SEO For Startups

In your startup, if your main marketing or user acquisition is based around SEO, stop NOW.

SEO is volatile and hard. I have been doing since before google existed and I look for other method of growth if I can.

Since Google came along there were once glory days when you could stick a page up, add a bit of content and then throw a few anchor text links in and unless you were going after “casino” or “car hire malaga” you were in.

That is not the case now.

Investors or savvy one will pretty much disregard this as a scalable strategy.

Let me give you one example, retailmenot, a listed company lost massive amounts of traffic due to a Google update. Share prices fell, etc etc. They are a Google Ventures backed company! So if they can get nailed so can you.

In fairness, their SEO was brilliant, they had the foresight to avoid keyword rich anchors which probably helped them loads.

Investors largely hate volatile sources of traffic.

It was suggested to me that if SEO is the primary source of traffic then half the value.

Now consider PPC, which is scalable and known, if you can make the user acquisition / revenue work from a paid model, you will be on much safer ground.

The facts as I see them are this:

1. Get your titles, headers and usual on page stuff sorted. This is a short task, minimal time.
2. Make sure you have stuff like Google Webmaster Tools sorted so you get updates.
3. Set up alerts in Analytics for increased and decreases in traffic. (Covered in a future post)
4. Add decent content if it helps your users and carry on with the rest of your business.
5. DO NOT BANK/RELY ON GOOGLE traffic, treat it as a nice bonus.