Don't fall into the SEO trap | Hacker News Reader

Don't fall into the SEO trap

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29 pointsnithyad19 comments

While I guess I can get behind "Don't do time sucking ineffective SEO when you could be implementing marketing which scales", the rest of the post strikes me as misguided. You can end up with traffic dominated by SEO over referrals for many reasons. One is being good at SEO. One is having a strong brand on the Internet. (I'd put money on over 90% of first time visits to, eg, 37Signals coming from Google. That isn't because they're particularly focused on SEO, but because Google is so many orders of magnitude more popular than the sum of every page which mentions them.)

Another plausible reason is being in a non-techy market, because you run headlong into the 1/10/89 activity pyramid except it is closer to 1/10/989: people who can't tell the difference between the green Googles and the blue Googles don't often start blogs to talk about their abiding love for invoicing software, and they don't come to websites directly because they have learned a way which works to access your Googles and that other way with the typing a website email address never really worked that well. (They still can make great customers, though.)

What is the 1/10/99 activity pyramid?

And yes, this doesn't really apply to non-technical markets, remember the "Facebook login" debacle? There's a whole slew of users that don't use the address bar, they just use the Googles.

99 visits, 10 demos, 1 paying customer ?

Historically, a rough rule of thumb is that there is one content creator to every ten people who interact around content (say, comment on it) to every hundred people who consume content. You can play around with the numbers a bit (they're not really that important -- it is an order of magnitude guesstimate) and come up with 1:10:89 as ratios of creators : interacters: consumers.

This is an important thing to keep in mind, since as an SEO you'll typically be wanting to influence folks in those first two categories with the eventual intention of increasing your reach among folks in the last category who only want to pull out their credit cards.

If you want to get into it, you can do a lot of sociological work on how creators are quirky fish and how/why to optimize for their preferences. (For example, there is a strong anticommercialist streak among many influential folks on the Internet, so a core skill for businesses is not looking like they're just in this to separate you from your money while still successfully separating people from their money.)

Of the people that visit a site, you'll get one 'producer,' ten passive signups, and 99 bounces, basically.

It's like when you see those twitter statistics that suggest only a fraction of the userbase actually Tweets, and the rest are consuming.

This is relevant with regards to the 'Why aren't people talking about you?' angle that they bring up.

Writing good and useful content (like you do patio) is always a great idea. However, trying too hard to work on SEO without understanding your target audience is what we are debating in the article. If you can turn visitors into customers, more search traffic is great. However if you can hardly turn any visitors into customers and still keep working primarily on SEO to bring in more traffic, you may be wasting your time. The idea is to work on your funnel as much as you work on bringing people to the site.

We wrote the post because we see a lot of people focusing on traffic when it makes more sense to tighten and work on the funnel. We have been guilty of this too :)

Don't forget people who don't know what the address bar is. They will Google "www.companyname.com".

And people who can't remember if it's .com, .net, .org, etc will Google "companyname".

This group is only likely to become larger once ICANN start allowing registration of new gTLDs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level_domain#New_to...)

Many older traditional businesses (like the one I work for) barely, if ever, look at the analytics. It's just not an important part of their marketing strategy. That may be a mistake but it is far more common than you might think. If you provide a great service or product that genuinely fills a need then people will seek you out.

I've spent the last few years getting very heavily into SEO, working out ways to increase relevant search traffic to my business sites. I've spent lots of time on seobook - an awesome private community for anyone serious about learning SEO.

In many ways having a good understanding of SEO is fantastic. When you understand what search engines want, and you know how to give it to them, you can get traffic that your competitors have no idea even exists. The small guy that understands SEO has a tremendous advantage over the big guy that doesn't.

However, for a small software company, I think it can be important to avoid going overboard. If you're making software (or a web service or whatever), SEO is just one piece of the puzzle, and there are only so many hours in the day. Generally only 24. Keeping close track of rankings, keywords, inbound links, and new linking opportunities is time consuming, and, when you're operating in just one niche, you can reach a point of diminishing returns. For niche products, there's only so much relevant traffic out there.

If you have multiple SEO-savvy competitors competing for your keywords, then maybe you do need to focus more time on day-to-day SEO, to keep the traffic rolling in. But many niche software businesses are doing something new, and actually don't have all that much competition for the keywords that line up well with what they're offering.

I think that often the best way for small software businesses to approach SEO it is to bake it into the systems they create, then leave those systems to do their job, building links, awareness and search traffic that will increase over time without direct involvement. By "systems" I don't mean scrapers and bots, I mean systems that encourage people to market your site for you (including building you good, natural links), and maybe systems that generate good link-worthy content for you as well.

The only thing worse than having a very high percentage of your traffic come from Google is not having it at all.

My sites typically get 75% of their traffic from search engines. I know that it could be all gone tomorrow, so I've worked on developing new sources of referrals. I still haven't found anything that delivers traffic as consistently as SEO.

In fact, generating advertising revenue from long tail traffic is a big part of my business. I don't feel like I'm in a death trap. Implementing the advertising is actually one of the best things that has happened to my business in a long time.

My company is a content business, not a software business, but I've never worried that I'm over-optimizing. If anything, I feel like I spend too little time micro-optimizing, and I spend a lot of time focusing on SEO.

Exactly our point. If you clearly know that search traffic works for you, invest most resources there. However if you are a resource constrained startup building a community (like quora for example) you may wanna keep SEO as your second or third priority. Your number one priority, atleast early on should be to make sure people are interacting on your site.

I agree that your product should be your #1 focus. Lots of users landing on a site that offers a poor experience is a waste. However, the problem with that is that investments in SEO compounds over time. Not only are aged links valuable, but as your rankings increase, you tend to build more links.

Aaron Wall calls it Self Reinforcing Authority: http://www.seobook.com/archives/002033.shtml

A good user experience can also offer compounding returns, but it's hard to test and improve user experience without users. SEO can provide a steady, free stream of users that enables you to test changes large and small at a statistically significant level. That's really valuable.

This is a viable concern, but it applies to pretty much any activity a startup can engage in. There are a lot of paths to revenue you can choose to take, and maybe over-optimizing is an easy one to be led down, but I don't think that this is a danger that is unique to SEO. Ignoring SEO and your analytics data is probably equally dangerous and just as common.

TLDR: if most of your traffic comes from search you haven't written enough linkbait articles...

SEO has diminishing returns. the basics don't take long and provide great results. trying to micro-optimize to jump up a spot or two takes tons of time and energy, and since there's some voodoo magic in the mix, might not yield positive results.

I'm going to have to completely disagree with you. A very basic SEO strategy might get you ranked for your basic brand related search terms but if you are in a niche with any real level of competition that is all you'll get. If you have a deep understanding of SEO and the ability to implement complex SEO strategies you hold the key to significantly improving the quantity and quality of your traffic. Moving from position 5 to position 1 is likely to increase your traffic for that term 5-10x.

and for a company that has multiple employees, a finished product, and/or is actively looking for user acquisitions, that is a good thing to spend time on -- SEO, conversions, A/B testing, etc.

for a smaller startup that is still trying to develop their product and push out an MVP, their best bang for the buck is going to be hitting the effective basics until they're ready and able to spend more time on more in-depth things.

This article makes a good point.

But the problem is that Google controls traffic to that extent. Almost any website if asked honestly will say that at least 60% and more likely 80% or more of their traffic comes from Google.

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