I'm here at myGengo this week doing some consulting, and they let me borrow the blog for a little bit to talk about SEO.
Have you ever had the experience of being the internal advocate for something which is a clear, obvious win? Something like source control or unit testing, which is now so fundamental to the practice of building web apps that to not do it is just wrong? Did you ever get pushback about that decision, about how there were higher priorities and uncertain benefits, despite the fact that the business was clearly, demonstrably hemorrhaging value every minute they delayed on starting them?
This is how I feel every time I talk about SEO to startups. While there are some exceptions -- Yelp and StackOverflow, for example -- most have no coherent SEO strategy, and seem to think that it is a distraction from raising money, Tweeting, finding early adopters for social networks for poodles, and writing that in-app chat in Node.js. This frustrates the heck out of me, since SEO was practically made for startups. (This has been noted by other experts, like Rand Fishkin, who gave an excellent presentation at YCombinator to try to educate the community.)
SEO Is A Scalable Channel For Customer Acquisition
Most startups do not have product problems. The product works. Most startups do not have design problems. The product looks pretty. Most startups DO have customer acquisition problems: they lack a repeatable way to find a new person, convince them to use the product, and take their money. Startups which do not have customer acquisition problems have *already won*: there is no longer a question of whether they will survive to exit, the only question is for how much.
Startups are, accordingly, very passionate about distribution channels with a lot of reach. Of late, that seems to be Facebook, Twitter, and the App Store. Google dwarfs all of these in reach. It also reaches people when they are in a mood to purchase or be persuaded, as opposed to in a mood for poking. A supremely popular tweet can be seen by thousands of people in a day — there are websites operated as hobbies which receive more Google searches, and that happens every single day. The typical customer on the App Store thinks that 5 dollars is a lot of money to spend: Google reaches them, but it also reaches people who have signature authority for five figures.
The combination of broad reach to the right people means that a channel exists, but the interesting question for startups is whether it is scalable. Most startups with a worthwhile product could close deals by having the CEO -- passionate master of everything to do with the product -- just walk around door to door and sign people up for it, just on the strength of the entrepreneurial reality distortion field. That doesn't typically happen because there is a physical limit to the number of doors the CEO can knock on, and their time is usually better spent creating processes such that sales can happen without their personal involvement.
Black Magic?
SEO can be one of those processes. It is often unfairly maligned as black magic. This is largely out of ignorance. Making quality products is hard and often poorly understood. Closing enterprise deals is hard and often poorly understood. Scaling a website to handle 100,000 users is hard and often poorly understood.
SEO is called black magic because it is hard, poorly understood, and not embraced in one's social circle. This is why startups get away with saying transparently stupid things about it, like "At an old job, we hired a SEO consultant and got a bunch of snake oil. Clearly, SEO is for suckers." Nobody says "At an old job, we made a program and it crashed. Clearly, this computer thing is a passing fad." You’d get laughed out of the room, because your social circle routinely creates value with programming.
Hopefully, successful startups (like, say, Mint) who gain useful levels of traction through value-creating SEO, and investors who realize this and try to push for it in their own companies (like Dave McClure), will charge the startup culture such that “SEO doesn’t really exist and, if it does, it is because it is evil” gets you laughed out of the room.
SEO Can Add Millions To Enterprise Value
I run what is, by rights, a teeny-tiny niche website which makes bingo cards for elementary school teachers. It has over 200,000 users and gets millions of visits a year. There are many startups addressing much larger, more valuable markets who would kill for those numbers.
Consider two startups trying to raise a Series A round:
- Startup A: good product, gigantic market, users like it, 10,000 users
- Startup B: good product, gigantic market, users like it, 200,000 users
Startup B is likely going to receive a higher valuation from investors because it can demonstrate more traction and because the perceived risk is lower. They've already removed a key risk factor -- can we scale customer acquisition -- from their investors.
The difference in valuations is equivalent to directly putting millions into the pockets of the equity holders of the startup, including the founders and employees. If your startup isn't doing SEO, it isn't just costing your business the forgone revenue, it is costing you, personally, money. Your equity is being excessively diluted with each capital raise because your business is riskier than it would be if it was doing SEO, and your eventual exit is smaller than it would be if you were doing SEO. These effects compound, and the double whammy means you get less out of the blood, sweat, and tears you’re pouring into the work.
It's not just for customers
There are knock-on advantages to ranking well in terms of other things startups care about, like achieving PR and lining up investors. Say you care about the online backup space, for example. Maybe you're writing an article about it for TechCrunch. How do you figure who is the leading name in online backup right now? You do what everyone else does: Google it. Carbonite, Mozy, and Backblaze get mentioned virtually any time an article gets written about online backup. Causation runs in both directions here: they're getting written about because reporters are lazy and inexpert, and rely on social proof from trusted sources (like Google) to identify winners. They're also ranking well on Google because they get written about a lot. Winners win in SEO, so you don’t want SEO to be on your list of “Things to do someday” when somebody who starts today accumulates advantage over you with each passing day.
There are knock-on advantages to ranking well in terms of other things startups care about, like achieving PR and lining up investors. Say you care about the online backup space, for example. Maybe you're writing an article about it for TechCrunch. How do you figure who is the leading name in online backup right now? You do what everyone else does: Google it. Carbonite, Mozy, and Backblaze get mentioned virtually any time an article gets written about online backup. Causation runs in both directions here: they're getting written about because reporters are lazy and inexpert, and rely on social proof from trusted sources (like Google) to identify winners. They're also ranking well on Google because they get written about a lot. Winners win in SEO, so you don’t want SEO to be on your list of “Things to do someday” when somebody who starts today accumulates advantage over you with each passing day.
Investors are also lazy and inexpert. (I can say that because I don't have any. If I take funding in the future, naturally it will be from savvy hard-working investors [LIKE THE MYGENGO INVESTORS -Rob]... but all the other investors in the world will still be lazy and inexpert.) The recent flap with AngelList involved, among other things, noting that investors have a strong herd mentality and that demonstrating social proof helps to break deadlocks and actually achieve funding rounds. Good rankings on Google are some of the strongest social proof you can get, particularly because your investor will not even realize you are trying to influence them.
SEO Plays To Startups' Strengths
At competitive levels, SEO is largely about link acquisition. Happily, startups typically enjoy popularity with link-rich communities who have disproportionate influence over the web's link graph. It is like swimming in the same social circles as NYT reporters tends to help one's PR.
Programmers, designers, and the startup community create literally orders of magnitude more links per person per month than the Internet at large. This means that, despite their smaller numbers and cultural profile relative to, say, "organized religion" or "government", their ability to cause their interests to rank is very high. Try searching for "angel" or "angels" some time and note how many sites you see about geeky TV shows, software projects, or angel investors. The words have valence outside the geek community, too, but geeks get a lot more votes than nuns do.
This lets startups run roughshod over entrenched competitors in schlerotic industries which do not get to tap the geek karma bonuses. If you're making a product which solves a boring problem for business -- and that is a recipe for money, by the way -- then the paper-based solution or the not-updated-since-1996 legacy software which you are competing with won't accumulate links at nearly the rate you do, and you will begin to outrank it for queries of interest to you.
You have DEEP expertise
Startups also have deep technological expertise and the capability to rapidly execute, which doesn't describe much of the world. As the simplest possible example, there are large multinational companies which can't nail "Put a unique, meaningful title on every page of the website" because organizational infighting and 18-month change cycles in IT make that impossible. Since your hands aren't tied in that fashion, if SEO were a priority for you, you could accomplish much of what needed to be done in a matter of hours or weeks rather than the months or years it would take Bank of America to accomplish the same task.
Startups also have disproportionate web footprints compared to the size of their enterprise. You're smaller than Tootsie Rolls, by a factor of "lots". You don't have factories, entire buildings dedicated to just your marketing or accounts receivable department, a nationwide network of distributors, etc etc. But you outpublish Tootsie Rolls on the Internet, by a factor of "lots", just by virtue of existing. Indeed, if your intern was to just update your blog every time they ate a Tootsie Roll, you would soon have produced a larger footprint on the Internet with regards to Tootsie Rolls than the entire Tootsie Roll company has ever managed.
That doesn't sound that valuable, but then again you aren't in the candy business. myGengo, for example, is in the translation business. That is a gigantic multi-billion dollar industry. Savvy use of techniques like scalable content generation mean that myGengo can punch substantially above its weight with regards to translation on the Internet, because translators and translation agencies are in the business of doing translation and myGengo is in the business of doing translation over the Internet. Your startup can take advantage of the same focus in your niche.
SEO work is also potentially inexpensive. Much of getting the basics right has no marginal costs over doing things poorly: you will have a title tag either way, so it should be attractive and have good keyword usage rather than being <title>Home Page</title>. (MyGengo’s is, currently, “Simple human translation | Home | myGengo”. This is clearly suboptimal, and changing it will be my first recommendation for the company -- “Home” adds absolutely nothing and should be cut, and while “Simple human translation” is catchy and describes what MyGengo wants to accomplish, there are better alternatives.)
After the ridiculously cheap low-hanging fruit, projects like scalable content generation can be done for amounts of money which are achievable to bootstrappers and rounding error next to round sizes. Scalable content generation, my personal favorite option in the SEO toolbox, is ridiculously cheap next to e.g. fully-loaded cost for employees or getting a bespoke iPhone app commissioned.
What’s Your Excuse?
I run a pair of software businesses. I understand that you’re busy and you have a million things on your plate. Which feature in your next release, specifically, is more important than doubling your rate of customer acquisition? (All of them? Really? Including that one which nobody has asked for but got put on the list anyhow because it struck one person’s fancy?) Why does your entire website have less than 2,000 words of content when every technical member of your team writes over 100,000 words a year if you count Slashdot/Reddit/HN/their Harry Potter fanfic?
There are legitimate answers to this: if you’re just too swamped servicing paying customers to tolerate adding any more until you expand the pipeline, OK, you can probably either put off doing so or pay someone to do it for you while you vacation on your own private island. But if you’re just making excuses, stop making excuses and start doing stuff, today.
SEO isn’t a one-day checklist activity, any more than writing quality software is. You have to build it into your processes. But getting started with it, on the other hand, really is as bit as easy as 1) Install git 2) Commit the existing code to it, and it does provide value virtually as quickly. Here, do you have five minutes? Write up a list of the top 10 keywords you would like to rank for. Check to make sure you actually use them somewhere on your site. Check to make sure your title tags on your three most important pages are useful and different. There, you’re better off than you were five minutes ago. Now get started on incorporating SEO as a first-class concern in the systems and processes you’ll need to continue creating value in the next five weeks, five months, and five years.
