Startups and SEO

John Doherty | Distilled

FounderCon 2012

How Startups Should Think About SEO

Who Am I? Director of Distilled NYC

t: @dohertyjf

e: john.doherty@distilled.net

http://www.distilled.net

http://www.distilled.net/u/

t: @distilled

Former

Entrepreneur

SEO is part of inbound

marketing

Image credit: @randfish

It fits here.

SEO ≠ linkbuilding

The main SEO tasks.

Keyword Research

Technical SEO

Internal Linking

External linking

Content

Why SEO Is

Relevant/Essential for

Startups

Startups can see good

growth

4,072 5,087

6,012

11,206 12,129

13,967

0

3,500

7,000

10,500

14,000

Dec-11 Jan-12 Feb-12 Mar-12 Apr-12 May-12

243% Organic Improvement in 6 months

Organic gets 82% of clicks

Paid

Paid

Organic

Organic

18% of clicks go to ads

82% of clicks go to organic

There are opportunities

Rich snippets

Ecommerce

Local/Maps

And these give better CTRs.

Videos

Author photos

Why SEO matters for

startup success.

It’s scaleable. Traffic keeps coming

as opposed to ads. It’s still work.

Paid

Organic

Organic

Paid

SEO is a longterm play

Two years

4x growth (established

company)

Startups can move quickly to exploit

opportunity.

How Startups Win

Education

http://www.distilled.net/u/ or http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

Build Branded Mindshare

through Content

Build, outreach through SEO/PR, design it well. Video can work well.

Also, don’t put your blog on a subdomain. Links to it won’t count towards

your overall site.

Pro tip – Make people happy to

share their profile.

Delight your users, whoever they are.

Get Coverage for Content

through Outreach

Find your audience, build content for them, leverage PR

Be Solid Technically

Use SEOmoz Pro (30 day free trial then $99/mo). It’s worth it.

Case Study

Made technical fixes

Traffic Tripled

Case Study

Made technical fixes

Traffic Tripled

This stuff works

Mistakes I’ve Seen Startups

Make

No Content Outside Login

Dropbox grew because they targeted content at Digg. Their homepage

doesn’t rank for anything. [cloud storage]? You won’t find them.

“Go build links, and I want

some SEO text.”

Do cool sh*t instead.

“We’ll do SEO later”

Retrofitting is much harder than doing it right the first time.

Not integrating SEO

into all marketing.

Where do you start?

Where do you start?

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

1. Hire a consultant to at least do a technical and content audit of your

site.

2. Look for opportunity for links from places you’ve already been

mentioned.

3. Give content away in exchange for a link. Create content targeted at

your ideal users. Where do they hang out online?

4. Build rich pages, not squeeze pages. Squeeze pages don’t rank.

5. Read The Beginner’s Guide to SEO

Learn More

http://www.slideshare.net/dohertyjf/startup-content-marketing-distilled-

meetup

2) Where does your audience hang out online, and how can you meet

them where they are? Brainstorm one piece of content that will get you

press, links, and new users.

Bonus - Who will help you get there, or who do you need to meet?

3) What other inbound marketing channels could you leverage to hack

SEO and get links? Be creative.

4) What’s one thing you can do tomorrow to delight your customers so

that they will tell all their friends about your product? How can you then

encourage them to link to you?

Three Burning Questions

1) Think about keywords your site should rank for. Why did you choose

this keyword?

Thanks.