SEO for Startups: A Blueprint for B2C Success

One of the top results for Google searchers looking to learn Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for startups is a Huffington Post article. It tells readers to perfect on-page optimization, build social media platforms and pursue guest blogging. Although there is nothing wrong with the advice per se, I believe that startup founders deserve better. This is my attempt.  This is what we have done for the past five years.

What Do I Know About Search Engine Optimization?

Last year, Funtober had nearly 1.1 million visitors in the month of October. Nearly 80% of those people (74% for 2016 overall) arrived at us through Google.

Over the last three years, I have built a website for the law firm where I work, McEldrew Young, that generates hundreds of leads for whistleblower and False Claims Act clients a year. We ask most of our potential clients where they find us. Google is the overwhelming answer.

I am also starting a third website related to the national parks called Parkcation. Restarting from ground zero is a harsh reminder of how hard it is to get the ball rolling as well as how fun it can be at the beginning when you don’t have to worry if the website is slow or crashes because no one is reading it anyway. There is nothing to get in the way of your passion.

I have no formal training in the matter. There has been a lot of reading on the internet over the past decade. I now have enough websites and pages that I can run tests on them to see what happens. I have attended a few helpful meetups in Philadelphia put on by (1) SEO Grail and (2) Wil Reynolds. Any flaws in the below strategy are of course my own.

What is My Startup Background?

I am primarily writing from the perspective of a first-time nights and weekends startup founder with minimal funding that has bootstrapped a company for the last five years.

How Do I Know this Strategy Works?

This is essentially the course of the last ten years of my life. It is not an easy path so I feel comfortable publishing it. Your mileage may vary, however. If you are looking for a quick path to SEO success, this is not it.

Why Publish It?

A person in the Philadelphia startup community that I respect recently published a post-mortem with lessons learned from his attempt at a consumer-oriented startup. Since I owe my business and my job to free advice that I found in online posts like his over the course of the past decade, I think it is important to pay it forward. I have also been asked from time to time how we get people to Funtober and I think this post will provide a better answer than saying “I understand SEO and have been very lucky.” And I’m not planning to fail, so I should just start writing my lessons learned now.

Assumptions

Let’s assume that you are not building something that will get a ton of press or industry blog links so you need a pretty purely content-based SEO strategy.

Here is how I rank websites:

1. Hone the Skill

I knew nothing about this game until 2006 when I graduated from law school and started a blog. It was then that I started learning how search engines rank websites. I spent a great deal of time over the next five years reading about digital marketing and trying to rank/monetize niche websites.

During this time, I built dozens of websites on different domains and tested plenty of SEO theories from exact match domains to spun content to blogging. Then I waited and looked at the results. Then the search engines changed and I tried some more.

This is an important part of the process. If you have never tried to rank for a low value keyword against low competition, how do you think you will be able to rank for terms that would support a multi-million dollar startup valuation? It isn’t particularly difficult to execute this stage and you can do it on a limited budget. You also need to learn that search engines change and rankings aren’t forever.

Learning might not be a bad strategy to pursue even if you are somewhere in the middle of a startup. If you are going to make mistakes, shouldn’t you make them on a domain that you don’t care about rather than one that you do? If you pick domains that are related to your startup, you can fold them into your work if one of them becomes successful.

Another important reason not to dash head over heels into an SEO strategy without some practice is that there is a 20 year history influencing rankings. If you do not understand why search engines started penalizing keyword stuffing or reciprocal links, you may be headed for problems. Staying ahead of trends can be important and you need some industry understanding to start recognizing them.

2. Believe

This was one of the hardest aspects for me personally. Since I didn’t have a formal education or work in the field, it took me a long time to embrace the knowledge and skill that I had acquired. If you can figure out how to rank small-medium competition keywords, then you have the skills to start trying to tackle longer term efforts at bigger keywords.

As part of this process, I also started telling all of my friends about what I was doing. If you aren’t willing to tell your friends, why should Google tell its searchers about you?

3. Extend the Runway

SEO is an uncertain beast. If you don’t have a long runway, it probably isn’t the right marketing channel for you. The one exception would be a small but valuable untapped market. You can sometimes find new areas with 1-2 early competitors where it would be possible to compete for traffic through rankings after a few months of content building.

I have worked a full time job to support myself while working on Funtober. I have kept expenses low. This means that we essentially have an unlimited runway (for the most part). This has allowed us to take a long term approach that is now starting to pay dividends. For example, we get significant search engine traffic from the terms Oktoberfest and Halloween. If you are able to do the same, you have the time to go after high value keywords.

4. Pick a Big Area

When talking to friends starting out, I see two common mistakes. Half of them try to rank for a competitive keyword with millions of searches right from the beginning. For whatever misguided reason, they think they will be able to build a website that ranks for the term (let’s use Halloween costumes for example). There is no way. It is too competitive for a new website to rank. Even if Google did think you were better, you probably aren’t prepared for the traffic.

The other half try to rank for keywords that are so small that no one is searching for them. I often see this strategy pitched by marketing companies. It’s only $1,000 a month to rank “Making Money for Stupid People”. You will know you are in this trap when you say to yourself like, “I am on the first page for blue widgets in alaska. Great. Now I need to rank for blue widgets for Alaska.” Don’t do it.

Halloween is a huge area with (didn’t look it up recently) hundreds of millions of searches. My current goal is to rank for the word Halloween and then later to rank for the word Halloween Costumes. Five years ago, one of my goals was to rank for the term pumpkin carving tips. It has traffic and there is a reasonable path between ranking for pumpkin related items and Halloween.

The other thing I would say about this topic is pick an area where people are passionate. I once had a website about credit card debt. Do you know how hard it is to get someone to link to such a website? I think it happened once. Pick something people want to talk about and you will find your path a lot easier.

5. Do Something Different

You know the definition of insanity, right? Don’t do the same thing and expect better results. You need to do something different. Much of our website is essentially a directory. It isn’t hard to build a Yelp clone. It is tough to market it. Most of our competitors have (a) relied on user inputed listings, (b) used a database to store information; and (c) given each business their own page listing. We did it different. We aggregated all of the listings without individual pages for each business (this ensured robust content on every directory page), we skipped user input (quality control); and we skipped the individual database entries (until recently each state page and all the content about businesses therein was one WordPress page). In some ways, this held us back. But it worked for us and the standard method has failed for a lot of people.

6. Right Size the Project

Like my pumpkin carving tips SEO example, you need to set realistic expectations and goals. You may want to rank for Halloween costumes, but you need to dial it back to start. I had five years of experience and hundreds of pages of content about costumes for Funtober and I still had trouble ranking these terms against the competition.

As a new website, you probably aren’t going to make the splash you dream about. This does not mean you can’t dream, but you should crawl before you walk and walk before you run. Take your goal of ranking Halloween costumes down two or three notches and plan to try to rank for the term nurse costume accessories.

7. Keyword Research

I consider myself an expert at research and even I fall in the trap of doing poor keyword research from time to time. Scope out the project. Take the time to plan where you are going. Figure out how much traffic there is to the keywords that you want. If you have doubts, run some tests with Adwords. When I started Funtober, I spent a solid month just doing keyword research. This was a bit extreme, but I knew from the beginning I was planning a multi-year project and I was going after huge keywords. I didn’t have the money to compete. So I had to have better content and that took a lot of planning and research. In this process, don’t forget to research the content that you are competing against. You haven’t been planning if you don’t figure out a way to create better content than the existing results.

8. Build the Content

You don’t have to be an expert when you start out or write the world’s best content. Just put words on the page.  You can provide value by merely aggregating the collective wisdom of others.  Like #1 (honing your skill), you should consider the content building process as honing your expertise.  You will naturally get better over time.

Most people fail at this step at some point. They get X things written and then life happens and it comes to an abrupt stop. Or they think that they will just outsource the content and then they don’t get back the quality that they expect. It has happened to me.

I have just been doing it long enough to pick it back up. I picked an area where I will be happy working for the rest of my life. I pursued #1 (honing your skills) long enough to have faith in the long term plan. And then I execute on it daily/weekly/monthly. Don’t be the blogger that blogs X times a day for a month and then goes on vacation and never does it again. If SEO is the marketing plan for your startup, you can’t screw it up.  If you fall off the horse, get back on it.

9. Publish Earlier

Perfection is the enemy of the good. I shouldn’t have to say more.

At the beginning, no one is reading what you are writing. So publish earlier. Revise it later. Don’t try to publish 30 articles at the same time at the start. Do 5. Then 2. Then 1. No fancy web design? No problem. The first version of Funtober was published on a stripped down default WordPress theme. It had long lists of links with little content that were sure to get caught up in the Google spam filters. In fact, they were sometimes so bad looking that we would get requests from events to remove their link because of the Google penalty for spam. One such business made a request on a page that Google was delivering about 10,000 people in a month. I told them that I was not going to remove it and they could thank me later for sending them customers.

But you know what? The information was solid. People found what they were looking for. They just wanted the date of the event and the link to where they could find more information. We did that well in the early days. Still do.

There have only been a handful of times where I have told people about Funtober and not crossed my fingers hoping they do not see X problem. Get used to it. It won’t go away. People forgive your mistakes when you are small and just starting out. They also will like to see the improvements.

We recently redid the design of the website. I swapped the theme live and fixed the errors on the fly. Some pages looked ugly for about two weeks. Some still do. No one said anything other than my dad, who at one point two days in told me the front page can not look as bad as it did. So I fixed it.

Before you build that perfectly designed website, look at Google. Enough said? You are a startup. Make something people want. You can make it pretty later.

10. Get Some Easy Links

I have practically stopped link building. There are some low value directory links that every business can get. You can probably get a few friends in the industry to link to you. Or some industry blogs that post about new websites. Your personal website. Get them and move on. If you want to chase something, chase customers.

11. Stop Watching the Analytics

The first time your real-time tracking flashes some unknown number X, you will become enthralled with watching it. It will be different for every person. Maybe it is 10. Maybe it is 50. Maybe it is 500. But you need to stop watching it. If you spend your time tracking every increase or decrease at this point, you will never get to 2X or 10X. The only time you should be watching it is if you think the website is going to crash.

I have been there. I have watched the stats. I can’t help it. You probably can’t either. Celebrate the success and then push past it or you will be so disappointed by the drop that it will be disheartening. Keep an eye on the goal: 100X. Besides, a watched pot never boils.

12. Wait and Keep Working

Eli of Blue Hat SEO once said: If you wait for results, there won’t be any. I made that mistake in #1. I won’t make it again. But search engine rankings don’t happen overnight. So wait and keep working.

13. Go Smaller

If you are having trouble gaining traffic or rankings, then you need to start targeting keywords with less competition. I generally take the word that I am trying to rank for, look at the suggested keywords on Google at the end of the first page and try to build content that ranks for them instead. Once you find keywords that you are ranking for, build more content for the keyword at the next level up.

14. Stop Obsessing About On-Page SEO

At some point everyone has obsessively fretted about their title, meta description, first paragraph, keyword density, hyperlink text and outbound link juice. You don’t have enough content to be worrying about this. Put in a good title and a reasonable URL slug and move on. You will never get to 100X this way.

I will end this with an example from the otherwise great WordPress SEO plugin. It shows red and green signals to indicate positive or problematic SEO. If you have used it, you understand. I know someone that took the time to put in their keyword focus on every page because they wanted to see green. Then they started making changes to pages WHICH WERE RANKING but showed red. Don’t obsess about what probably doesn’t matter. Spend your time on what does. It is not the red or green signal on the plugin.

More and better content. Better marketing of your existing content. This is what matters. It does wonders for SEO.

15. Refresh the Content

Remember all of that content that you wrote at the beginning? You need to update it now. Some of it will be out of date. You may have fresh insight on other pages. Maybe you even disagree with some of what you wrote on the spur of the moment. Fix it! If you were a search engine and had a choice between ranking something from 5 years ago OR ranking something that has been updated annually for 5 years, which would you choose? I made my decision long ago. We update.

16. Look at the Analytics Again

I told you to stop watching the numbers go up and down on a minute-by-minute basis earlier. But that doesn’t mean that you should ignore them completely. Now that you have a bunch of data in Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, go look at it and take stock. Figure out what worked and what didn’t. Glean insights on what you should do differently – and then test them.

This also applies to keyword rankings. You will drive yourself nuts watching a ranking go from 25 to 32 and back. Neither will get you the traffic that you need. So take a data point and come back to it in a month or two. Or after you make some big changes. And take another data point.

17. Obsess About On Page SEO Again for a Week

What can I say, really? Two steps forward, one step back I guess. As much as Google will tell you that it doesn’t matter, the title and keywords in the first paragraph still seem to matter. Go back and reword as necessary. I put this right after the analytics tip because you should be using that data in this process. Don’t go overboard, however. An occasional keyword density check to make sure you aren’t stuffing a problematic page is fine. If you start doing it on every article, you are worrying about the wrong things.

18. Sacrifice

There will be a point in this process where you have to decide between putting in the effort to rank your website and something else. It could be a television show, video game, happy hour, meetup, speaking engagement, or something else. Make a decision about your priorities and then don’t look back. This is a marathon, not a sprint, so don’t always choose the startup.

19. Take a Break

20. Get a Jump on the Competition

Every day, there are new keywords opening up. There are also annual keywords (X 2017). If you are a startup with little traffic and your competitors are entrenched in 2017 rankings, why not skip 2017 entirely and start trying to rank for 2018? Or 2019! Then they will have to displace you after you have had the #1 ranking for two years.

21. Fix Your Technical Errors

At this point, you need to do a complete look at the website because something that was once working is now broken. I practically guarantee it. It hasn’t been your top priority but it is holding you back. One day, I went looking for our sitemap and it was no longer there. I don’t think it had been working for months. Another time, I realized that our blog was generating dozens of pages of duplicate content. I won’t even go into detail about the morning that I woke up and discovered exactly how long it had been since I had received a message through the non-functional contact form. If you start looking, you will find it.

Google delivered us a million people in a month with a broken sitemap, no https certificate and mobile warnings (all now fixed).

22. Get Discovered and Shared

The first time that we went viral was over Labor Day weekend in New Jersey. We were shared on Facebook and thousands of people descended upon Funtober. There was even a significant end-of-day bump as people who were out all day got home and checked their social media around 9 PM at night. You will botch this badly in some way the first time. For us, we didn’t have a Facebook like button on the page so we missed out on even more traffic. We also didn’t have any ads on the page. We corrected this for later when we went viral in Atlanta. We were shared on a closed Facebook group with a big following. We had approximately 100,000 visitors in three days and roughly 1/3 of them hit the like button.

23. Survive the Dip

Can you imagine what it is like to go from 500 people on concurrently to 5 people concurrently? A strange mix of motivation and sadness. The dip with Funtober is 9 months long. If I can push through it, so can you. Your dip should be shorter.

24. Help Some People Out

To succeed in life, you need friends. The same is true online. Start being friendly and helping people. You have wisdom. You have marketing power. Use it for good, not evil.

25. Ask for Links

You have valuable content (because it got discovered and shared). Now ask some people for links. Maybe the people that you just helped out? No need to be pushy about it. Figure out a mutually beneficial reason for sharing, such as their visitors would benefit from your content or startup. Offer their visitors a coupon code, perhaps? Be creative. You can do better than the idea to search resource pages for broken links and then email the webmaster.

26. Wait More, Build More Content

One thing I haven’t talked about is your visitors. You can’t sell ice to an eskimo. If they don’t want what you are building, it might be hopeless. If you are a Chicago haunted house, for example, you will always have trouble ranking for the term haunted house outside of the Chicago area. Some things like that are impossible to SEO your way out of the problem. Don’t get yourself caught in this trap. It will ruin your startup. If you aren’t headed down this path, keep working!

27. Watch Competitors

You can learn a lot about what is working by looking at what the people with better rankings than you are doing. Sometimes, you just need to match them. You should also look at people in competitive related industries. You will get ideas from what they are doing successfully. Look at what other people with no money are doing, too.

28. Try Something Different

Most people assume that they can build a better mousetrap than the people that came before them. But is it really better? Do a straight up comparison of the content ranking above yours and ask if the ranking is correct. If their content is better, you need to do something different. If it is worse, you still need to do something different (or your better content wouldn’t be outranked). Either way, you should do something more or different. Now is the time to figure it out.

29. A/B Tests

Now that you have a decent amount of content, you can start making changes to certain sections of your site to see whether it improves rankings vs a control section. We tested early on whether navigation bars with 5 links (nearby states) or 50 links (all states) ranked better in our directories. Since we were running 5 directory sections, it was an easy test to run.

30. Wait More, Build More and Better Content

If you are out of ideas, go back to #4 and pick a bigger idea. Last year, we built a section on black friday deals, a locator for retail Halloween costume stores, and collected dates/times for neighborhood trick or treating. This year, we are completely redoing the Funtober store to add more costumes. I could list another dozen things for the future if pressed.

Sometimes it just takes time. My father has been working on our haunted house section for 3+ years now. It is just now starting to really rank. The content was really amazing when he launched it but I had to tell him constantly to have faith that it would rank eventually.

31. Get the Ball Rolling

Sometimes you need to get some traffic through other means. If no one is using your website, why should Google serve it up in results? Get some people on some pages through social media or guest blogging. See if that changes your stars.

32. Do Real Company Sh!$

Wil Reynolds introduced me to this concept, and it works. I can’t say it better than him. Google is your friend. If you are going to do SEO, you should be able to find his thoughts.

33. Utilize Feedback Loops

Get your traffic to sign up for your newsletter or social media and remarket to them so that they become loyal customers, come back more frequently, and tell their friends. Get press based on your success.

34. Cross Fingers

You need some luck. Rinse and repeat above where necessary.

35. Focus

Although I have called it SEO, what we are really talking about here is content marketing on a website.  At some point in this content journey, you will have some success and start to focus on other things.  You will stop producing great content for your website.  But “SEO” is not a do it and forget it task that you can cross off your checklist. You need to come back to it.  Over and over.  And over again.

This doesn’t mean that you need to produce X blog posts a day.  There is no magic bullet for success.  It doesn’t matter whether you are adding posts or pages or Youtube videos.  When you wake up and realize that you haven’t added anything to your website in a month, realize that someone else is starting the process from the beginning and targeting your valuable Google rankings.

 

36. Some Things You Can’t Fix

I may never get the #1 ranking for my goal keyword. You might not either. Sometimes the rankings aren’t rational. Sometimes you are just in a box and you have to live with being on the first page (or ranking for different keywords). If you don’t like the game, the solution is to pay for advertising.

37. Monetize

Now you have traffic. Monetize it! Don’t forget to test the monetization along the way or you may be building towards something your visitors don’t want.