Ask Patio11: Why don't you make SEO tools?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1928838

by wolfparade • 16 years ago

53 29 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

SEO is your bread and butter and from my research the existing tools aren't stellar. You also already have a good following on Hacker News which is exactly the market that would need and use the tools? I guess my real question should be if you were to make tools what would they be?

il• 16 years ago

I don't mean to be a jerk, and I'm going to be downvoted into oblivion for this, but I don't think Patrick is the brilliant SEO wizard some people on here make him out to be, certainly not anywhere near a Rand Fishkin type level.

He's an excellent writer and marketer, but it's not like he's privy to some magical SEO techniques that would explode SEO traffic.

I would be surprised if he uses SEO tools much himself. From what I've seen, he's very good at identifying small niches, creating good content, etc. Basically good SEO fundamentals, not cutting edge trickery.

sabat• 16 years ago

He has mentioned how lacking some of the tools are -- he once referred to Google Website Optimizer as "the devil" IIRC.

Whether Patrick has the inclination to work on tools like this, I don't know. I think it'd be a good idea for him to write a book, too, but he pooh-pooh'd that idea on TechZing because there's just not enough money in it.

bigiain2• 16 years ago

You may be right, but at the same time his niche success is much closer to "what I'm looking for" than the latest SEO-trick-de-jour.

While I'm impressed by the ability of people like Rank and Greywolf to identify and exploit new-found SEO techniques for short term profit, with the knowledge that Matt Cutts' team is going to be hot on their trail as soon as anybody notices, I'm _significantly_ more interested in Patrick's longterm sustainable business strategy.

While I might be prepared to go out on a grey-hat SEO limb for an idea of my own with only a marginal chance of success, I'm _much_ more cautious about risking Google blackholeing any great ideas I've got, or any of my clients' sites...

I guess what I'm saying is that "excellent writing and marketing" _is_ a magical SEO technique. It's not a $50k/month affiliate scheme or a $2k/day Adwords trick, but I suspect Patrick's BCC is a properly valuable business that someone might sensibly buy off him one day. I'm not so sure I'd ever consider buying a quick moneymaking website off Rand or Michael...

vog2• 16 years ago

> and I'm going to be downvoted into oblivion for this

From the HN guidelines:

Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you.

zackattack• 16 years ago

I feel this is different. patio11 is one of the most popular members of the community (probably the most popular, aside from pg himself) and to disagree with an estimation of his value is to violate the norms of the community. il is simply signaling that he recognizes the norms of the community and is voicing a dissenting opinion: in this case, perhaps the appropriate social maneuver.

I eagerly welcome discussion on this topic.

tptacek• 16 years ago

I don't think Patrick would claim to be a "brilliant SEO wizard". He's made mention of friends who are.

Patrick's SEO abilities are notable on HN because he has managed to run a business quantifiably tied to SEO and search advertising. He's hasn't just "done" SEO. Lots of HN people can claim that. He's successfully taken a product to market with it. That's impressive.

Referring to Patrick as an SEO undervalues him. SEO isn't really his schtick. Engineered product marketing is. Engineered marketing includes SEO, but also A/B testing, metrics, optimization, and a grab bag of other "lean startup" ideas.

(Also, in case it isn't obvious, Patrick is popular here because he writes thoughtfully, helpfully, and often.)

patio112• 16 years ago

Please rap my knuckles soundly with a wooden spoon if I ever refer to myself as a wizard in a context unrelated to Dungeons and Dragons.

aaronwall5• 16 years ago

I can confirm that Patrick knows more about SEO than 98% of SEO experts.

I know this because he is a member of our community and we chat often, I tell him stuff that is off the record & sometimes he evolves the model & pushes my model of thinking in new directions.

If I had his programming skills my goal would to be able to retire by the end of next year. :D

Probably the only thing that holds Patrick back in terms of aggressively using SEO to make a ton of money is that he isn't primarily driven by making a boatload of money. Some people are, but he isn't.

bigiain2• 16 years ago

My first guess is that he's smart enough to realise the somewhat greater competition for all the good keywords you'd be facing if your product was "SEO tools" compared to "bingo cards"...

If you had to choose _one_ vertical to be in, would _you_ chose one where every competitor in it knew all the dirty SEO tricks in the book?

aaronwall5• 16 years ago

This is a bit ironic, but inside the field of SEO I don't think search rankings matter that much.

Anytime you sell something which is a higher end service or an abstract type of service what drives sales is word of mouth recommendations rather than rankings. This is true for the higher end of the legal spectrum, the higher end of the health spectrum, and the higher end for any b2b services sort of business model.

Those who are buying based on rankings will see the Google AdWords ads for $149 SEO and such...and get sucked into buying trash. Those who are even cheaper will get scammed by their domain registrar or web host.

It is hard to make much money in the SEO game teaching others or providing tools to other. It is much easier to make more as a publisher, as Patrick stated.

One of the reasons I haven't invested more into some tools area is just how much stuff is becoming freely accessible. Google's keyword tool is amazing, Google analytics is amazing, some of the competitive research tools are awesome & cheap.

When you get down to it, its hard to automate the link parts without running into issues. Automating some of the link research areas is still an area for innovation, but most the stuff around keyword research, keyword organization & general content creation have already been heavily commoditized.

Another area where some folks work is baking a semi-legitimate cloaking service into their SEO product & then making it seem legitimate by only working with huge brands who agree to minimum contract amounts in the 5 or 6 figures per month. That model works well for the SEO because they typically get paid by the click, but it is pretty crappy for the client because they end up reliant on a tool that can be pulled out from under them at any time.

Brokering links is a huge business as well...but its sorta a gray area.

patio112• 16 years ago

For your future reference, I have an email address and answer at least half of all questions asked to it. (100% for elementary school teachers.)

1) Providing value in a scalable fashion in SEO is hard, because Google has an incentive to make it hard. If SEO were only as hard as AdWords, Google would lose billions of dollars. Google considers virtually any repeatable process that improves rankings to be black hat. I don't enjoy having to joust with a giant team of PhDs who have infinite budget.

2) The SEO tools space is hard. Small-scale website owners are often very skeptical that there is positive ROI in SEO. (There is positive ROI in SEO. Crikey, if you learn one thing from me this year, learn that.) You have to do huge amounts of teaching to raise people to the point where they can begin to benefit from it. That starts, literally, at "What is a search engine?", because most website owners do not know, especially in small business.

For marginally savvier website owners, like the average HNer, you can skip some of the teaching and proceed directly to "I don't want to pay you money for this." You've been on the same HN I have for the last year, right? We talk a good game about raising $50,000 each of a dozen angels and valuations in the tens of millions and whatnot, but what happens every single time someone suggests raising prices past, oh, $20 a month?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1510986 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1780348 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1357592

SEO makes me thousands a month. I'm not interested in selling it for less than many hundreds a month, at the low end.

3) Enterprise sales is not my idea of fun. Selling SEO to people who really would seriously benefit from it -- companies which do a lot of transactions online -- requires a high touch sales process. I'm not incapable of that -- I do it for consulting -- but it isn't my passion in life, and it wouldn't scale easily without me building a sales force. That requires a whole lot of skills (hiring, managing salesmen, showing up promptly at nine to an office somewhere, etc) that I don't have experience with, natural aptitude for, or any reason to suspect that I'd be really good at.

4) What would it do, really? (Your "real" question.)

Broadly speaking,

+ SEO analytics: Hard to demonstrate value. Most obvious feature sets are well represented by free competitors. Significant competition from SEO training providers who like to throw in a bag of tools subscriptions to make the $N00 a month fee look cheaper.

+ Tools which purport to "do" SEO for you: if it works Google will call it black hat, if it doesn't work it is snake oil. I have seen an awful lot of snake oil.

+ Demand Media In A Box: Probably the best SEO tool I can think of writing -- automate topic selection and direct outsourced production of content for it. Let's hypothetically pretend that I both was capable of and wanted to write this: what is my incentive to selling it to people who pay little money and need lots of handholding when instead I could point it at any problem domain I wanted and make a million dollars each time?

5) What is the opportunity cost?

I'm pretty good at what I do: I make and sell software, and I do occasional consulting for other people who mostly make and sell software. Consulting is fantastically lucrative, and would (and has) helped me get together enough money to launch any software/service I care to.

I picked out one I thought was a good bet, and am busy implementing it. Ask me next December, but I am cautiously optimistic, in a way I have never been optimistic about SEO tools.

THAT SAID:

There may be a profitable, addressable market for SEO tools. There certainly is for SEO-related training/services -- SEOBook and SEOMoz are both doing quite well. YC has funded at least one SEO-related company.

I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole, though.

wolfparade2• 16 years ago

Sorry about that, I couldn't find your email address on your blog and didn't think support @ bingocardcreator was the correct outlet. Maybe you could add your email to your HN description, but understand if you don't.

frankacter• 16 years ago

For future reference, email on the about page of his blog:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/about

wolfparade2• 16 years ago

I think "Demand media in a box" is brilliant. It is exactly what I would want in SEO tools. I have a problem domain where I need SEO traffic. You obviously know how to find good free lance writers and you can teach them all the SEO basic and anything else they need to know. So it's like consulting but scalable or it's like running a free lance writing website but target at making great SEO content and picking topics in the problem domain space to write about. The reason you don't just do this and apply it to any problem domain is because of scale at the end of day in SEO you need to sell a product and I don't think you can produce 1000s of products

mattgratt• 16 years ago

I believe CopyPress by BlueGlass (http://www.copypress.com/) is this. And those guys are some SEO geniuses - like Greg Boser?

robryan• 16 years ago

Can this process really be automated in any way that Google would not consider black hat?

gacba• 16 years ago

The problem is not "Is this possible?", but how long before Google recognizes it and then classifies it as black hat, thereby causing anyone who uses the technique to get downranked. The problem with any popular SEO technique or tool is that it will eventually attract the attention of Google and then be evaluated as "black" or "white" hat.

kriru• 16 years ago

I have done loads of SEO research and no tool comes close seomoz.org . They have created their OWN index similar to that of google's . I would make a similar tool or maybe even better

nickfromseattle• 16 years ago

Can you expand on 'no tool comes close.'? What makes Seomoz pro tools stand out?

i-like-water2• 16 years ago

I used to think there was some magic sauce to SEO - that only good content with proper promotion would get high rankings. I've worked with SEO consultants on every level. I've worked with two separate individuals who are extremely well known (sorry NDA prevents sharings names), hired writers, and outsourced work overseas. For my particular industry, which i won't share because it will identify me, my content is pretty much un-linkable. You don't want to talk about it. I paid a writer for years to write top quality content that is actually useful to users and promoted it accordingly. Because good content is what Google wants, right? Wrong.

After spending well over $100k in SEO i can tell you sadly the most effective tactic has been spam. Yep, tons of links on sites, setting up gateway pages that are focused on particular keywords, spamming social sites with links, setting up blogs to target keywords, etc.. I've hired/fired about 5 different companies in India and finally found one that is working magic for us.

Google's algorithm is not a mystery - most 'SEO' people will try to sell you some snake oil. I was paying 10k a month to a top name SEO consultant (very popular SEO book, well respected) and never felt so cheated in my life. Beyond the basics of SEO like semantic structure of your HTML and URL's - SEO is primarily a popularity contest.

naithemilkman• 16 years ago

thank you for confirming my suspicions

pbhjpbhj2• 16 years ago

>Google's algorithm is not a mystery - most 'SEO' people will try to sell you some snake oil.

Google's current ranking algorithm is a mystery. Sure we have some good clues to go on but outside of Google's own info (which on at least one occassion I've considered to be a deliberate attempt to mislead, though I might be wrong) or industrial espionage the only way to determine the nature of the algo is to experiment (or use other's experiments).

Yes they have a heavy reliance on site authority and the external link structure but this is not all there is.

Good content is arguably what Google wants because it is how they mine their product (people) to be delivered to their customers. Whether their algo is optimised to deliver good content is a separate issue - you clearly think not.

Haven't you been stung with any of the algo updates?

tlack• 16 years ago

I've also observed that off site factors (incoming links) trump onsite factors (optimizing content and producing more of it). I think Google feels that it's way easier for a black hat to come up with great SEO-focused content then it is for them to engineer a lot of authority links, even if the latter is becoming easier and easier all the time.

aaronwall5• 16 years ago

Follow the money.

What % of spam sites are wrapped in AdSense? Greater than 5%? Greater than 50%?

For all Google's talk of content quality, they are clearly willing to make some concessions with who they have as business partners and the type of "content" they are willing to fund.

aaronwall5• 16 years ago

That comment sorta makes me cringe for choice of branding, as sometimes when anyone who talks bad about someone with a "very popular SEO book" people will assume that it is me.

I would just like to clarify that I have never had a customer paying 5 figures a month that was unhappy with what they got from me. ;)

Also agree with you that spammy links can work better than what one would think if they attended Google's sermons about quality links. Though typically from a risk profile it is better to mix and match so whatever your promoting doesn't stick out as an outlier & get whacked at some point.

i-like-water2• 16 years ago

Just to clarify it is not Aaron.

Ask Patio11: Why don't you make SEO tools?

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