Dear Startup CEOs, CPOs (Chief Product Officers) & Founders,
I know your time is valuable, so I'll be brief. If you currently have or are in the process of developing a business/marketing plan that includes the phrase "traffic from search engines," please peruse the following diagram:
The percentages are rough guesses, but they represent the collective wisdom of many experts in modern SEO. You certainly need to get the on-page factors right, but these are easy. Information from alternative signals (like click-through rate, toolbar usage, analytics, etc.) is still relatively insignificant. Rankings, particularly for competitive queries, are largely governed by links. The ability to rank for large amounts of less competitive keywords (long tail queries) with your content (by getting those pages crawled and kept in the main search engine indices) is also reliant on links.
Have a look at just one more visual:
That Pacman size chunk of the pie chart has been broken down into three important sections (again, the percentages are a rough guess). Taken together, these illustrations and the logic behind them should give you a solid foundation for understanding SEO. Get the on-page stuff right - that's easy. Target the right keywords - again, easy. Earn large numbers of links from diverse, high quality sources with descriptive anchor text - that's crazy hard.
Great SEO - the kind of SEO that can actually build a business by exposing a new company to thousands of targeted customers every day - isn't done after the product launches. It's not even done during the website design & architecture phase. Great SEO happens during product design. I know product is hard - maybe even the hardest part of building a great startup - but you have to add this step if you want to win.
Incentivize large numbers of diverse website operators to link to you.
Think about it right now - what is it that your product/service/website/company does that's going to make people link? How are you going to convert a higher percentage of the visitors to your site into productive, value-adding links than your competitors? What emotions do you leverage that inspire a visitor to link to you (not just Tweet about you)?
We work with a lot of startups, and I can count on one hand the number of companies who thought about this during the product design phase. In the future, more companies are going to think about this and execute on it. They're going to get the top rankings. Those who don't will have to compete in spite of the fact that their competition has thousands of targeted, interested visitors showing up on their website every day. Be a part of that first group - think SEO when you're designing your business, not after.
Sincerely,
Rand Fishkin, Startup CEO & SEO Addict
Excellent letter! I'm glad your opening sentence read "traffic" and not "ranking!"
SEO may not be "easy" to those who don't understand the process; however, it is easy once SEO is part of initial planning and part of the workflow.
Writing good link-worthy content is harder and often overlooked. Just pumping a site full of copy will make linkbuilding very hard, for sure.
Sharing a quote that could be a guiding principle for incentivizing links:
Dana,
What a great point you make. I have to train my clients to use the word traffic and not ranking. Many new comers to SEO use the word "Ranking" when really they should be concerned with traffic!
@chenry,
Differentiating between ranking and traffic is like differentiating between hits and visits. :-)
It's easy to get excited and stroke the ego by measuring ranking. But, if the keywords are not in demand and bringing in converting traffic, that ranking does nothing more than look good.
The recipients of Rand's letter should also understand that ranking varies based off geographic location of searcher, personalization (their history), and if they are logged in or out of their Google account.
great post rand, as people probably notice im a fan of pictures and graphs, clients love them also because they are too busy to read hundreds of pages of stats and figures, they just like simple thing...
ive just done a detailed link audit on a clients site and noticed that their PR was ok but could be a little higher, the biggest issue flagged was their anchor text audit showed some possible spammy links and they were lacking some more authority based sites which would benefit them
Interesting post Rand. I think for new startups, you cant go far wrong, even in the early days of a business idea to:
- register your domain for a good few years (to show your intent to not being a spammer)
- Get some relevant, quality content on your site.
- Acquire some nice links to get things ticking over.
New out of the box websites will just struggle, so the earlier you work on the site the better.
In your second pie chart I would have probably put a larger segment of the pie for "Trust & Authority" and less for "Raw Link Popularity" and "Anchor Text from Divserse Sourse" but I get where you are coming from and it's a good article.
One to book mark and show potential clients in the future.
That's a good point. Rand actually wrote a neat post regarding exactly that here:
How Google's Rankings Algorithm Has Changed Over Time
As you can see, we spend a huge amount of time obsessing about this stuff.
Well said Rand. We recently did what you suggested -- including SEO stuff from the very beginning of the product design. Combining that with the fact that our new service was great and had lots of people talking about it and linking to us, meant we were able to secure the #1 position for the most valuable keyword in our space. We wouldn't have come close to that if we hadn't designed the thing with SEO at its core. After two months we're up to 100+K new visitors (and potential paying customers) a month. Sorry, I'm sounding a little like an infomercial here ...
One step closer to resolution on this entry Rand, I've got an inkling that the audience is looking to get a case on how these numbers prove themselves.
After all, the more marketing and communication that is echoed on multiple platforms soon becomes either spam or a much diluted message - leaving the prospect customer or audience member a bit disenchanted. Which is why social media and viral are so appealing right?
Tricks and treats in the form of online pabulum is the winning ticket, but more than 5% of the brain has got to be involved and perhaps a bit more of a strategy. The product stage is important but doesn't this in theory then tickle the initial concept of the "said" business?
my 2 cents.
Nice post Rand, great breakdown of the main slices of the pie!
It's often hard for new businesses (and some old ones to be fair) to appreciate the way in which they present their business and success (or failure) online.
The most common problem we come across is a company presenting itself (through their website) as they see themselves, not as their customers/users see them. This causes a dispatity between company expectations of the performance of their site and the customer's expectations of what they will find there - which more often than not affects the sites ability to rank well.
A UCD driven process can help enormously in getting it right first time (rather than fixing these problems later) however this can be expensive and not an option for some start ups.
I agree with your comment about the disparity between how companies see themselves and how customers view them. Often we have had clients determined to rank well on terms that offer little to no search traffic, but are an "internal" ego boost. More than once we have had to convince a company that thier "new business" has a (sometimes widely) different perspective than the client.
"UCD" - User-Centric Design? If I guessed right, I agree it is an invaluable factor - even more important than typical SEO metrics might indicate.
I'm Surprised by the size of the slice for Historical data.
Everything I have learnt and observed has led me to believe sites with a long history (5+ years) will have a signficant advantage over sites that have not been there as long.
Furthermore, I've noticed new websites, even those having built up a high level of quality links , struggle to rank for competitive queries.
Perhaps you consider age related metrics to be link metrics, since it's the building of links over that time that likely helps older sites?
Great analysis,
I have one question to ask at this time,
does the location of inbound link in the link page produces different value for the search rankings?
If anyone have any thought about it, then welcome.
In my view, of course there will be one algo which would calculate the locatio of link.
First the top most link in the link page is added first, then shows high value the by age,
Second the visitor will visit first at the top link then he will come to the bottom, same as CPC in PPC.
If anyone has any clue, please answer.
Birendra Singh
Internet Marketer India.
Rand,
1. Regarding "easy on-page stuff right" - it's technically easy, but if you work for a huge company with a badly coded platform - it can take months or even years to do it right.2. Earn large numbers of links from diverse, high quality sources with descriptive anchor text - a wordpress plugin or magazine theme does the trick.3. If "think SEO when you're designing your business, not after" would be the case, I would have nothing to do :) But as no company I know does it, I've got lot's of things to optimize.
How would you rate and rank the various types of links form the different social media platforms
Facebook
Twitter
StumpleUpon etc
vs. links from open environments such as blogs and web sites in relationship to SEO strategy.
Are all these links created equal?
I understand that this post is prolly just for business peeps who have no seo knowledge...but I feel that both of those graphics should be broken up into 2 different categories.
Non-competitive terms
vs.
Competetive trems
But, in the same breath, it does have the general trends right:
links are more important than on page stuff
PR is part of it, but not the only thing that counts
Getting links from a diverse set of domains is important
etc
Great Summary Rand - I will be using this post in education of basic breakdowns of importance when dealing with the powers that be that may have no concept of the breakdown.
These charts might be a good addendum to the SEO quick reference sheet?
Martin
Summarizes it quite nicely but I think I would have added a point that it’s a long term investment and not to expect the world over night.
Good Work Rand.
Great way to show clients about how SEO works.
Most the clients i talk to are focussed on getting their site SEO attention by increasing and bettering the on-site SEO appearance.
But this is a great article to show that SEO is more about the links and quality links it has
Thanks Rand
I like this post as well, Rand...and would only add that the timeline for same should also be considered....we find that SEO campaigns are long long term....but if you have passion for what you do, it's what gets you up in the morning looking forward to getting to the office!
:)
Jim
Absolutely.
As far as
"what is it that your product/service/website/company does that's going to make people link?"
goes - if a business hasn't thought this out in basic marketing terms anyway, then chances are they aren't going to be around very long.
The thing is - startups can have great ideas, produce great products and make them eminently useful, usable and even viral, but when they miss out on the link "hook" piece, they're going to fall to the competition that's managed it.
Twitter has a link hook - you want to link to your profile. The same goes for LinkedIn and Facebook. Yelp has a link hook - they give their active participants badges, rewards, and the ability to show off when they link to their reviews/accounts. Vimeo has a link hook - when you embed their videos, you automatically link back to them.
So many other startups that launch with the idea of relying on search traffic don't have that same "hook." They've though about how to make their product/service link-worthy, but not how to really incentivize the link and that makes all the difference.
All this is important to note, but great quality links are real hard to come by.
Really nice article.