
150k Small Business Website Teardown 2019 - gurgeous
https://freshchalk.com/blog/150k-small-business-website-teardown-2019
======
elevation
Not all businesses need to put effort into SEO.

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.

~~~
_dczq
I am trying to bootstrap a niche B2B service myself and having much less
success getting off the ground. I would love to hear more about how you
identify, qualify and communicate with new leads/referrals.

~~~
hhw3h
1) Have a solid offer that gets existing clients results and makes them happy.

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.

~~~
moorhosj
I would love to dive a little deeper on these strategies. How can I reach out?

~~~
hhw3h
harry [at] convopanda.com

------
jedberg
It makes me sad that "SEO consulting" exists as a thing. I understand the need
for it, but it's always just felt so dirty. It's basically someone who is an
expert at tricking a single business, and it's a constant cat and mouse game.

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. :(

~~~
cooperadymas
There are plenty of bad actors in the SEO world, and it certainly has an
overwhelmingly slimy history. But as is usually the case, the issue is more
complex than "SEO bad, good content good."

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.

------
gurgeous
Apologies for the self-promotion but I think this will be interesting to HN.
It's an analysis of a huge crawl of 150k small business websites, correlated
with google search rankings. This first chapter is focused on SEO. I'm in the
midst of writing more chapters to address things like hosting, site speed,
wordpress, etc. I'll probably also add some stats like what % of sites use
bootstrap, most popular CDN, etc. This thread is a good place to ask me for
more data points!

~~~
quickben
It would be interesting if you can evaluate the UI spam lately somehow:

    
    
      - Sign up for newsletter
      - This website wants to send you notifications
    

and more, like this one:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9bx5a3PMks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9bx5a3PMks)

~~~
gurgeous
I will have some of this in my "technical factors" chapter coming down the
road. I definitely will be evaluating the percentage of SMB websites which use
chat clients and various (annoying) marketing tools.

------
LeonM
It took me a while to understand what BBB is, maybe the author should have
taken into account that non-american readers don't know what it is.

~~~
gurgeous
Great point - I will update. For those reading here, BBB stands for the Better
Business Bureau. It is a US based nonprofit that tries to collect and address
complaints about small businesses. Very well known in the US.

~~~
calabin
The Better Business Bureau has a history of using extortion-like tactics,
pressuring businesses into paying for memberships to extract higher ratings.
The show 20/20 from ABC did a segment on them in which they were able to
procure an A-rating for Hamas.

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-...](https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/business-bureau-best-ratings-
money-buy/story?id=12123843)

------
gdcohen
Excellent insights and a well written article. One suggestion - it would be
helpful if you explained how someone can tell if they have each of the SEO
features enabled.

~~~
seanwilson
> \- it would be helpful if you explained how someone can tell if they have
> each of the SEO features enabled.

You could try my Chrome extension for this which automatically checks multiple
pages at a time for technical SEO factors:

[https://www.checkbot.io/](https://www.checkbot.io/)

All the SEO factors checked for and the reasoning behind them are explained
here (mostly based on advice from Google):

[https://www.checkbot.io/guide/seo/](https://www.checkbot.io/guide/seo/)

~~~
hnick
This looks great and I gave it a try. Is there a reason you ignore robots.txt?
Example result is 'thin content' on our shopping cart, which we say not to
index obviously :)

~~~
seanwilson
Checkbot ignores robots.txt here because Google can still index pages even
when they're included in robots.txt files.

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](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.

~~~
hnick
Thanks, that makes perfect sense. And I'm definitely guilty of that
misconception. This would definitely be last on a long list of things to clean
up for my site.

------
a13n
> 25% of all small business websites are missing an H1 tag.

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.

~~~
seanwilson
> 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).

From Google directly:

[https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en](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](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:

[https://www.checkbot.io/guide/seo](https://www.checkbot.io/guide/seo)

------
ulucs
All those correlations, but not a single regression? Each of those correlation
measures are poisoned with the biases introduced by the correlation of other
variables :(

------
austinhutch
Awesome post. My main issue is with the BBB reference data... to me that
smells like correlation not causation. It implies a level of detail and effort
spent on the page. I have a hard time believing that the reference to BBB
itself serves to improve rankings...

~~~
gurgeous
I too am very sensitive to "correlation != causation" and I tried to call it
out extensively in the report. I even included a chart at the bottom from the
famous Spurious Correlations project... Hopefully nobody gets too carried away
with the report.

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.

~~~
austinhutch
You did a great job explaining that in the article, and I'm not trying to muck
up the conversation with a generic swat down. Just specifically interested in
that particular result. Also it's likely your hard work gets reblogged into "5
things you MUST do to improve SEO!"

------
ksahin
I would be really interested by the source code for crawling and generating
the stats, do you plan to open source it?

------
sixhobbits
Did you have very specific hypotheses to test before doing analysis of the
dump? Sentences like "Websites with feature x rank y percent better" are
pretty meaningless if they're just patterns that appeared from the dump. Any
large enough sample is going to have significant looking patterns which can
have a likely reason back fitted to them, but which are simply due to
randomness.

------
patricko
Great insights! Thanks for putting this together.

It's hard to pick who to root against more, GMB or Yelp.

------
comment10
> 150k Small Business Website Teardown 2019

What a superb report.

