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Comment by nickfromseattle | Hacker News Reader

These are overly technical things that technical founders will be drawn too.

But it's not what matters (at least, until you have hundreds of pages ranking).

Google Search is very similar to LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram in the sense that the better your UX metrics are (time on-site, pages visited, return visitors, etc) the more visibility Google will give you in the SERPs.

For most SaaS, there aren't a few valuable keywords, there are hundreds of valuable pages representing thousands of keywords to drive a qualified audience.

This means after you learn how to create highly valuable content, the next step is to scale your publishing velocity to increase your footprint in the SERPs.

I've brought 4 websites from 0 to 100,000+ organics/month by focusing on creating more reader value than any other page of content Google could show for the keywords I want to rank for, and publishing hundreds of pages of content.

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> the better your UX metrics are (time on-site, pages visited

IMHO actually good UX metrics mean as low time on-site and pages visited as possible. An ideal user experience (I would, as a user, be glad to pay for) is when you visit the page, immediately find what you want, do you job as quickly as possible and go away.

A good valuable website caring about users rather than ad-spamming them would optimize for this, not for users to waste huge amounts of time wandering through pages until they can achieve their goal.

"Good UX" is dynamic, and depends on the search query, and the UX metrics of the websites you're competing with.

Recipe related searches will have different UX metric gradient than "creating a PTO policy"

I also kindly disagree with your assessment.

All things being equal, if you're Google, and you want to keep users coming back to Google Search, and you could show one of two pages for any search query, I think the only reliably metric to evaluate whether one page adds more value to the user than another page is through UX metrics.

Generally, if you can't find what you're looking for - you'll bounce and look somewhere else.

But if you Google something, then get drawn into the website because the writer knew the 'intent' behind the search, the writer/website should ALSO know what you need to know next, or likely questions to have, and serve you that content after they finish answering whatever is you originally Googl'd for.

For example, if someone searches "content writer job description", I can guess that

1. This is an employer that is actively in the hiring cycle

2. The next things they might need to know are average comp for content writers, the best place to find content writers, the best way to evaluate / test / interview them, etc.

So, if I'm competing with a page of content that is just strictly about "content writer job description", and I go above and beyond to educate you on what you'll need to know next - I should end up with better UX metrics that reflect an increase in value I provided over the page.

Love this. Have you written any more detailed content about this journey taking any one of these such websites from 0 to 100k? I'd love to read the play by play.

I looked at your profile to send you a DM, but no contact information. :(

Here is the playbook we used to grow a website from 0 to 1,500,000 organics/month: https://workello.com/0-to-1-500-000

This exactly. Focus on value for the person that hits your website and organic search will follow. I've had a slow SPA site for years but the (user generated) content, long on-site time and high rate of return visits all made it one of the top pages in my niche. Not because I was fine tuning image size, speed or meta tags.

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