Proper research, willpower, time, and money are needed to ruin a blog for tech startups. The rewards are there to grab, but few know how to leverage them.

You see, tech startups rightly focus on the product or service about to launch, prove, or scale. Most startups are also based on the technical skills founders have and not on their blogging or marketing skills.

Blogs are part of startup marketing strategies. Highly misunderstood, they’re often overlooked, or even worse, they run poorly. Since running a blog can be as detrimental to a startup as not running one at all, the following guide covers all you need to know if you decide to do content marketing, branding, or simply build trust in your startup using a blog.

You should run a blog for tech startups like a business. Set tangible SEO goals, write helpful content, and rely on the blog to be a marketing tool and a sales funnel to boost your startup’s revenue in the long term.

How do you know a startup can be successful? You confirm there’s a need for such a product and aim to solve a problem. Blogging success is also based on market research.

Before putting together a budget and a team, you need to validate the idea of the blog and the main topics to cover.

While it may not seem obvious up until now, startup blogs, and especially tech startup blogs should add value related to a product, service, or problem it solves.

Certain topics are more applicable to some tech businesses than others. Needless to say, they should all be related to your tech startup.

Here are 2 examples that show why validating your blog’s topics is important. Doing it the right way attracts free visitors from search engines.

CoPilot (a fitness app for finding workout coaches) benefits from 2 blog pages ranking among its top 5 pages! Even more, the topics are highly relatable to the ideal client, helping quickly grow new leads.

Growyze (an inventory management software startup) shows how B2B tech blogs can leverage traffic. All of its top 5 ranking pages are actual blog posts!

Pro tip: you can use keyword research tools or work with an SEO specialist for realistic topics or keywords you can leverage organic traffic with.

Running a blog for a tech startup is different than running an SEO blog for startups. Search engine optimization (SEO) requires covering topics that actually have searches. Unless you have an established brand, this is what makes or breaks the blog.

Planning is key to successful blogging. Here’s a detailed plan and a step-by-step guide to get you started.

The best way to discover the relevant keywords for your startup is to combine how you describe your product and how your customers describe their problems.

Example 1 – Payroll software

Let’s say you run a payroll blog for a SaaS startup. Obviously, the goal here is to rank for ‘payroll software’.

This might be a difficult keyword to target at an early stage.

Keep in mind that a seed keyword is always a good starting for a long tail keyword or, simply, a longer search query with less competition.

Here’s how Quickbooks software does it.

Quickbooks ranks on the first page of Google for payroll software. The company ranks for long-tail keywords as well.

A long post on how to do payroll yourself also ranks on the first page of Google. This is a lead post that can bring plenty of new customers.

The idea is to choose the right seed keywords and explore your options from there.

Google autocomplete is one of the options to find new keywords for your startup.

In this case, there are many other options such as payroll software examples, payroll software cost, payroll software cloud-based, payroll software with time tracking, etc.

Industry jargon may not always be the primary way users search for products or services. By some estimates, anywhere between 15 and 35% of Google searches are new.

In the example of payroll software, here are a few other terms worth targeting according to more specific ways clients and possible clients search for such solutions.

Payroll software for small businesses

Payroll software for large businesses

Best payroll software for accountants

Payroll software for one employee

Payroll software for startups

Payroll software for restaurants

Payroll software list

HR payroll software

Diving into more specific keywords is important for SEO blogging as well. These potential traffic ideas may not be obvious to people who actually build the software.

Competition analysis is a powerful SEO strategy. It’s so powerful that it’s sometimes the only go-to-market strategy for various startups.

Simply put, you replicate, get inspired, or expand on the blogging strategy of your competitors.

Here’s a brief overview of how to ‘steal’ keywords from your competitors.

Let’s say you build the next payroll software tech startup and you need to rank the blog quickly. Here’s how you’d analyze the competition in this space for creating relevant keyword ideas that can turn into blog topics.

Using an SEO tool, you can analyze the keywords your competitors are already ranking for.

In this example, we discover a keyword bringing in hundreds of thousands of visitors related to the payroll software tool. This keyword can be added on a list of main keywords.

Other keywords that aren’t necessarily related to payroll can also bring in valuable traffic.

Just look at this keyword low difficulty keyword. It builds that important traffic in new ways, bringing in potential small businesses to the tech startup’s software blog.

All of these keyword ideas need to be organized by category and by their urgency.

You start with the most important ones or with the lowest-difficulty keywords.

Should a blog startup go for high-traffic keywords first?

This depends on your budget. If you have the right marketing budget to push your product and blog, then you can go for the high-traffic keywords, also highly likely to be harder to rank for without the budget.

Lower difficulty keywords should be prioritized when working with a limited budget startup.

Even more, learning to balance the main keywords related to your business and the less common keywords someone would associate with your business is almost a form of art.

Here’s how you categorize them so that you know how to create a publishing schedule.

A topical map (in SEO) is a type of semantic topic categorization relevant to your keyword. It organizes both relevant and less relevant keywords within a category related to your industry.

Why is this important for SEO and when running a blog for your tech startup?

It shows search engines you have valid authority in a space. You cannot publish on many topics and build proper authority, let alone knowledge, without doing it.

Here’s an example of a topical map for a tech startup blog creating security apps for Android security app.

You can also use various SEO and keyword research tools to come up with quick topical maps for semantic SEO.

I’ve chosen an imaginary restaurant management SaaS for the following example.

In this example, the approach covers various queries that also build a cluster of topics that build authority and trust in your blog in this space.

Not all keywords are created equal. The more competition there is, the higher a keyword is to rank.

Various SEO tools use a keyword ranking difficulty score. While this score may not always be accurate, it’s still a good estimate of what you can realistically expect in terms of ranking.

Long-tail keywords or keywords that target more specific queries tend to be less competitive.

Here’s a good example of keyword difficulty in the same restaurant management software space.

A high keyword difficulty score is attributed to the main keyword in this industry

A long-tail variation of the same keyword already has a lower difficulty score.

Brand-related topics are among the best types of blog posts you can target. You should still target multiple posts that explain how to use your product or service even with a startup.

If you’re selling software, make sure to include plenty of how-to types of posts. Lists posts that cover the best types of products in your industry are also common on tech startup blogs. Obviously, don’t forget to mention your startup first.

All of this content is written by different people. Sure, you can write it all as a one-man show, but this is not the best use of your time. Here’s a blueprint of who writes and manages a tech startup blog.

Ideal writers for technical content, you know the ins and outs of your product or service. This is your time to put everything into words the average customer can understand.

Almost all other tasks can be outsourced or delegated to a content manager. Some of the tasks they cover include setting up a publishing schedule, ensuring quality control, blog promotion, networking, and blog monetization

SEO writers can cover many topics outside technical content. While you can hire technical writers, SEO writers can handle all types of keywords and brand-related topics.

If you can’t hire in-house, you can always choose a freelance SEO writer. A contractor works on a flexible schedule but may still ensure your blog gets at least 1-2 relevant posts per week.

There are many SEO tools you can use to ensure blogging success in the tech startup world. A combination of free and paid tools is usually the right path for a business in this space.

Google Analytics is the first type of free tool you should consider for your blog and even for your startup’s website.

Other free tools may include graphics and statistics tools such as Canva.

SEO tools are quickly changing. What used to be a space dominated by many small tools that do one thing is quickly changing to a space with software that does it all.

Tools that handle keyword research, keyword difficulty scores, topic ideas, competition analysis, and backlinks are a must for a tech startup blog. Some of their features may be replaced by smaller free tools.

However, Semrush, Ahrefs, and Senuto are among the tools that can cover your needs thoroughly to put the blog on the right path to drive traffic, not just to be an orphan area of the website.

Poor marketing is one of the top 20 reasons startups fail according to CB Insights.

Blogging is one of the top ways to create a viable marketing channel and is so often overlooked.

You see,

Marketing isn’t just about paid ads. It’s also about the content that brings in readers to gain something valuable, in this case, information.

Investopedia notes that business owners often lack the skills to market their product or service the right way. This may as well include the blogging part. Here’s where many get stuck.

Building a tech product isn’t easy. It’s often demanding, expensive, and highly time-consuming. All of the efforts of the entrepreneur go into the product or service leaving little energy or even time to present the product properly.

Most importantly, many fail to understand SEO and its benefits. Even big brands are now investing in SEO which means there’s always room for growth in this space.

As you discover when you try to run a blog for tech startups for the first time, good SEO is never truly free. You either have to put in the work yourself or hire a team to do it for you.

It might sound a bit too complicated, but things are brighter at a further glance.

Blogging is one of those business tasks you can readily allow others to take over for your startup. You can be as involved in it as you want if you have the time.

What you should not do is completely avoid it in the hopes of making it big.

Good startup ideas can be original or they can be a better product or service to what’s already out there.

In this last case, the competition for that first page on Google is fierce. Some startups may be inclined to overlook blogging completely as a result.

However, as seen above, there are many tiers or categories of topics you can cover that are related to your field and still rank to bring in those visitors or potential customers

From an SEO perspective, new keywords represent uncharted territory. Your idea may be so innovative that it’s the first one of its kind.

In this case, you’re at the crossroads of what’s already out there and what’s to come.

The solution?

Target the problem!

You go back to the problem you are trying to solve and use these problems as blog topics and as your SEO keywords.