
SEO is no longer a viable marketing strategy for startups - icey
http://cdixon.org/2011/03/05/seo-is-no-longer-a-viable-marketing-strategy-for-startups/
======
patio11
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
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?

~~~
patio11
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_.)

~~~
citricsquid
I'm in England and for "online dating" I see:

Sponsored #1: Match.com Sponsored #2: top10bestdatingsites.co.uk Sponsored #3:
matchaffinity.com Ranked #1: plentyoffish.com Ranked #2: dating.guardian.co.uk
Ranked #3: eharmony.co.uk Ranked #4: mysinglefriend.com Ranked #5:
loopylove.com Ranked #6: flirtbox.com

I can't locate okcupid in the first 5 pages (at that point they were all no
name sites) this seems strange to me, is ok cupid #1 for you?

~~~
JonLim
#2 in Toronto

Guess they rank differently based on geographic location...?

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jonknee
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.

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

~~~
a5seo
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.

------
oniTony
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.

------
gohat
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.

------
InfinityX0
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.

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aristidb
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
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

------
jdp23
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.

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

~~~
a5seo
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.

------
rcavezza
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...](http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pirates-long-
version) (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.

------
kevinpet
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.

------
gamble
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.

------
marcamillion
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...](http://marcgayle.com/githubs-brilliant-
organic-traffic-acquisition)

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.

------
tchock23
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.

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ntoshev
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.

------
jayzee
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_

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jonkelly
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.

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danneu
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.

------
sawyer
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.

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trevelyan
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.

------
gersh
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.

------
perlgeek
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.

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bauchidgw
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...](http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/07/07/startups-linking-to-your-
competition-will-help-you-no-really/)

------
melvinram
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.

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

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a5seo
Anyone know how Zenedy.com (YC W10) is doing with their "unviable" SEO content
farming strategy?

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jsavimbi
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.

------
leon_
SEO = digital snake oil

