SEO is no longer a viable marketing strategy for startups

http://cdixon.org/2011/03/05/seo-is-no-longer-a-viable-marketing-strategy-for-startups/

by icey • 15 years ago

111 51 15 years ago

oniTony• 15 years ago

Perhaps a better conclusion would be that: startups should no longer consider SEO a viable __short-term__ marketing strategy.

Sure, the industry has spawned aggressive black-hat SEOs that make "profitable" keywords very competitive. But I feel that a startup that's carving out a niche that's not as cutthroat as "hotels", and more focused than content farms, can still make search engines a significant part of their traffic.

jsavimbi• 15 years ago

I found the argument and the conclusion to the premise to be somewhat vague and underwhelming. If Dixon thinks X, then it shall be.

That being said, studies do prove that content drives traffic and linkage and that the more linkage you have, the higher your search rankings. Whether you like that or not.

InfinityX0• 15 years ago

I agree that SEO shouldn't be the viable marketing strategy for your start-up. If that's your path to gaining traction in any market that can make you a real amount of money through organic, it's largely already been harvested and/or millions of dollars have been thrown at establishing ranking positions - such as on keywords like "cheap flights" or "car insurance".

However, in subsidiary markets where the volume isn't as large, it's a valid marketing channel for ancillary revenue streams. Much like retargeting or PPC or having a Facebook fan page, in these markets, SEO won't be your thing. It will simply be a thing, because the volume is significantly lower and often times, in the "startup" environment, what you're offering isn't necessarily something that people know how to search for.

If your aim is for the long term, throw out the bait and continue building for some long-term keyword like "cheap flights" - but in the seed-investment environment where traction must occur quicker and something positive must be seen somewhere - trying to achieve such a keyword would be a suicide mission, and as such, would almost make this post an accurate take.

aristidb• 15 years ago

I was hoping that he would also lay out the strategies that he DOES consider viable. It's hard to compare SEO and the allegedly superior alternatives without even knowing them.

Because, if there were no superior alternatives to SEO (just for argument's sake, I don't believe that), then SEO would still be a viable marketing strategy, despite its flaws.

jarin• 15 years ago

I would say some alternatives might be: CPC/CPM advertising, getting articles written about your site, lead generation, social sharing, social promotions (think Dropbox), affiliate programs, or just making a product that is so awesome people tell their friends/coworkers about it

trevelyan4• 15 years ago

I agree, and suspect this is a major factor driving higher valuations. Companies which can grow organically in this environment are undervalued at 20x revenues. Not only is there much lower risk for investors, but Google gives these companies a significant competitive advantage:

- potential competitors can't compete on price since they'll be more reliant on AdSense

- potential competitors will need more money to survive to the point they see any SEO traffic.

jdp233• 15 years ago

That's just silly. Plenty of new sites get significant amounts of traffic from search engines, and figuring how how to do better remains a viable marketing strategy for everybody. OK, it's a lot harder to dominate primary search terms than it used to be, lots of people with deep pockets, and a lot of favoritism by Google to the incumbents. But there are plenty of opportunities for creativity.

mkr-hn• 15 years ago

My site manages to get 1-3 search landings a day despite the bulk of it being less than 6 months old, and with me not knowing anything about SEO until very recently. Difficult, but possible. Sometimes it feels a bit like voodoo though. Most of the things I rank for are things I wasn't even aiming at.

The niche site I started as an experiment a few months back is actually doing better than the older site.

jdp233• 15 years ago

Agreed. And it's valuable to play around and discover what voodoo works to get that up to 3-5 search landings/day and continue to build from there ...

cdixon2• 15 years ago

I have been observing startups for the last decade and SEO has definitely gotten way harder recently for startups. Believe it or not.

jdp233• 15 years ago

I believe it. But that's not the same as "it's not a viable strategy".

a5seo3• 15 years ago

In my experience, the problem is the investors. Most investors in startups can't stomach the unpredictability, in timing OR payoff of investments in SEO.

In my case, it took 5 years of bootstrapping to hit 1M uniques per month from organic and 7 years to exit for 8 figures. If I'd had investors to contend with, my head would have likely been on a platter well before that.

gersh• 15 years ago

If you gain traction, you should gain SEO. If you aren't an SEO expert, it may be tough to gain a foothold in tough keywords. However, if you are an SEO expert, I'd assume SEO would be quite a good strategy for you.

jonknee3• 15 years ago

I don't necessarily disagree for many startups, but his example is poor. The TripAdvisor site is a better result for the reason Google featured it in the SERP--user reviews. Oyster's page is a review by one person versus TripAdvisor's 171 reviews. TripAdvisor's page is also much older, dating back to at least October 2003 when the first review was posted. Oyster was started in June 2009, which is pretty recent in the scheme of things. I'd say they are doing pretty well to rank where they do considering.

FWIW the top results are also all Four Season's actual site, which is what it should be.

SEO is tough in the web app market, but if you're a content based website, SEO was and still is a very viable strategy. Look at Stack Overflow for an example.

cdixon2• 15 years ago

Might not be the best example - but I think my overall point stands.

aristus• 15 years ago

Isn't this always the case? Startups exploit media or approaches that are new, overlooked, or both. If they weren't doing something odd they wouldn't be startups.

When they succeed, that focuses attention on the new media and techniques, and leads to crowded fields. Then the next generation has to come up with something else. Groupon did not grow on the back of SEO. It grew on a combination of Facebook, Twitter, cold-calls and good old-fashioned copywriting.

It may still be possible to succeed using some overlooked wrinkle of SEO, or SEO plus something else. It's even more likely to happen if everyone takes your advice to ignore SEO... except the one startup that doesn't.

saucerful• 15 years ago

I don't. Excuse the cynicism but it sounds to me like you're complaining. Did you happen to be involved in a start-up that isn't doing so hot and you believe Google is to blame?

Sorry but just because this is the internet doesn't mean real world business rules don't apply. There is a difference between form and content. Your only reasons for preferring Oyster over TripAdvisor is that the page is cleaner and there are less ads? Ummm if you had actually used the two services it would become clear that TripAdvisor has better content. And again, just because this is the internet doesn't mean that there is no barrier to entry. Think about the search engine market, the social networking market, the audio statistics market (c.f. the totally off Last.fm article also curretly on the front page). Try displacing those guys.

Point is, if Oyster in fact proves to be a superior website in the long run, it will hopefully (and probably) get its due. But to expect an algorithmic search engine to order results based on hope is just... wrong.

a5seo3• 15 years ago

re: links, have you heard of Mint.com? Check out their infographics as and example of aggressive, but high quality and legit link building. The one they did about 'how big is a trillion?' got hundreds of links. Here's another peice of brilliant link bait: http://feefighters.com/paypal-calculator.

If you think only black hat link builders can move the needle, you aren't meeting the right people.

Also, why can't startups just raise money to buy an existing site with inbound links? A domain is just a pointer, and handled properly, there is little downside.

trevelyan4• 15 years ago

Stack Overflow didn't bootstrap to viability off Google traffic. The other guy brought Joel onboard to get his audience, no? Which is not to be critical of Stack Overflow, but it's a bad example, not the least because Google had to manually intervene to solve its SEO issues.

jonknee3• 15 years ago

> It's also a bad example because Google had to manually intervene to solve their SEO problems.

That was kind of my point--SEO makes a huge difference in the content business. They got beat with their own content!

patio113• 15 years ago

SEO is tough in the web app market, but if you're a content based website

There is no rule that says you can't sell a web application with a content-based website. I mean, if you're using AdWords, you're essentially outsourcing the production of content leading into your landing pages to the more efficient content farms, who will get X level of results with pages tangentially related to your product festooned with ads (including your's and competitors'). Why not write the content yourself, make the quality a few notches above "How To Boil Water", leave off the competition's ads, and pay for the content once as opposed to leasing traffic from it monthly?

mashmac2• 15 years ago

I was just about to comment and say the same thing, using Bingo Card Creator as an example, then I noticed who made this comment :)

Thanks for blogging Patrick, it's a great resource for the rest of us.

bl4k• 15 years ago

A hotel review from October 2003 isn't relevant information

p0ppe• 15 years ago

But reviews from 2003 to 2011 might help you spot trends. If the same issue has been reported over the years, it's fairly certain that it's something the hotel has no plans on fixing.

gohat• 15 years ago

I've done a lot of SEO and my experience is that you can get great amounts of traffic if you think creatively and approach things the right way. If you want to gain traffic by ranking well for "music downloads," good luck! If you, however, research the music niche and find 5 keywords with low competition and 20,000 monthly searches, you could easily build good traffic.

One example - I have a health site, and realized that I could write an article on medications when they were officially named - as until then, the name was a closely kept trade secret. This type of trick could lead to gaining traffic over established players like WebMD who were less nimble.

Ultimately, you need SEO, you need great content, you need everything if you want to succeed. But SEO still works very well and still offers plenty of room for people to outmaneuver and perform the big names.

matthewlyle• 15 years ago

Why is the assumption that Oyster is more useful than TripAdvisor just because it has less ads and is "cleaner"?

sawyer• 15 years ago

Interesting article; a search engines' strength is in linking keywords to text based content, but they do a very poor job directing customers to modern web applications. Easy example: search for the term "social network", and try to locate Facebook. I gave up after five pages.

The point is that if your site is an application, rather than a repository of written content, SEO is going to mean writing keyword laced content, and then building inbound links. Obviously this is a sub-optimal way to market if you're a startup; it's far better to grow as Facebook did, by word of mouth and strong network effects.

rcavezza• 15 years ago

SEO should not be "the strategy", it should be one of many customer acquisition tools in the startup toolkit.

I also believe that the notion that you can't have a great user interface and optimize for SEO at the same time is wrong. Well optimized websites have a lot of additional content below the fold on their home pages. Most users don't see it, but the search engines do.

Re: Jonknee - SEO is tough in general to do it effectively and build backlinks you need to be createive.

RE: artisdb: He does provide a link in the comments section for what you're looking for. I'd also take a look at McClure's Slideshare for other ideas - http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pir... (acquisition part of diagram is on slide 3).

Re: Sawyer - that's a very interesting point. I'm surprised modern search engines haven't found a way around ajax and other modern techniques. i would assume they're close since they rolled out ajax tools for adsense recently.

jayzee• 15 years ago

Article is surprisingly lacking in logical rigor:

Observe X (Trip Advisor above Oyster)

Observe Y (Trip Advisor has a cluttered ad-strewn page)

Conclude that X is a result of Y.

One counter-example to refute article: Wikipedia

gamble• 15 years ago

Not a great example, but it's still disturbing to me how aggressive and universal SEO has become in the last few years. It's starting to feel like a 'virus writers versus Windows 98' situation, but with Google as the monoculture under assault.

tchock23• 15 years ago

The article may have a point about startups that are "informational sites," but not everyone is doing that type of startup.

My startup is in enterprise software and services and I had more than $200k in additional revenue last year due to SEO (of course it took me two years to get any decent SEO traction, but it was still worth it). I should note that I didn't go after primary search terms, but got this mostly through long tail keywords that were directed at my niche.

jonkelly• 15 years ago

Here's the bottom line. Don't rely on Google, Facebook, Reddit or HN for that matter. They all have their own interests, changing rules mores etc. The "best" content, app or product doesn't necessarily win in any channel. The best marketing wins and having an awesome product is just one factor in great marketing.

patio113• 15 years ago

I strongly disagree with this, and should probably blow up that disagreement into a blog post:

1) SEO is harder today than it was in, say, 2000, just like the App Store is more competitive than it was at launch. That is a long way from non-viable, though. There are recent, high profile, successful startups like Mint or OKCupid where SEO was a core traffic acquisition strategy. (OK, you will not be as good at SEO as OKCupid, but you can be as good at SEO as Mint is. They're in an uber-competitive market and found a spin on it such that the skeeziness in the space worked in their favor, because most people in consumer finance are trying to sell you a credit card and Mint was trying to save you money by, ahem, selling you a credit card.)

2) Links >>>> everything else, with regards to ranking for head keywords. Happily, startups are in a great position to get links. BCC has a couple of hundred in five years -- a YC startup can pick up a couple of hundred by launching. AirBNB practically has a hundred from PR coverage in the NYT. A single well-executed link bait or viral sensation seeded with your hundreds of linkerati friends can really, really move the needle.

3) You can still dominate large portions the tail of the keyword distribution through superior execution on your content strategy. Is this the tactic for all seasons? No, if you're just doing brand arbitrage against the same 400 New York hotels that every other person with a phonebook has access to, this will not lead to dethroning established competitors. If, on the other hand, you're finding unconquered frontier and settling it, you win by default. Can I give yet another plug for services which do not target twenty-something white and Asian males and, instead, which target the need of underserved demographics? If your primary competition is Demand Media you should ROFLstomp them for most of the keywords you actively target. (And learn from their model for scaling content creation up.)

sssparkkk• 15 years ago

Could you elaborate on why you say OkCupid was very good at SEO? Is it mainly because of their blogposts, or were they doing other things right as well?

patio113• 15 years ago

Google [online dating]. That's why I say they're very good at SEO.

As to why they have that ranking? Well, they do linkbait so well that almost isn't fair to call it linkbait any more. They also do other things. One particular tactic which used to be quite popular in dating is viral quizzes.

http://www.okcupid.com/the-death-test

They have toned down the aggressiveness of that tactic in recent years, probably after a different site got torched for it. (Plus you don't have to be quite so aggressive after you've already won -- then you can use self-reinforcing authority and translate your commanding market position into, e.g., a competitive moat like their blog posts.)

They also execute very, very well. For example, it's easy to say "Viral apps win" and it is hard to be Zynga. Similarly, it is easy to say "Get more links and you'll win" and it's hard to top OKCupid's execution on that -- most individual tactics I've seen them try have execution in the top 1%. They're #1 with a bullet at linkbait. Those quizzes are better than 99% of quizzes. Their use of the product to support the SEO is better than 99% of startups. (Humming a few bars: OKCupid has rabid fans amongst folks whose dating behavior results in banhammers at other dating sites, and they leverage that to the hilt.)

leon_• 15 years ago

SEO = digital snake oil

bauchidgw• 15 years ago

well, then startups must change the way SEO is done at a startup, they must do something that big companies can't or won't do .... i.e: link to their competition http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/07/07/startups-linking-to-your...

kevinpet• 15 years ago

I'd say link bait title, but the whole article follows it.

The sites described don't use SEO as a marketing strategy. They used SEO as a business model. Marketing is about getting people aware of your business. What's discussed in the article is getting customers to accidentally use you.

ntoshev• 15 years ago

Interestingly, Chris Dixon's own Hunch has a pretty good potential for SEO with their long tail of multiple answers questions (teach-hunch-about-you), but they do not exploit it. These are user-generated questions and answers, currently hidden from Google in Javascript. Text in the form of questions typically ranks well because this is what users often type in the search engines, and very little text on the web is phrased as questions.

melvinram• 15 years ago

Although Chris's supporting info is accurate enough, he draws a conclusion than I find to be not appropriate for many startups.

However, let me set the tone by defining at a high level what I find to be the core of SEO today (from my limited experience):

* Being indexable - Make it easy for Google to read and store your website. Building your site using web standards is easiest way to do this.

* Be relevant to what people are searching for - If someone is searching for "some phrase" and your site doesn't have those words, Google has no way to connect you to the phrase. The more content you have around the topic, the more likely your site will be considered relevant to what people are searching for.

* Build authority of your website - Quality & quantity of links are one of the primary ways Google figures out how to rank the content the are going to suggest to their visitors. Other factors play a role, such as site age, but a lot of high quality links trumps everything else.

Now that we have a foundation to start the conversation, let's dig in.

1) Startups today will have a "tougher" time with garnering traffic from SEO but that's true of almost anything at any point in time. People always complain about the good old days but what they are really saying is that the game is different now. If people from 1999 timetraveled, they'd be jealous of our overall low cost for startup and even how many people are online. Yes, times are different. Deal with it.

SEO is harder today because there are entrenched players who see the value of SEO and are willing to make the investments. With that said, a solid 70-80% of the players who are leading the SEO rankings were likely not there a couple years ago (just from anecdotal observation over time.) This means that a year from now, you could be at the top of a really competitive term that will drive your sales, if you invest the time, energy and resources it takes.

2) The fact that search rankings is more competitive now is actually a good thing. Getting ranking won't be a walk in the park but it'll be just as tough for someone else once you're leading the pack. It's a worth while competitive advantage that will be valuable when you are ready to sell and it'll help you make SALES which will bring in REVENUE. Profitable revenue will give you the fuel to live another day and eventually figure out how to really be successful. Profits trump everything, IMO!

3) Long tail search is growing and will likely become bigger than the high volume terms as people become more able to request more specific terms. This presents a lot of opportunity to the creative marketer who can guesstimate the search phrases their prospects will use and it presents low competitive overall.

4) SEO takes resources to do but it actually is best done when in combination with other things. This means the margin resources needed is fairly low. For example, if you're going to make something remarkable and attempt to get lots of PR, keeping SEO in mind will help you get a lot more out of your effort and the cost difference will likely be a tiny percentage of your overall time and money investment.

5) And lastly, SEO is good for the soul. One of the best SEO advice I got was "Why does your business/site deserve to be #1 on Google? Why should they refer people to you?" If you think about SEO from that perspective, you'll do right by your visitors and you'll improve your entire business.

For all the above reasons, I can see where Chris is coming from but I strongly disagree.

perlgeek• 15 years ago

So link trading is "black-hat SEO" now?

Yes, link trading might not be directly relevant for the user, but i consider it much less bad than link farming and spamming, so I'd rather call it "gray-hat" or so.

marcamillion• 15 years ago

I also strongly disagree with this.

Github is the perfect example of this strategy working today. It's a bit different than examples of yore, but certainly still quite lucrative.

I wrote a post about this sometime ago: http://marcgayle.com/githubs-brilliant-organic-traffic-acqui...

I can bet that if Github released their traffic data like Stack Overflow did, a large portion of their traffic would show that it comes from the long tail of many keywords associated with open-source repos from Google.

a5seo3• 15 years ago

Anyone know how Zenedy.com (YC W10) is doing with their "unviable" SEO content farming strategy?

danneu• 15 years ago

1. Who gains "initial traction" from SEO, anyways? A fresh website to Google is not indexed for an arbitrary amount of time up to many months. Word of mouth and media coverage are what give startups their momentum. Search engine ranking is more of a longterm byproduct in practice.

2. Increasing search engine ranking isn't hard. You can overpower seemingly entrenched websites with a mild link-generation campaign.

3. SEO is all about inbound links and not much else. Aside from blogspam, I haven't seen a website that seemed to compromise usability for on-page "search engine optimization", the latter being so severely deprecated that it's only peddled by people who have the word "SEO" self-proclaimed in their job title.

SEO is no longer a viable marketing strategy for startups

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