SEO

Sustaining A SaaS Brand & Organic Channel During A Recession

Published

1 year ago

January 28, 2023

Max

During an economic recession, marketing budgets and ROAS typically comes under much more scrutiny.

You should read this article for reasons you should not cut your SEO spending during a recession.

The next question will be about ROI and what you can do to mitigate the oncoming issues.

During an economic downturn, the objectives of reducing churn are amplified. Your sales pipelines may see less activity, and the C-suite may focus more on MRR (monthly recurring revenue) and ARR (annual recurring revenue).

In this article, I will look at subscription-model-based businesses and some methods and strategies that can pivot their SEO efforts toward maintaining performance and SEO ROI (return on investment).

Understanding Why Accounts Cancel

Customers cancel their subscriptions for myriad reasons, but during an economic downturn, reasons tend to gravitate toward costs and perceived value.

Other reasons include not receiving enough value from the subscription, difficulty canceling their subscription, or feeling that customer support is unresponsive or unhelpful.

You can identify these issues before customers provide feedback on an exit survey. Create opportunities for conversations and feedback loops with the sales and customer service teams. This lets customers address concerns before they cancel.

Targeting Disengagement & Value Shortfalls

To show this value, we can pivot our content and messaging to demonstrate opportunity costs and how the upfront cost prevents a more significant shortfall in the long run.

Encountering usage friction with the software is an identifiable problem.

Within the organization, teams should be able to provide you access to DAU (daily active user) and MAU (monthly active user) data.

Companies often boast about having high numbers of each, but the data can also be used to identify accounts with below-average or spare login frequency, and these can then be collated and reached out to.

Put accounts on low and mid-tier subscriptions into an email gauntlet and reach out. Offer a consultation with an accounts person. You could also ask them to fill out a feedback form to identify pain points to help build a content strategy.
Reach out to accounts on high-tier subscriptions with existing account managers.

Addressing customer issues could be as simple as rewording elements of commercial product pages, adding additional sections, or reinforcing the value proposition with case studies.

You can also address these issues with traditional blog content. Add more support articles to your support center and build out existing ones with media such as video to address common friction points.

Developing Content Against Competitor Value Pitfalls

Price is likely the most challenging reason for leaving to predict and manage. Price is informed and dictated by other business needs and costs. While it might make sense to offer deals to high-value accounts, reducing the price on a wide scale likely isn’t an option.

Price and cost are subjective to the value your solution provides. So Demonstrating your benefits can help customers justify the expenditure.

Any solution’s cost must, at minimum, balance out the problem or provide additional value.

This is known as a cost-benefit analysis. A vital part of a cost-benefit analysis is comparing the costs of the solution versus the benefits and determining a net present value.

During this assessment, your messaging can leverage and demonstrate additional benefits, or benefit enhancements, against your competitors.

In SaaS, you could break this down as comparisons between both product elements and overall “package” elements:

Direct product features and performance of those features.
Indirect product features and “add ons” that supplement the core product.
The bandwidth of the solution on a monthly or annual basis.
The number of user seats/sub-accounts per main account.
Speed of customer support response (and level of customer support).

A typical approach to highlighting competitor pitfalls is with comparison tables and our-brand-v-competitor-brand URLs and blogs.

These pages will then compete with your competitors’ versions and independent websites, affiliates, and other reviews for clicks and to sway consumer opinion.

You must also explain these benefits and competitive advantages on the product pages themselves.

Bullet listing the product features is commonplace. But make sure the benefits are explained directly against your competitors. This can help these competitive advantages better resonate with your target audience.

Reinforcing Brand Solution Compounds

A brand compound search term is a term made up of two or more words and refers to a specific brand.

For example, the brand compound search term “Decathlon waterproofs” would highlight users wanting to find waterproofs specifically from the brand Decathlon.

Users performing searches like this also reaffirms the connection between topics and brands, helping Google further understand relationships and relevancy.

To optimize brand compound search terms, you need to understand the concept of semantic marketing. This means knowing how different words, phrases, and ideas relate in terms of meaning.

You should research how your target audience searches for information related to your product or service and use those search terms in your content.

Another strategy you can use is to add modifiers to your search terms.

These can be words like “best,” “how,” or any other qualifier that will make the search more specific. This will help you get more targeted traffic that will likely convert better than generic search terms.

Summary

While these are uncertain times and competition for users and recurring revenue becoming more fierce, pivoting your SEO and content strategy to focus on value propositions and addressing consumer friction points can help better qualify leads and provide objection questions that consumers will take to competitors.

In this strategy, the keyword search volumes and other values might not be high. When you’re addressing user friction points and concerns, the value is qualitative, not quantitative.

More resources:

Featured Image: VectorMine/Shutterstock

Related Topics:brand Channel Organic recession SaaS seo Sustaining

Up Next

8 Content Writing Tips From Experts In 2023

Don't Miss

Where Are The Advertisers Leaving Twitter Going For The Super Bowl?

Click to comment

You must be logged in to post a comment Login

SEO

brightonSEO Live Blog

Published

5 hours ago

April 25, 2024

Entireweb News Bot

Hello everyone. It’s April again, so I’m back in Brighton for another two days of ~~sun~~, sea, and SEO!

Being the introvert I am, my idea of fun isn’t hanging around our booth all day explaining we’ve run out of t-shirts (seriously, you need to be fast if you want swag!). So I decided to do something useful and live-blog the event instead.

Follow below for talk takeaways and (very) mildly humorous commentary.

SEO

Google Further Postpones Third-Party Cookie Deprecation In Chrome

Published

8 hours ago

April 25, 2024

Max

Close-up of a document with a grid and a red stamp that reads "delayed" over the word "status" due to Chrome's deprecation of third-party cookies.

Google has again delayed its plan to phase out third-party cookies in the Chrome web browser. The latest postponement comes after ongoing challenges in reconciling feedback from industry stakeholders and regulators.

The announcement was made in Google and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) joint quarterly report on the Privacy Sandbox initiative, scheduled for release on April 26.

Chrome’s Third-Party Cookie Phaseout Pushed To 2025

Google states it “will not complete third-party cookie deprecation during the second half of Q4” this year as planned.

Instead, the tech giant aims to begin deprecating third-party cookies in Chrome “starting early next year,” assuming an agreement can be reached with the CMA and the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

The statement reads:

“We recognize that there are ongoing challenges related to reconciling divergent feedback from the industry, regulators and developers, and will continue to engage closely with the entire ecosystem. It’s also critical that the CMA has sufficient time to review all evidence, including results from industry tests, which the CMA has asked market participants to provide by the end of June.”

Continued Engagement With Regulators

Google reiterated its commitment to “engaging closely with the CMA and ICO” throughout the process and hopes to conclude discussions this year.

This marks the third delay to Google’s plan to deprecate third-party cookies, initially aiming for a Q3 2023 phaseout before pushing it back to late 2024.

The postponements reflect the challenges in transitioning away from cross-site user tracking while balancing privacy and advertiser interests.

Transition Period & Impact

In January, Chrome began restricting third-party cookie access for 1% of users globally. This percentage was expected to gradually increase until 100% of users were covered by Q3 2024.

However, the latest delay gives websites and services more time to migrate away from third-party cookie dependencies through Google’s limited “deprecation trials” program.

The trials offer temporary cookie access extensions until December 27, 2024, for non-advertising use cases that can demonstrate direct user impact and functional breakage.

While easing the transition, the trials have strict eligibility rules. Advertising-related services are ineligible, and origins matching known ad-related domains are rejected.

Google states the program aims to address functional issues rather than relieve general data collection inconveniences.

Publisher & Advertiser Implications

The repeated delays highlight the potential disruption for digital publishers and advertisers relying on third-party cookie tracking.

Industry groups have raised concerns that restricting cross-site tracking could push websites toward more opaque privacy-invasive practices.

However, privacy advocates view the phaseout as crucial in preventing covert user profiling across the web.

With the latest postponement, all parties have more time to prepare for the eventual loss of third-party cookies and adopt Google’s proposed Privacy Sandbox APIs as replacements.

Featured Image: Novikov Aleksey/Shutterstock

SEO

How To Write ChatGPT Prompts To Get The Best Results

Published

1 day ago

April 24, 2024

Max

How To Write ChatGPT Prompts To Get The Best Results

ChatGPT is a game changer in the field of SEO. This powerful language model can generate human-like content, making it an invaluable tool for SEO professionals.

However, the prompts you provide largely determine the quality of the output.

To unlock the full potential of ChatGPT and create content that resonates with your audience and search engines, writing effective prompts is crucial.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore the art of writing prompts for ChatGPT, covering everything from basic techniques to advanced strategies for layering prompts and generating high-quality, SEO-friendly content.

Writing Prompts For ChatGPT

What Is A ChatGPT Prompt?

A ChatGPT prompt is an instruction or discussion topic a user provides for the ChatGPT AI model to respond to.

The prompt can be a question, statement, or any other stimulus to spark creativity, reflection, or engagement.

Users can use the prompt to generate ideas, share their thoughts, or start a conversation.

ChatGPT prompts are designed to be open-ended and can be customized based on the user’s preferences and interests.

How To Write Prompts For ChatGPT

Start by giving ChatGPT a writing prompt, such as, “Write a short story about a person who discovers they have a superpower.”

ChatGPT will then generate a response based on your prompt. Depending on the prompt’s complexity and the level of detail you requested, the answer may be a few sentences or several paragraphs long.

Use the ChatGPT-generated response as a starting point for your writing. You can take the ideas and concepts presented in the answer and expand upon them, adding your own unique spin to the story.

If you want to generate additional ideas, try asking ChatGPT follow-up questions related to your original prompt.

For example, you could ask, “What challenges might the person face in exploring their newfound superpower?” Or, “How might the person’s relationships with others be affected by their superpower?”

Remember that ChatGPT’s answers are generated by artificial intelligence and may not always be perfect or exactly what you want.

However, they can still be a great source of inspiration and help you start writing.

Must-Have GPTs Assistant

I recommend installing the WebBrowser Assistant created by the OpenAI Team. This tool allows you to add relevant Bing results to your ChatGPT prompts.

This assistant adds the first web results to your ChatGPT prompts for more accurate and up-to-date conversations.

It is very easy to install in only two clicks. (Click on Start Chat.)

Screenshot from ChatGPT, April 2024

For example, if I ask, “Who is Vincent Terrasi?,” ChatGPT has no answer.

With WebBrower Assistant, the assistant creates a new prompt with the first Bing results, and now ChatGPT knows who Vincent Terrasi is.

Screenshot from ChatGPT, March 2023

You can test other GPT assistants available in the GPTs search engine if you want to use Google results.

Master Reverse Prompt Engineering

ChatGPT can be an excellent tool for reverse engineering prompts because it generates natural and engaging responses to any given input.

By analyzing the prompts generated by ChatGPT, it is possible to gain insight into the model’s underlying thought processes and decision-making strategies.

One key benefit of using ChatGPT to reverse engineer prompts is that the model is highly transparent in its decision-making.

This means that the reasoning and logic behind each response can be traced, making it easier to understand how the model arrives at its conclusions.

Once you’ve done this a few times for different types of content, you’ll gain insight into crafting more effective prompts.

Prepare Your ChatGPT For Generating Prompts

First, activate the reverse prompt engineering.

Type the following prompt: “Enable Reverse Prompt Engineering? By Reverse Prompt Engineering I mean creating a prompt from a given text.”

Screenshot from ChatGPT, March 2023

ChatGPT is now ready to generate your prompt. You can test the product description in a new chatbot session and evaluate the generated prompt.

Type: “Create a very technical reverse prompt engineering template for a product description about iPhone 11.”

Reverse Prompt engineering via WebChatGPT

Screenshot from ChatGPT, March 2023

The result is amazing. You can test with a full text that you want to reproduce. Here is an example of a prompt for selling a Kindle on Amazon.

Type: “Reverse Prompt engineer the following {product), capture the writing style and the length of the text :
product =”

Reverse prompt engineering: Amazon product

Screenshot from ChatGPT, March 2023

I tested it on an SEJ blog post. Enjoy the analysis – it is excellent.

Type: “Reverse Prompt engineer the following {text}, capture the tone and writing style of the {text} to include in the prompt :
text = all text coming from https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-bard-training-data/478941/”

Reverse prompt engineering an SEJ blog post

Screenshot from ChatGPT, March 2023

But be careful not to use ChatGPT to generate your texts. It is just a personal assistant.

Go Deeper

Prompts and examples for SEO:

Keyword research and content ideas prompt: “Provide a list of 20 long-tail keyword ideas related to ‘local SEO strategies’ along with brief content topic descriptions for each keyword.”
Optimizing content for featured snippets prompt: “Write a 40-50 word paragraph optimized for the query ‘what is the featured snippet in Google search’ that could potentially earn the featured snippet.”
Creating meta descriptions prompt: “Draft a compelling meta description for the following blog post title: ’10 Technical SEO Factors You Can’t Ignore in 2024′.”

Important Considerations:

Always Fact-Check: While ChatGPT can be a helpful tool, it’s crucial to remember that it may generate inaccurate or fabricated information. Always verify any facts, statistics, or quotes generated by ChatGPT before incorporating them into your content.
Maintain Control and Creativity: Use ChatGPT as a tool to assist your writing, not replace it. Don’t rely on it to do your thinking or create content from scratch. Your unique perspective and creativity are essential for producing high-quality, engaging content.
Iteration is Key: Refine and revise the outputs generated by ChatGPT to ensure they align with your voice, style, and intended message.

Additional Prompts for Rewording and SEO:
– Rewrite this sentence to be more concise and impactful.
– Suggest alternative phrasing for this section to improve clarity.
– Identify opportunities to incorporate relevant internal and external links.
– Analyze the keyword density and suggest improvements for better SEO.

Remember, while ChatGPT can be a valuable tool, it’s essential to use it responsibly and maintain control over your content creation process.

Experiment And Refine Your Prompting Techniques

Writing effective prompts for ChatGPT is an essential skill for any SEO professional who wants to harness the power of AI-generated content.

Hopefully, the insights and examples shared in this article can inspire you and help guide you to crafting stronger prompts that yield high-quality content.

Remember to experiment with layering prompts, iterating on the output, and continually refining your prompting techniques.

This will help you stay ahead of the curve in the ever-changing world of SEO.

More resources:

Featured Image: Tapati Rinchumrus/Shutterstock