Google is the crossroads of the Western world’s internet. That makes it an obvious place to meet folk on their buying journey.

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If your audience is researching software or looking for answers to their big problem, then organic and paid traffic from Google offers a simple way for you to provide a solution there and then.

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But for early-stage startups, this isn’t always straightforward. Before you spend big on Google ads or search content production, you’ve got to figure out whether the channel will work and how big the opportunity to attract leads is.

Here are a few scenarios where I wouldn’t recommend relying on search to reach your target audience:

1. The buyer is not the person searching

Early-stage startups should focus on reaching their buyer directly, where possible. Adding a single degree of separation introduces a heck of a lot more friction. Your software might end up on an RFP longlist, but as an early-stage business, it’s more difficult to prove your value in this situation.

2. Your niche is hard to reach

Niching down is a great way to become well-known in a specific market, but it might limit you to a handful of keywords. For example, if you only work with online fashion businesses, then only a fraction of traffic from generic retail terms would be relevant to your business. Besides, your non-niched competitors will be more motivated to dominate Google’s results, making the auction and the search results pages more competitive.

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3. No one knows what to search for

Sometimes the language around emerging technologies is poorly defined. What do people search for when they want to buy software like yours? Who knows? You could guess at a few low-volume terms that could become more popular in time, but meaningful growth shouldn’t rely on a wing and a prayer.

4. No faith in Google’s results

For some buyers (like partners at law firms) there’s a huge knowledge gap between the generic how-to blogs and the varied on-the-ground experience of what professionals do every day. The buyers know this, so they’re less likely to bother with Google.

5. Buyers want a recommendation

Some software purchases are too important to rely on desk research. In these cases, buyers would ask team members, industry groups, partners, suppliers, and former colleagues for recommendations. Google is a less important part of this buying journey.

6. Paid search doesn’t convert

This is obvious, but worth mentioning. If your paid search campaigns don’t bring in customers, your organic search campaigns will struggle too. There may be a top-of-funnel advantage to search, but as an early-stage business, you’re probably better off focusing on simpler, more commercially focused journeys.

Or, to summarize, if your buyer is the person searching, your target audience is large, your average deal size is not huge (less than roughly $100,000/year), competitive analysis tools show your competitors are driving traffic with search, keywords related to your tool are clearly defined and attract significant traffic, and you’re able to convert customers from paid keywords, then building search content campaigns could be an excellent use of your limited time.

Gauge the size of the opportunity

Does search seem like a good fit? You’ll need to size up the opportunity to be sure. Use keywords you’ve already gathered for your competitors to understand potential keyword volumes, and use Google’s Keyword Planner tool (or Spyfu, or any other keyword research tool) to fill the gaps with other keywords you expect will capture the buying intent of your audience.

By working backward from the number of searches to your relevant terms each month, you can work out how many new customers you can expect to attract. Find some ad conversion data relevant to your industry or use my generic benchmarks below.

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1. Number of searchers (50,000)
2. Number of visitors (5% conversion, 2,500)
3. Number of contact form submissions (12% conversion, 300)
4. Number of qualified leads (33% conversion, 100)
5. Number of new customers (33% conversion, 33)

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These figures reflect ad conversions. Organic content conversion is tough to benchmark because the relationship between the searcher’s intent to buy, the competition for the keyword in the search results, and the role of the content to convert prospects to leads is less clear. Here are two examples of different types of search-focused content to demonstrate that:

Organic landing page

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• Attracts more clicks than an ad
• Captures buying intent and converts just as well as an ad
• Lots of competition to get on Google’s first page

Organic blog

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• Attracts more clicks than an ad
• Works best when prospects focus are researching, so doesn’t convert as well as an ad
• Less competition to get on Google’s first page

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Because there are too many unknowns for me to understand what your business’s organic content conversion rate will be, let’s return to those paid conversion benchmarks as a conservative stand-in. If you operate in a niche market, the number of people searching for what you do each month across all keywords could be as low as 500.

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• 500 searchers become...
• 25 visitors to your site, which become...
• 3 contact form submissions, which become...
• 1 qualified lead, which becomes...
• 0 new clients. Sorry, better luck next month!

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For so little upside, search marketing probably isn’t worth your time as a channel you can scale. I’ve wasted more time than I’m willing to admit to trying to make low-volume keywords work, so investigate the opportunity before you invest in the channel!

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On the other side of the coin, don’t be too discouraged by a lack of search volume. Buyers may struggle to articulate their problems or may not believe in search engines’ ability to offer solutions. Search volume is not the same thing as demand.

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But let’s move on with the assumption that there is a strong opportunity for search content and look at the steps you need to take to make the most of it.

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Audit your site

Using a tool like SEMrush, or the services of a freelancer that specializes in technical SEO, run an audit on your site to ensure it’s set up to rank well in the search results. If you’re not especially technical, you might want to get help from a developer too.

Identify your strengths

From this list of key factors that help content rank well on Google, which can you meaningfully influence? (Thanks to Tracey Wallace and her excellent Contentment newsletter, which helped me update a couple of the points below.)

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1. Domain authority: Factors that influence domain authority, such as your site’s technical health, and the volume and relevance of links that point to your site from high authority sites.
2. Links back to content: The volume and relevance of links to your content from high-authority external sites, and internal links from your site.
3. Awareness of your brand: Increased brand awareness will encourage more people to click on your content vs anything else in the search results.
4. Relevance of keywords to content: Your content targets keyword groups by presenting information that answers searchers’ queries in a clear and comprehensive way.
5. External links: Your content links out to other high-authority sites’ relevant, quality content.
6. Visual layout and user experience: Your content looks fantastic, and on-page elements such as tables of contents make your longer content easy to navigate.
7. Quality of written content: Your written content is engaging, concise, and answers searchers’ questions.
8. Volume of content on your theme: You’re producing several blogs that target the same theme, and link to one another.
9. Technical health & hygiene: You’re optimizing your content with meta images, meta titles, and image alt text, plus your links work, your images are resized, you’re using headers, and the slug is relevant and clickable.
10. Uniqueness: Your content captures searchers’ true intent more effectively than anything else in the search results.

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From this list, you’ll ignore points 1-3 for now. They take too long to influence and will distract you from producing excellent content. Instead, points 4-10 are fair game. Unless the terms you’re trying to rank for are uber-competitive, by meeting each of these requirements, you’ll produce content that Google’s algorithm recognizes is high quality and worth bumping up the rankings.

If you think your team brings a unique advantage to any of these factors, double down on that strength! It will help you compensate for what you might be lacking elsewhere.

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Prioritize keywords

To figure out which keywords to target, go back to the list of competitor keywords you pulled from your Audience research and hide all keywords that don’t indicate that the searcher has some intent to buy. Next, sort these terms from high to low by search clicks. Starting at the top of this list, Google each search term and look for weaknesses in the content that appears in the first 10 results of the search results page.

Here’s what you’re looking for:

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1. Content that is more than a year or two old
2. Content that doesn’t clearly or comprehensively respond to the search term
3. Content from blogs that have a low domain or page authority (I use an extension called Mozbar to identify these)
4. Content from blogs that have few backlinks (use Mozbar again)
5. Search results with boring meta titles and meta descriptions
6. Content that’s presented poorly or offers a poor user experience
7. Content that’s poorly targeted to the audience that’s likely to be searching

Now you know where the opportunities lie, you want to create content that better meets the searcher’s intent by drawing on the ranking factors that you can meaningfully influence. If you can offer what the existing content in the search results cannot, you’re more likely to rank.

Publish, promote, and monitor

You should already have Google Analytics and Google Search Console set up. If you don’t, do that now! You’ll need to introduce these analytics platforms to discover how successful your content efforts are.

The key stats to monitor on Google Analytics are pageviews, time on page, and bounce rate. On Google Search Console, you should focus on impressions of pages and keywords in the search results, along with clicks through to your content.

When you’ve got analytics up and running, publish your content and put it in front of your audience using other promotion channels, like social or email.

When you check back in with Search Console later you should be able to see Google’s algorithm testing the content with searchers. If these search audiences show the right engagement signals, Google gives your content more exposure by bumping it up the rankings. If the engagement signals aren’t there, Google will leave the content alone until it sees that the content has changed.

It usually takes about three months to start to see results, but it can take longer if your site doesn’t already drive much search traffic.

Introduce backlinks

You may find that some of your content plateaus nowhere near page one. You can leave that content alone for now. Instead, focus on giving a boost to content that’s close to reaching page one, or close to reaching the top of page one, by sending backlinks there.

I find that the quickest way to do this is by working with freelancers who have a large network of publishers in your niche who may be interested in linking to high-quality content. Your content should earn some backlinks organically too.

Applying ‘Beginner’s Mind' to search

Despite my best attempts to keep things simple so far, search is a bit complicated.

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When you’re getting started, it’s a nerve-wracking experience. You’re worried that you’ve missed something. You’re worried that in three months, you’ll look at Google Analytics and see mothballs where all that glorious traffic should be.

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Try not to worry so much. It’s good to be a beginner, in one sense at least: you’re bringing your ‘Beginner’s Mind’ to the table.

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It’s not a tricky concept. Beginner’s Mind just means dropping any preconceptions you have when you’re approaching a challenge, just like a beginner would. When you’re an actual beginner, that openness is more important than ever. How can you solve problems beyond the capability of experts?

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Your first reaction will be ‘You can’t’, but because marketing changes so quickly, it’s more than possible. Pros sometimes get stuck doing things the way they know how, while the behaviors of the people they are marketing to change. Or they get sidetracked by new things and drop the ball on previously launched campaigns.

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Here’s how Beginner’s Mind can help you in practice.

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A few years ago, I didn’t know much about search marketing. I had some success driving customers through a blog and had read lots of how-tos, so I pitched building out search content for the social scheduling tool, ContentCal.

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I thought that, by listing all the things that influence whether content ranks, and focusing on what I could change in the short term I’d stand a good chance of winning high-intent traffic. This list of 10 ranking factors is an updated version of those I identified for ContentCal.

I decided to focus on the final five points, which I felt I had more influence over in the short term and plowed ahead. With the help of writers, I produced a 2-4,000 word blog every week for 13 weeks, targeting the highest intent search terms.

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(I no longer believe that focusing narrowly on maxing out word counts blogs is best practice, but to be fair, it worked well at the time.)

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As a novice, I was far too optimistic about when the traffic would kick in, so the monthly client calls were painful until about month three when search traffic started to take off. ContentCal’s blog was already more than 100 blogs strong, but over the next three months, blog traffic from search increased by 20X, and sign-ups from folk that landed on the blog via search increased by 17X.

One blog targeted at the term ‘content calendar’ generated more than a hundred monthly sign-ups to ContentCal’s platform, a content calendar.

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At first glance, the content on the first page of Google seems slick and well-tuned. But in reality, most search content is less Formula 1 and more banger racing. Unless you’re angling for very competitive terms, the content your competitors are ranking with is usually far from perfect, so there’s usually a way to turn up somewhere near the top of the search results.

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Plus, if you don’t get the top spot, there are runner-up prizes from position two down to 10, which is nice. Just stay focused on your sweet spot: where you’ll have the biggest impact and what you can change quickly.

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Come to think of it, that’s pretty good life advice in general.