Finding the product and market for an SEO SaaS (Part 2)
I'm an SEO. I've been working on websites for a decade and am avidly passionate about information retrieval. I also have strong opinions about SEO tooling so it makes sense to build an SEO SaaS.
Defining the product
There are a few different classes of SEO tooling.
Keyword research
Backlink analysis
CMS Plugins
Content Briefs
Content generation
Crawlers
Rank tracking
The links and keyword space is tough because you need to collect massive amounts of data for the tooling to be effective. Crawlers is a competitive market and is difficult because the web inherently has large amounts of edge cases.
Personally, I love natural language processing so the content brief space is attractive. I also love CMS's because it democratizes websites. So the sweet spot for me would be a CMS plugin that provides content feedback.
So this product will be the best content feedback tool on the market, utilizing machine learning and connecting directly to the CMS.
Read more about the planned product features for Lemmatic.
Finding the market
I worked on the 2022 web almanac for CMS's. I can tell you that CMS usage is extremely high across the web. Wordpress is of course the dominant product but it comes with a host of issues. I could build a wordpress plugin but personally, I don't want to be chasing security vulnerabilities with PHP.
Based on the research from the web almanac, there was an obvious choice for me.
Wix
For Q1 of 2023, I was on the Wix SEO consultancy board. That means I had the opportunity to provide Wix feedback about their tooling. As this project was percolating in my mind though, I hadn't yet decided to work with the CMS.
However, there were a few strong reasons to look at the Wix App Marketplace as the CMS market of choice.
220mm users (at time of writing)
100% rev share for the first year
Continuous investment in SEO features
Extensive documentation
Great APIs
I think it's important to me that Wix as an organization listens to its users. They also work tightly with their app developers. With app development, you can go down 2 paths.
Just open up the Wix dev center and get cracking
Already have a successful product and work with their integrations team directly
Normally, the integrations team supports known brands or new technology implementations with APIs/SPIs while working with external developers. I've been lucky enough to do a mix of 1 and 2. I fleshed out the idea just by reading through their docs but also connected with an integrations manager.
So with all that said, this SaaS has a clear market with Wix.