Is there one thing you did that greatly improved your search engine rankings?
As a founder, was there one action like a blog post or backlink that greatly improved your organic traffic.
I have been working on SEO for sometime, but have seen the advises to be all over the place. Felt SEO is more like an abstract science. So was wondering if other founders could share their experiences.
Is there one thing you did that greatly improved your SEO position? Please provide specifics if possible.
Trending on Indie Hackers
I want to share some lessons.
If your website doesn't have much traffic, use yourwebsite.com/blog instead of blog.yourwebsite.com.
blog.yourwebsite.com is another website from Google's side, which means you need to optimize two websites.
If you have a big company, then do what you want.
Hi,
I've been In SEO for over 15 years and went from. hacking SEO in the early days to earning SEO these days. I'm a professional standalone SEO Consultant while developing my market research saas solution.
Consider SEO as a reward from Google when you have high quality relevant content for a specific audience.
That should be your North star.
For any starter I would say just to focus on creating compelling content. Optimise it for SEO later. It's much more imports that you actually have content. Than creating perfect content. Optimizing is easier than creating something perfect.
Actually SEO is like running a startup. Solve a real problem for someone. In this case the way of doing it is through content.
Then, once you have some stuff, you'll already see what gets picked up organically by google. No pun intended. You'll see what resonates on your socials.
Optimize that first. This is where you're going to start doing some keyword research. Align your site around those keywords. Improve the site hierarchy. Improve page titles. Meta descriptions and the body content.
Those are the basics. Again, only that. Youll see good results.
Now that you have that, create more content based on additional relevant keywords that you identified.
Repeat the proces..
Then, after a couple of months doing this... Start looking in tech optimization. Don't even yet look in to tf-idf.. It's not worth it at this stage. Way too detailed.
You're starting up, fix the basics. There's many resources about this on the Web. Sitemaps, JSON-LD, internal linking and then if you want to go deeper and have the time, make an SSR version of your SPA (Though don't bother for SEO if Google already ranks everything.)
Note that this is how I recommend startups to kick off. If you are an established player my advice would be different.
In my opinion startups should not worry about perfect seo. They should get momentum with their content. Use it for social first. Focus on today.
Simply consider SEO as another distribution channel for that content. In the beginning as bonus to your socials. And later as a direct source of traffic.
Perfect seo will come later. There's not enough time to do it all perfect right way when your bootstrapping yourself and you have to build, administrate, market, sell and dream up your solution.
Absolutely love your answer.
One difficulty that I find the content approach is that even if one of your content become on the top of the list, visitors to that content has a much lower rate of conversion than if someone comes to your homepage or pricing page. So, do you suggest we spend more effort on building the backlinks to the homepage. How has been your experience with this?
As i am from SEO industry and its all depend on your niche and competition. Be consistent with your publishing articles.
Let me know if you need any help!
all in all, the optimisations are counter intuitive, so I wouldn't be surprised if other simple tricks could make a massive difference. What I do know is that backlinking can seriously back fire on a domain. So use with caution, don't use if you don't know what you are doing.
It's not an abstract science. Known and unknown algorithms are used by search engines, make those algorithms happier than for other content, without triggering the anti cheat bells and you will rank first. The other strong criterion is of course true popularity. If a domain get clicked a lot via search, google knows, it will organically rank that domain higher than if it was clicked on less.
Thank you for your answer. This is very helpful. Didn't know these had such a big effect :)
I've found technical SEO to greatly enhance my on-page SEO strategy. Especially schema markup.
I would also recommend looking into TD-IDF.
Thank you for your answer.
Can you elaborate on TD-IDF? When I googled it is taking me to a physics term.
TF-IDF (term frequency-inverse document frequency) is a statistical measure that evaluates how relevant a word is to an article in a collection of an articles.
Let's say you are a blog that writes about space stations. You do a TD-IDF analysis and find that the word "space station junk" is extremely relevant to blog posts that discuss the topic of stations. However, you are not using this word in your blog posts.
The move here would be to include this keyword in your space station content to make it more relevant.
If you do this at a large scale, you will greatly improve content relevancy, leading to increased search visibility.
Here's a good resource on TD-IDF:
https://moz.com/blog/tf-idf-for-seo
Thank you for explaining. Didn't know these before, very helpful :)