Hey it’s Opossum here! Welcome to my free monthly Q/A Roundup. Today’s post is on some of the best questions in the last month. Each week I write about a new topic or analyze a new digital business. If you’re not a subscriber, here’s what you missed this month:
Hey Opossum, when it comes to testing demand, would you bother making the home page/product page or just the landing pages? And do you bother with pre-landers at this stage? Thank you in advance!
Opossum - first up , thank you for the guidance and constant pushing to set up a side hustle.
I've set up my services website and am currently pushing out content for the website . Using Semrush for finding keywords and Surfseo for writing the content - like you suggest.
The problem I'm struggling with is - I feel that the monthly search volumes for my keywords are too low , not only that - even the number of keywords seem less.
Eg. Keyword 1 has total volume of broad match results as 7,000 of which the main keyword with highest volume has like 1,000
Keyword 2 - total volume of 2080 for broad match with main keyword at 210 volume. related keywords are 4690
I understand my services are pretty niche however, the LTV of an acquired customer is substantial.
Would it make sense to keep putting out more content here or to focus on outbound lead gen here and keep the SEO for another broader service?
Do both. If you're worried that you're going to be unemployed, focus more on outbound lead gen. If you're setting it up for an eventual exit and you want leads to continuously come to you, focus more on SEO.
You're not *just* writing content to get leads so the search volume doesn't matter as much. They're to support your service pages. You're writing content so that Google views your site as a topical authority in your niche so that when someone types in "Accountant + [your city]", Google knows you are a SME on all of the things you've written about.
On that note, make sure your blog pages link to your service pages. You're trying to rank your Google business profile and service pages along with that content. So when someone searches "Specialty accounting service + [your city]", your service pages rank up because you have all of those supporting posts linking to your service page. Also make sure those service pages are really flushed out and in depth.
Love your work so far. Has helped me a tonne. Are you able to make a post on how to expand into international markets? I have an e-com business (supplements) which runs well in the country I live in. However, I wouldn't know where to begin in terms of expanding internationally.
Every country has different laws on importing products.
Every country has different laws on selling cross border online.
Every country has different laws on taxes on the above.
Every country has different laws on supplements and how they're treated.
Every country has different treaties on how they handle the above with different countries.
It's literally a nightmare. Writing a guide on the whole world would be impossible.
I will say this. Pick one country and find a lawyer in country that knows what they're talking about and pay them to advise you.
Supplements especially vary very widely by country. The regulation on supplement ingredients is all over the map and is sometimes treated like pharmaceuticals and sometimes treated like candy. Each ingredient in the product can be treated differently. China for example requires a red hat and $250k per product to get it while America is still pretty much the wild west.
It's not a statistical model. You just export all of the orders and pivot them into an excel graph with count of orders on the Y axis and AOV buckets on the X axis with each bucket being roughly $5.
Once you decide the shipping levels that you're going to test based off of the AOV distribution, just run an A/B/C test with the levels in optimizely or a similar tool and then calculate the AOV shift and margin difference accounting for the differences in AOV and shipping.
Hey Opossum, when it comes to testing demand, would you bother making the home page/product page or just the landing pages? And do you bother with pre-landers at this stage? Thank you in advance!
I'd build out the whole site. Some users will click off and look at your HP, about page, etc. and you want to look like a real company.
Opossum - first up , thank you for the guidance and constant pushing to set up a side hustle.
I've set up my services website and am currently pushing out content for the website . Using Semrush for finding keywords and Surfseo for writing the content - like you suggest.
The problem I'm struggling with is - I feel that the monthly search volumes for my keywords are too low , not only that - even the number of keywords seem less.
Eg. Keyword 1 has total volume of broad match results as 7,000 of which the main keyword with highest volume has like 1,000
Keyword 2 - total volume of 2080 for broad match with main keyword at 210 volume. related keywords are 4690
I understand my services are pretty niche however, the LTV of an acquired customer is substantial.
Would it make sense to keep putting out more content here or to focus on outbound lead gen here and keep the SEO for another broader service?
Do both. If you're worried that you're going to be unemployed, focus more on outbound lead gen. If you're setting it up for an eventual exit and you want leads to continuously come to you, focus more on SEO.
You're not *just* writing content to get leads so the search volume doesn't matter as much. They're to support your service pages. You're writing content so that Google views your site as a topical authority in your niche so that when someone types in "Accountant + [your city]", Google knows you are a SME on all of the things you've written about.
On that note, make sure your blog pages link to your service pages. You're trying to rank your Google business profile and service pages along with that content. So when someone searches "Specialty accounting service + [your city]", your service pages rank up because you have all of those supporting posts linking to your service page. Also make sure those service pages are really flushed out and in depth.
Thank you Opossum. Will continue to focus on SEO - it makes more sense long term.
This is great information. Are you planning on doing something similar for the Affiliate market by any chance?
What do you mean? There's a lot of information on the Substack and website about affiliate marketing.
Thank you. I checked your Substack and did find a lot of information on Affiliate marketing. Cheers
Love your work so far. Has helped me a tonne. Are you able to make a post on how to expand into international markets? I have an e-com business (supplements) which runs well in the country I live in. However, I wouldn't know where to begin in terms of expanding internationally.
No. And here's why.
Every country has different laws on importing products.
Every country has different laws on selling cross border online.
Every country has different laws on taxes on the above.
Every country has different laws on supplements and how they're treated.
Every country has different treaties on how they handle the above with different countries.
It's literally a nightmare. Writing a guide on the whole world would be impossible.
I will say this. Pick one country and find a lawyer in country that knows what they're talking about and pay them to advise you.
Supplements especially vary very widely by country. The regulation on supplement ingredients is all over the map and is sometimes treated like pharmaceuticals and sometimes treated like candy. Each ingredient in the product can be treated differently. China for example requires a red hat and $250k per product to get it while America is still pretty much the wild west.
What kind of statisticaL model do you use to test for AOV distribution?
It's not a statistical model. You just export all of the orders and pivot them into an excel graph with count of orders on the Y axis and AOV buckets on the X axis with each bucket being roughly $5.
Once you decide the shipping levels that you're going to test based off of the AOV distribution, just run an A/B/C test with the levels in optimizely or a similar tool and then calculate the AOV shift and margin difference accounting for the differences in AOV and shipping.