150k Small Business Website Teardown 2019
freshchalk.com
freshchalk.com
I'm bootstrapping a niche B2B service. In this space I have the luxury of not relying on google for leads; word of mouth referrals have generated consistent growth by bringing in clients who initially need a few hours of consulting but eventually transition to being customers of my service.
Because my webpage is more of a statement of legitimacy than a sales tool; it doesn't need to rank on google. By the time my clients need to access my website for some information, they know my domain because they've already corresponded with me via email.
Since I haven't needed google's help for my business to grow, and I believe their level of dominance is bad for the world, I use robots.txt to block google's crawler, and generally do anything to avoid receiving any help from them.
This strategy could work for a non-SaaS/consulting company too; if I were running a bike-repair shop on main street, I would build my business through word of mouth promotion within niche bike communities to generate referrals. Once a neighborhood, city, or region full of people trust your brand, a negative yelp review or a google algorithm won't sink you.
If google doesn't build your business, it can't take your business away.
I know I do this, for a couple of reasons. One, so I don't have to type in the whole domain. Two, to avoid accidentally hitting a typo-squatter.
For years I'd moonlighted as a backend developer; I'd meet graphic designers who were making amazing-looking websites but were in over their heads when it came to integrating database or API functionality into a client's project since they were more into design than coding. I would code up an integration and bill them for a few hours of effort. This would always lead to an hour or two of future maintenance, but wasn't a reliable revenue generator.
On one project, the client required an web integration with an ERP system so their website could reflect inventory status; the ERP vendor provided an API but it was rate limited and couldn't support production web traffic volume, so I coded up a cache layer and a few custom reports. During the process, I discovered that the API documentation was incomplete so I ended up corresponding with the CTO in order to complete the work.
After that project was over, I hoped to leverage my newfound familiarity with the API to win more business, so I asked the CTO to forward any of his customers that needed integrations beyond the scope that his company usually supports. After a few referrals, I was able to see some common patterns of needs not supported directly by the 3rd party API and was able to develop a service to support those use cases. Referrals from the CTO of the ERP company carry weight with my clients, who in turn have been happy enough with my service that they have also been a source of new leads.
The combination of 2nd and 3rd party referrals has continued to generate new clients for me almost every month, and since my infrastructure costs are relatively fixed, every new client is gravy.
Long term, I will need to automate more of the onboarding process in order to scale up the number of new clients I can onboard in a week. And there are many other considerations as a business grows. But doing good consulting work and then asking clients for referrals was the pattern that allowed me to find the market for the niche SaaS that I developed.
2) ask for referrals in a polite systematic way.
3) send hyper personalized outreach to similar folks introducing yourself and sharing a bit about the results you’ve achieved for clients. Email and LinkedIn work great right now for B2B.
If you’d like to chat more happy to do so. I help B2B SaaS companies breakthrough $1M ARR and we generally start off with these types of strategies to get predictable higher quality revenue quickly.
Depending on where you live, there might be some industry group meeting, exhibitions, online formums,Linkedin groups,etc. Often it cascades pretty quickly after the first few, as business people are willing to recommend companies/people. Just a couple of days ago went to a fantastic training session with this guy,so from now on,if anyone asks,I'd point them his way.
And Google will even tell you how to get a high ranking, which pretty much boils down to "make content that humans find compelling and Google will too". It's all the other "tricks" that might work for a while until Google gets wise and changes their algorithm and then we all start the dance over.
It was just like the spammers on reddit -- they'd come up with some new trick, we'd block it, they'd find another new trick, and so on, but all along, the stuff that got to the top was for the most part things that people found interesting. Post interesting content was always a good strategy, even if there were a trick or two that might work to boost you on any given week.
I just wish we could all just make good content and not worry about gaming the directory, but a few bad actors make that impossible for the rest of us. :(
I've been preaching basically what you said as the core tenet of SEO for over a decade. (I would add a "that people are actively looking for" clause to "make content that humans find compelling.") This is much more challenging than one would think, and can really benefit from someone experienced. Whether you call that Search Engine Optimization or Content Marketing or Copywriting or just Writing, done correctly it all boils down to this same principle.
That alone often warrants someone to assist a business, as most businesses don't have the internal resources or knowledge to do it entirely themselves.
But there's more that falls under the SEO umbrella.
1. The technical aspects of configuring a site to be indexable, accessible, and well-architectured. This might have traditionally fallen under the guise of a webmaster, and for larger sites might fall to more specialized experts, but for the large majority of sites the only people working on these issues are "SEOs".
2. Actually going out and promoting a website in some way. The best content in the world will go unnoticed by man and machine if it's not discoverable from some other source. This has traditionally meant "link building" or (for a long time) "guest posting", and might also include PR or advertising depending on who you ask.
3. Monitoring the results and improving the approach. It's great to say "make content that is compelling" but if you're spending the resources to do this then you need to monitor and analyze the effects it has. This can get incredibly complex, but again, for most websites, is performed by an SEO.
Google "recipe for X." Mostly, the first 3 results will be recipe pages preceded by junk text describing recipes in paragraph/narrative form... tailored to the ranking algorithms.
Google "online dating sites." The first couple of acreens will be ads (high value ones). Mostly, they'll be "aggregators" which rank the top 5 dating sites that pay affiliate fees.
The first few organic results will be similar to the ads, but worse, because these need to cater to search engines, first and worry about getting users to their customers second.
Where the value of clicks is high, what happens with search results isn't at all like the "for the most part." For the most part, person people search for "penguins" or "Penelope Cruz." Here, the advertisers and SEO guys aren't involved. It's in specific little, high revenue areas where spam/advertising/SEO outguns everything else. You can feasibily "just write good content" about penguins and rank highly.
For one example "content people like" on YouTube is apparently headshots with exaggerated expressions, large colourful text, and arrows and circles and other "exciting" features. Not to mention the trend towards a generic "YouTube voice" inflection that they all seem to share if they stay on the platform long enough.
There's plenty of great stuff, but it doesn't seem to find its way onto my suggestion feed at all.
I just switched to DDG as my default search because Google's results are so bad now that the first three or more pages are all zero information e-commerce sites. I used to never click beyond page one.
However I still found a bunch of things really useful (see later).
Yelp as far as I can see from my own experiences isn't really that big of a thing in the UK, but TripAdvisor is, especially for hospitality sector. Google local/My Business is certainly becoming a thing here in the UK as was pointed out to me by a buddy who runs an outdoor activities centre in the Highlands. He has a tremendous understanding of Google and funnelling folks into his biz and banging on about it in the pub the other night.
Also in the UK we don't really have such a thing as BBB that google recognises as boosting the juice. Sure we have the British Chambers of Commerce and the CBI, but they're geared towards much larger businesses than your local SME (Small to Medium Sized Enterprise). There are local "Chambers of Commerce" in each council area, but meh.
That said, I'm working on unfecking a site that's never had image alt tags, no canonical refs (you can get at the same content from multiple URL's), out of nearly 200 pages there was one solitary H1, page titles were a mess...it goes on. The customer paid their previous "agency" a tidy sum for this site and somehow SEO was never looked at.
I did find your article genuinely useful though. I'm a freelancer now, and it seems I need to learn how to SEO as well as be a developer. I look forward to your follow ups.
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I can imagine that for some businesses this is also true. Not to mention people who are new to creating websites and don’t feel ready for their in-progress site to be indexed, or business that are in the process of closing down.
I think Squarespace does the right thing by making this option easy for the user to control. It’s weird to me that you encourage people to “blame” them. That sounds like a hidden agenda sort of bias to me.
As a former owner/operator of a small golf facility, I have experienced this diet-extortion first hand, and heard about similar experiences from other owners of similar businesses in our area (Chicago).
https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/business-bureau-best-ratings-...
It doesn't take much effort to spell out what the acronym is when you first introduce it, and you do your audience a disservice by not introducing it.
Of course you can google it, but the point is you're making people go out of their way to understand what it is that you're talking about.
Be conscientious people, and FFS (for fucks sake), spell out your acronyms.
You could try my Chrome extension for this which automatically checks multiple pages at a time for technical SEO factors:
All the SEO factors checked for and the reasoning behind them are explained here (mostly based on advice from Google):
If you don't want pages to be indexed, you should use a "noindex" tag instead of robots.txt. It's a common misconception that robots.txt stops indexing when it doesn't. See:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en
> Important! For the noindex directive to be effective, the page must not be blocked by a robots.txt file. If the page is blocked by a robots.txt file, the crawler will never see the noindex directive, and the page can still appear in search results, for example if other pages link to it.
For small sites you can get use the free version you wont be able to save any results and are limited to the number of URLs you can crawl.
This SEO advice seems dated. Pretty sure Google doesn't care about which tags you use anymore, just that there's a visual heading (some big text at the top of the page).
In your research, did you find that sites without an H1 tag performed worse, SEO-wise? The article doesn't seem to mention this.
> SMB websites with a meta description rank 17% higher than websites without
Hard to tell if this is causal or just correlational. Maybe sites that have meta tags just tend to be better, SEO-wise, unrelated to the fact that they have meta tags.
I don't think you should give this advice unless you add meta tags to your site and then see an increase in your organic search traffic.
From Google directly:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en > Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide
> Use heading tags to emphasize important text
> ...
> Similar to writing an outline for a large paper, put some thought into what the main points and sub-points of the content on the page will be and decide where to use heading tags appropriately.
Nobody is saying you have to have H1 tags to rank well, but it's not going to hurt and is likely to help. It's better to tell Google what the main heading of the site is instead of Google having to guess and getting it wrong.
> I don't think you should give this advice unless you add meta tags to your site and then see an increase in your organic search traffic.
Google says description meta tags don't impact your search rank but as these descriptions can optionally be shown to users, well written ones should increase click through rates. Google recommend you write meta descriptions in https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en as well.
I have a list of SEO recommendations like the above that are mostly sourced from Google here:
If an analysis such as this finds such correlations, it's likely that Google's algorithms have also picked up on them. In other words: maybe people diligent about meta tags and H1s also write better content and should therefore rank higher (correlation). But "good writing" is hard to judge algorithmically, and Google may therefore well be turning some correlations into causations.
The brutal truth is many business websites are terrible
It's impossible to determine causation at scale, unfortunately. One could argue that business owners who curate great BBB rankings and feature the badge are more likely to instill trust in consumers, which in turn will result in longer time on site and therefore better rankings.
:)
It's hard to pick who to root against more, GMB or Yelp.
What a superb report.