Coefficient.io SEO Opportunities

Coefficient.io is a SaaS startup that is trying to bring automation into our reporting and help us save time while using spreadsheets to build beautiful-looking dashboards.

Aatif Mohd

27th Feb, 2023 , 7 min read

Coefficient recently raised $18M in Series A and is setting some ambitious goals for customer acquisitions in a competitive space.

With funding usually comes pressure from investors to grow

I will be talking about the SEO strategy & opportunities that the company can undertake for 2023 & beyond that will make a big impact & help it set its foot strong

Template Pages

With Coefficient core value prop being a no-code solution that helps automate reporting it is important that they are able to have a library of pre-built templates to establish a connection with all their total addressable market & attract the right set of customers into their ecosystem

As a startup, it is important to bank on your customers that have helped the company achieve product market fit.

This can be as simple as categorising your existing paying customers by the common characteristics that they possess and what buckets can be labelled under.

One of the most widely used approaches to do this by breaking your existing customers by

• Channel (Use Case)
• Tool + Use Case
• Job to be Done
• Industry
• Job Title

Why does this work so well from a search perspective?

It is because you have identified what your sticky customer personas which are more likely open to paying & have shown a strong use-case for your product.

This drastically ups your chances of bringing in highly relevant customers who have a pain point that your product solves & you are providing them with a plug-and-play pre-built template that they can use & get going to solve their problem instead of having to start from scratch

Not to forget about conversion rates which will be dramatically better than positioning your brand for everything & everybody.

Fun Fact- Hubspot during its early days started out with a niche audience- small businesses that they focused on and eventually branched out to other things & it wouldn’t have been the mammoth Saas player it is today without specialising early on

The highest scaling mechanism for Coefficient is the community, where users can upload and sell templates for all sorts of use-case templates. UGC content can have strong network effects & may even outgrow the templates section on Coefficient. UGC growth loops tend to scale better than a programmatic landing page strategy but come with indexing and spam challenges

Competitor Brand Jacking

The space that Coefficient is entering isn’t a blue ocean market with no competitors. It has a bunch of competitors such as Clari, Coupler, Sheetgo, Unito etc which are more or less going after the same set audience. 

For a Saas business, there is usually churn by customers over a period of time due to the current SaaS business not being able to meet their needs, better pricing, different use-cases not catered to currently and several other reasons. Here there are going to 2 phases of the customer journey Phase-1 A searcher is already aware of the fact that they need an alternative tool/software that is out there to help them solve their problem.

Phase-2

The searcher is in the exploration/evaluation phase where they are comparing two or more similar SaaS products to assess which one is right for their use case.

Until lately, this search results space was dominated by aggregator review sites like Capterra, G2 which source user-generated reviews to show the pros & cons of a SaaS solution.

Instead of losing control over the narrative on how to best describe your product on what it solves to other websites & have no say.

Saas Companies can choose to create pages around this & get access to organic traffic that is bottom of the funnel & very likely to bring revenue that is a missed opportunity

Here are all the potential search combinations that a searcher may do during the 2 phases

What’s more intriguing to learn is A 2-way comparison (Competitor A vs Competitor  B) with a total of say 10 Competitors can result in 45 variations 

And a 3-way comparison (Competitor A vs Competitor B vs Competitor C) can result in 120 variations of pages 

Some napkin math on the total potential of pursuing competitor brand jacking 

This project alone has the potential to generate over $48,000 approx a month with 515 pages which can easily be templatized.

In terms of operating costs for the project, if they were to build them programmatically they’d spend just $15,000 to start seeing traction & impact on revenue

Leveraging Chat-GPT & AI 

Coefficient as a product offers a wide array of integrations to multiple CRMs, Dashboard & analytic tools over the course of time. These can be all your Hubspot, Salesforce, Looker Studio, Quickbooks & everything else out there. The simple first principle here of the product is to allow users to automate reporting on their favourite spreadsheets 

From an SEO pov, we can use this to capture customers online who are looking to find/calculate a metric using these analytical tools. A typical scenario of searchers here can be How to calculate [metric] from [platform] data

The very hypothesis being used here is once users learn that they can use software like Coefficient to they are more likely to stick around & consider using the solution it provides

Since these are long-tail phrases they have lesser competition, easier to rank for highly on search results & easy to be overlooked & SEO tools would mostly show them as low volume terms & you need a seasoned SEO to tell you what’s worth going after & what isn’t

I have considered going the AI route for this content because this content is factual in nature & has very less human touch that it needs & the fact that we are targeting some long-tail keywords with this strategy justifying the costs of writers to create these pages may just be an uphill battle with C-suite executives & CMO’s

Educational Excel + Sheets Pages

Coefficient as a SaaS product has its foundations built on Google Sheets & Excel. From a customer market research pov, their core customers/users aren’t just people looking to do reporting on G-sheets. There is another insight that needs to be uncovered about their target customers which is they are people who are looking to use advanced formulas and shortcuts to help them report the desired data points better additionally they may also be able to build custom dashboards on G-sheets for their requirements to present valuable learnings to other stakeholders Coefficient is looking for G-sheets power users who aren’t beginners but fall somewhere between intermediate to advanced levels of expertise. This is a cohort that truly understands how painful it is to build a reporting dashboard & all the manual menial tasks it entails in updating them weekly/monthly/quarterly/yearly or at a custom frequency based on business requirements This is where it makes all the more sense for Coefficient to be able to be present on search engines covering all the advanced formulas/shortcuts on how to them & being able to make the user more aware of a simpler solution that Coefficient offers

Amongst the common stages of awareness, I’d categorise this awareness type under “problem aware & solution aware” Some things that might be worth knowing about this type of audience is

• Active buyers, but are not product aware
• May not know all the features but are willing to try something new (works very well with the freemium/product-led growth model Coefficient has)
• A larger volume helps with brand awareness & make iterations to product faster
• Captures people with the interest looking for a solution

Lastly, since the Coefficient add-on can be also downloaded directly within G-sheets from Google Workspace Marketplace, I’d also look at ways to optimise the listing where its competitors are already ranking highly within the Marketing & Analytics category

Would you like to make an integrative set of choices that positions you on a playing field of your choice in a way that you win?

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