Further adventures in SEO land: Organic search for side projects and startups

This is part of a series about my side project Bashfully, which aims to give graduates and other new entrants to careers a seasoned professional level way of expressing themselves through the super power of story telling. Following the core principles of being discoverable, personalised and guiding in approach.

I have already written about Venturing into the world of SEO where I setup the infrastructure on the site, like metadata and adding a sitemap. Then a little later When SEO meets the MVP process on Bashfully, where I revisited how search results appear and what I hoped for Bashfully.


Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
This has been the hardest part of the project so far. As much as you can setup the structure and hint to search engines, if people aren't finding your site organically then they're unlikely to find it. So, how to get organic searches?


Taking a look in the search consoles the closest searches that appeared were “Bashful github” and "flickr integrations". Which got me thinking, how could our content be better for searching?


One of the things that isn't appearing in searches were comparison to "competitor" or complementary products. So I set about creating some pages to compare Bashfully to competitors. How to pick competitors? The first one had to be LinkedIn as the main player in this space, the second was GitHub with it's place as the "developers resume". The final spot to test out this idea came from doing my own searches for the kind of terms that we wanted Bashfully to appear under .... and the winner was VisualCV.


When writing the comparisons I set myself a couple of rule, first Be positive in introducing competitor. They are popular for a reason. Often not the same as Bashfully’s purpose. They also provide value to someone. The second was actually highlight the features that we liked and wanted ... Ok, maybe not all the features, but the ones we won't reasonably do this year.

As another stream to getting organic search we are doing some work to join and support the open source resume creation community. This will probably be the subject of another post, so won't go into it too much here.


Final step was to update site map, resubmit to Google and Bing to try to get crawled. Next monitor to see if it worked! Then tweak and improve the content.


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