doing the same SEO duties over and over again. Nick and his co-founder were able to expand the product to hundreds of clients by working the site’s SEO.
Maximize Your Website’s SEO Potential
Seomator’s two founders. I met my business partner Eugene while working as a network administrator for a local ISP provider. We just recently discovered that we were both snowboarders and insane chillers after three beers together:)
Then, for several years, we both worked in the engineering and online products fields. We launched a few web businesses at the same time since we were very young, intelligent, and energetic, and they were all successfully sold. Along with it, we developed a concept for the brand-new online service and worked on it for 1.5 years until beta Seomator was released. Seomator will perform the work for you and make your life easier whether you’re a marketing firm or a freelancer.
We currently earn $4k MRR, and we are gradually expanding.
I learned and took care of web design and SEO on my own since we had to establish websites for our businesses and, as young professionals, we didn’t have enough money to pay for all the costs of high-quality services. It was much simpler back then in 2006 than it is now. Later, as a side business, I started an SEO agency, which I sold in 2015. Unbelievably, we always had two or three ideas we could develop into services right from the start of our partnership with Evgeny. As we work on a job, we become aware of the best places to automate or improve a process or make use of personal expertise and data. I was using Seomator to work on the SEO of my clients’ websites and was unsure on where to put the SEO Analysis base rails. Eugene and I decided to create a program that would evaluate websites, point out any flaws, and provide suggestions for how to fix them.
SEO Graders, like Woorank, Nibbler, and Mysiteauditor, give you some basic “insides” based on one crawled URL (typically the homepage), and SEO Crawlers, like Screaming Frog, Deepcrawl, Onpage, and Botify, crawl the entire website and provide results, but typically to figure out something from their reports, you have to understand how SEO works and what you’ll need to do to fix issues.
We crawl up to 1000 pages from a website and then present a list of SEO Issues backed by crawl data, thorough information, and How-to-Fix advice. We fall halfway between full-scale crawlers and SEO graders.
Our singular focus on the automation of the SEO Audit Reports sets us apart from our rivals. We take pride in being more reasonably priced than the majority of other services available.
While working on SEO for a few of my clients in 2013, I came to the realization that I didn’t want to keep doing the same thing. I needed someone to handle things for me. I looked at the tools that were already available and discovered that I preferred something different.
With the help of tools like SEOptimer, ZadroWeb, or MySiteAuditor, you can quickly analyze your website and get advice on how to improve your SEO. Seomator is the ideal tool if you’re searching for something a little more in-depth and sophisticated without going over budget. In order to assist SEO Agencies with new sales, we offer an embedded SEO audit widget. You could also discover a monitoring alert tool beneficial for keeping track of all website updates. You may sign up for a one-time report or take advantage of our free trial to test things out.
The Importance of PHP for SEO Optimization
Eugene and I started with a description of all the characteristics that had to be verified for any website’s SEO optimization and any advice we may provide based on that, using our team and the sources we already had from our prior projects.
Since we had developers and prior expertise, we decided to go with the trusted PHP technology stack when looking for the best tech stack. It’s also important to note that PHP developers are rather abundant on freelancing websites, so you won’t have a labor scarcity.
Beta Full Audit Report with Embedded Tool, Domain Comparison, and Seomator were introduced in May 2014. We only provided the tool as a trial for two to three months before starting to sell it in the fall of 2014. We started working with mentors and influencers who shared helpful nuggets of wisdom with us and assisted Seomator in breaking into the SEO field.
Our pivot point likely occurred when we achieved the ideal product-market fit and were included in the well-known Brian Dean’s SEO Tools List.
Following the introduction of our first MVP, we made many marketing initiatives. I wish we had begun performing them sooner. For us, SEO and content marketing are the most effective methods; throughout the years, we were able to rank rather high for a number of our target keywords and obtain a sizable number of backlinks:
Giving out our top-tier subscription for free to bloggers and influencers in exchange for a Seomator mention was the most effective link-building tactic. It performed admirably. When we started an affiliate program, it was another intriguing development. Although it didn’t bring us many paying clients, it really aided in link development. We use Tapfiliate, a very adaptable affiliate management software appropriate for SaaS recurring payments that also seamlessly interfaces with our payment processing provider, to administer our affiliate program.
Additionally, we tried using Google AdWords and social media advertising, but the cost of acquisition was too expensive for us.
It’s important to note that we have developed a few side projects to boost our SEO along the way, most notably Curatedseotools, a ranking of the top SEO tools, which was quite popular at ProductHunt in the past:
The most crucial factor is that, because our marketing approach is based mostly on SEO efforts, our monthly marketing costs are now extremely cheap, and our user acquisition cost is close to zero.
With all of our efforts, we generate 600–700 leads every month, with a trial conversion rate of roughly 10%.
Lessons learned: The mistakes we made with Seomator’s SEO strategy
Seomator was our first SaaS project and our first project with an entirely remote crew, while we had previously done online projects. Thus, we committed several errors. There were a ton of them, and they were often expensive.
For instance, we invested a lot of time and money on localizing our products, only to learn later that maintaining many languages would be even more expensive. Additionally, we weren’t getting enough clients from those new areas to turn a profit.
We spent close to nine months developing our own billing backend on top of the Stripe and Paypal APIs because we also wanted to use both companies as payment processors. We simply discarded that code after nine months and switched to Chargebee, which provided all the functionalities we need.
Managing remote developers was a brand-new beast as well. Our staff included a senior software engineer who worked full-time, as well as several freelancers from other countries who worked on different aspects of our product. Naturally, working with freelancers led to dealing with every issue imaginable: missed deadlines, subpar code, overestimated work hours, developers vanishing just as we needed them to address a crucial bug, and so on and so forth. Hubstaff has worked well for us since we started using it to track employee time.
We need to have prioritized our product’s marketing earlier. We wasted entirely too much time developing features that never received enough momentum while searching for a product-market fit. Everyone continues repeating that SaaS entrepreneurs should chat to consumers on a daily basis while searching for product-market fit, but I would argue that this is only true if the users are currently paying clients who haven’t started a trial or abandoned the service after a few days. What features of your product did your paying consumers find useful? How do they utilize your offering?
In the very competitive market for SEO tools, if someone complains that your product lacks a few features, it’s probable that they won’t ever pay for a subscription even if those features are built. Beware of feature requests from tire kickers!
For instance, we spent a lot of effort and money developing and supporting an API for Seomator, but relatively few users are really utilizing it. Many of the features that we’ve included in our product would be removed if I could go back in time.
I would advise giving up on learning and starting to apply. I’ve observed several individuals seeking sacrosanct knowledge, who spend countless hours listening to podcasts and visiting each startup event in the area without ever touching their own product. Guys, simply go to work on your product and address issues as they arise.
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