SEOptimate: seo recommendations and content creation for stores
A SaaS that helps store owners and marketers improve SEO with recommendations and content drafts.
Problem it solvesSEO outsourcing is expensive and doing it in-house takes too much time.
The makers built SEOptimate after their own craft beer webshop needed a cheaper, faster way to improve SEO. Seven or eight months later, the tool is being used across more than 70 websites, and they are still weighing whether to target webshop owners or marketers and agencies.
Contentking-0411
u/Contentking-0411
Our SaaS is being used across 70+ websites, but are we targeting the wrong customers? Earlier this year, I quit my job to start a SaaS company with a friend. I handle sales, he handles the technical side. We’d done our research and thought we had a pretty good starting point. Seven or eight months later, our tool is being used to optimize more than 70 websites. We’ve made progress, but I’m finding the customer side much harder than I expected. The idea came from our own craft beer webshop. Outsourcing SEO was expensive, and doing it ourselves took a lot of time. We wanted a tool that could figure out what needed improving and then do most of the work, with us reviewing it before anything went live. So we built SEOptimate. It brings together Search Console data, your sitemap, keyword data, and competitor analysis to recommend changes and create or improve content. That includes product descriptions, category pages, and blog posts, which users can approve and publish through their CMS. It worked for our own webshop, so we figured there must be plenty of other store owners with the same problem. There are. But having the problem and being willing to do something about it are apparently two different things. A lot of the owners we speak to want better visibility in Google and AI search, but have limited budgets and very little time to get involved. Even reviewing suggestions or going through onboarding can be a hurdle. I sometimes catch myself thinking, “You want the results, but you don’t want to spend time or money on this?” Then I remember they’re running a business, dealing with orders and customers, and SEO probably sits somewhere near the bottom of a very long to-do list. Maybe we’ve underestimated how much support this audience needs, even with a tool designed to do most of the work. Our response has been to keep improving the product. Easier onboarding, clearer recommendations, more automation. But I’m starting to wonder whether we’re solving product issues or trying to build our way out of a targeting problem. Meanwhile, we also have marketers and agencies using it for their clients. Those conversations are very different. They understand what it does, know how to use it, and give us useful feedback. They already know why the work matters; they just want to get it done more efficiently. The challenge is that we haven’t found a consistent way to reach more of them yet. So we’re at a bit of a crossroads. Keep focusing on webshop owners and make the product increasingly hands-off, or focus on professionals who already understand the value? For anyone who’s been through this with their SaaS: what helped you distinguish between “the product needs to be easier” and “we’re selling to the wrong people”?
Websites
70+
used by SEOptimate
