
Don't fall into the SEO trap - nithyad
http://teamblog.supportbee.com/2011/01/18/dont-fall-into-the-seo-trap/
======
patio11
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.)

~~~
ZoFreX
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.

~~~
patio11
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.)

------
tjmaxal
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.

------
bromley
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.

------
WillyF
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.

~~~
prateekdayal
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.

~~~
WillyF
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.

------
jeffreyrusso
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.

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

------
noodle
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.

~~~
jpzeni
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.

~~~
noodle
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.

------
lynx44
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.

