Marketing for nerds

Okay, I know it's only been a few days since I started working on my first startup, but I worked like a madman and finished the MVP already!

The next step is obviously marketing the product, but I want to go for super high leverage methods first, in order to have clicks passively coming in whilst I do the slower cold outreach next week.

The first method is one I have heard of during a past job, but until now I didn't really understand how it worked or how to implement it. So, to save me (and anyone else who may be reading) from having to re-research it, I'll briefly summarize.

pSEO is the method of programmatically generating loads of webpages (often between 100-1000) which are packed with long tail keywords, each targeting a different sub-niche of your target market.

There are a few steps involved in setting it up, but Marc Lou (a cool indie developer I just discovered on twitter) has a good guide.

I decided to create an index page to aggregate my ~500 pSEO sites

This is where it gets interesting. In fact, as far as I'm aware, it might be something I have thought up myself. The main difference between this and pSEO is that instead of creating loads of mini sites targeting long tail keywords, you are optimizing for long tail queries.

A handy little explainer image courtesy of nano bananna pro

Whilst the concept of generative engine optimization is not new, I haven't really seen the programmatic concepts from pSEO applied, despite the concepts being extremely similar.

So here's my theory: the rise of generative search (LLM answers, chatbots etc) means that the new "long tail" isn't just keywords, but instead it's user queries. If you can generate pages or content optimized to seed data for these queries (essentially feeding the input information for LLMs and GenAI) you could have your answers, tools, or content surfaced organically when users query these models.

The key is that the more info you have that targets super niche queries, the better.

I'm currently not sure what this would look like but I'm trying to apply the pSEO techniques to creating hundreds of pages that answer specific long tail questions people might ask AI tools.

It's still early days, but once I figure out the best way to identify what specific queries to 'answer' I definitely think pGEO might be the a big thing for indie hackers.