Startups and SEO
John Doherty | Distilled
FounderCon 2012
How Startups Should Think About SEO
Who Am I? Director of Distilled NYC
t: @dohertyjf
http://www.distilled.net
http://www.distilled.net/u/
t: @distilled
Former
Entrepreneur
SEO is part of inbound
marketing
Image credit: @randfish
It fits here.
SEO ≠ linkbuilding
The main SEO tasks.
Keyword Research
Technical SEO
Internal Linking
External linking
Content
Why SEO Is
Relevant/Essential for
Startups
Startups can see good
growth
4,072 5,087
6,012
11,206 12,129
13,967
0
3,500
7,000
10,500
14,000
Dec-11 Jan-12 Feb-12 Mar-12 Apr-12 May-12
243% Organic Improvement in 6 months
Organic gets 82% of clicks
Paid
Paid
Organic
Organic
18% of clicks go to ads
82% of clicks go to organic
There are opportunities
Rich snippets
Ecommerce
Local/Maps
And these give better CTRs.
Videos
Author photos
Why SEO matters for
startup success.
It’s scaleable. Traffic keeps coming
as opposed to ads. It’s still work.
Paid
Organic
Organic
Paid
SEO is a longterm play
Two years
4x growth (established
company)
Startups can move quickly to exploit
opportunity.
How Startups Win
Education
http://www.distilled.net/u/ or http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo
Build Branded Mindshare
through Content
Build, outreach through SEO/PR, design it well. Video can work well.
Also, don’t put your blog on a subdomain. Links to it won’t count towards
your overall site.
Pro tip – Make people happy to
share their profile.
Delight your users, whoever they are.
Get Coverage for Content
through Outreach
Find your audience, build content for them, leverage PR
Be Solid Technically
Use SEOmoz Pro (30 day free trial then $99/mo). It’s worth it.
Case Study
Made technical fixes
Traffic Tripled
Case Study
Made technical fixes
Traffic Tripled
This stuff works
Mistakes I’ve Seen Startups
Make
No Content Outside Login
Dropbox grew because they targeted content at Digg. Their homepage
doesn’t rank for anything. [cloud storage]? You won’t find them.
“Go build links, and I want
some SEO text.”
Do cool sh*t instead.
“We’ll do SEO later”
Retrofitting is much harder than doing it right the first time.
Not integrating SEO
into all marketing.
Where do you start?
Where do you start?
http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo
1. Hire a consultant to at least do a technical and content audit of your
site.
2. Look for opportunity for links from places you’ve already been
mentioned.
3. Give content away in exchange for a link. Create content targeted at
your ideal users. Where do they hang out online?
4. Build rich pages, not squeeze pages. Squeeze pages don’t rank.
5. Read The Beginner’s Guide to SEO
Learn More
http://www.slideshare.net/dohertyjf/startup-content-marketing-distilled-
meetup
2) Where does your audience hang out online, and how can you meet
them where they are? Brainstorm one piece of content that will get you
press, links, and new users.
Bonus - Who will help you get there, or who do you need to meet?
3) What other inbound marketing channels could you leverage to hack
SEO and get links? Be creative.
4) What’s one thing you can do tomorrow to delight your customers so
that they will tell all their friends about your product? How can you then
encourage them to link to you?
Three Burning Questions
1) Think about keywords your site should rank for. Why did you choose
this keyword?
Thanks.