Ask HN: Does SEO still work in 2018? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Does SEO still work in 2018?

#101

Post by SnowingXIV » Wed, Apr 18, 2018, 1:09 AM UTC

rokhayakebe wrote: post #80

I do SEO for lawyers, mostly Family Law. I can tell you SEO works as in: Proven Measured Positive ROI, to the point I wish I was allowed to own a law firm. One thing I would say though is SEO should be one part of your marketing strategy but not all of it. You should have a diversified approach. Edit: Let me offer a different way to look at it. Does having a well organized website help turn visitors into clients? Yes…

I also do SEO work for lawyers, primarily PI and mass torts type stuff. It does work - to an extent. There are certain technical things you need to get right and that alone can rank you decently, especially locally. There is low hanging fruit that can put you miles ahead of the competition and I've done this time and time again.

The problem with SEO and why I have a grudge against the industry is past success by gaming google with PBNs has led to hoisting up a few sites that can dominate because of their past. Those sites used spam tactics, then ranked high, that led to actual relevant backlinks, google got confused, and now keeps them at the top for any new content. Others must also utilize these dicey methods and pour serious money into it to do well. At least nationwide. I'm praying for the day that house of cards comes tumbling down.

Until then, having a better site, with better copy (done by a professional writer not farmed out), and using Adwords typically is the go-to.

Re: Ask HN: Does SEO still work in 2018?

#102

Post by gscott » Wed, Apr 18, 2018, 1:47 AM UTC

LoSboccacc wrote: post #91

gscott wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Local SEO can be very competitive depending upon what you are doing. Having a physical address is good and so signing up for a cheaper local listing manager (cheapest I have found is from Vistaprint https://www.vistaprint.com/digital-marketing/local-listings?... ) will get someone's website on 20-30 sites with authority immediately. Then having long articles and having keywords that focus on the local market. But dep…

Could one do that landing users on a facebook page instead of a real site? I got some question from a friend owning a local business but it’s quite outside my competency and was just looking around for info when this hn popped up

Instead of Facebook I would suggest focusing on getting a lot of positive reviews on Yelp. If your friend can get 20 or 30 reviews on Yelp he will totally dominate the whole local market with a number 1 listing organically on Google without hardly any effort.

Re: Ask HN: Does SEO still work in 2018?

#103

Post by rokhayakebe » Wed, Apr 18, 2018, 3:45 AM UTC

SnowingXIV wrote: post #101

rokhayakebe wrote: post #80

I do SEO for lawyers, mostly Family Law. I can tell you SEO works as in: Proven Measured Positive ROI, to the point I wish I was allowed to own a law firm. One thing I would say though is SEO should be one part of your marketing strategy but not all of it. You should have a diversified approach. Edit: Let me offer a different way to look at it. Does having a well organized website help turn visitors into clients? Yes…

I also do SEO work for lawyers, primarily PI and mass torts type stuff. It does work - to an extent. There are certain technical things you need to get right and that alone can rank you decently, especially locally. There is low hanging fruit that can put you miles ahead of the competition and I've done this time and time again. The problem with SEO and why I have a grudge against the industry is past success by gami…

I decided to stop pitching SEO and instead pitch "growing your business." SEO alone is not going to cut it and it is dangerous for any business to rely on one source of leads. Also thinking about Growing a business allows me to keep looking for sources of revenue and improving conversion rates. Haven't had success with Adwords (Family Law), you should email me so that I have your contact (email in profile).

Re: Ask HN: Does SEO still work in 2018?

#104

Post by bryanrasmussen » Wed, Apr 18, 2018, 4:05 AM UTC

jachee wrote: post #47

brosirmandude wrote: post #34

I'm a little biased because I currently work as an SEO Manager at an agency, but I would say yes. It REALLY depends on the type of business, what stage the business is at, their goals, and probably a few other things. SEO should almost always be a part of a larger overall marketing strategy. If you're an ecommerce shop optimizing product and category pages - SEO will help. If you're a plumber and ranking higher than…

Give us some more counter-examples? Where will SEO definitely not help?

An industry with very few competitors servicing professionals where services cost a lot, because in those situations

1. Everyone knows who the competitors are 2. You are either going to be paying for those services or not, and if you are you will decide which competitor you want to pay for based on something different than how they show up in your google.

Examples - Thomson Reuters' legal services, LexisNexis etc. I'm pretty sure the amount of times some lawyer searches for a term, ends up on some competing legal service and just says oh well I better just pay for this now is negligible.

Near or actual monopolies.

SEO in these cases might help rank, but you don't actually need to rank for your business.

Re: Ask HN: Does SEO still work in 2018?

#105

Post by bryanrasmussen » Wed, Apr 18, 2018, 4:10 AM UTC

teddyh wrote: post #44

openIce wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with w3schools?

W3fools used to have more detail: https://web.archive.org/web/20110117085131/http://w3fools.co... Even if w3schools have fixed all these instances since then, that all those errors were ever produced is a bad sign, especially when there were better alternatives even then.

If you keep punishing someone for past mistakes there is no reason to improve. On the other hand MDN is a mozilla resource and had good stuff from day 1 so they deserve the traffic.

Re: Ask HN: Does SEO still work in 2018?

#106

Post by orliesaurus » Wed, Apr 18, 2018, 4:44 AM UTC

chrischen wrote: post #98

orliesaurus wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

all of the above + hyperlocal seo

Between link building and content generation, which takes up more budget/time? Asking as I'm trying to decide which one to focus more on.

Great content takes time but it's impossible that you won't have an output. Link building is hard and can lead to nowhere. If you were to get started and only had a finite amount of time, I would focus on great interactive, captivating and insightful content.

Re: Ask HN: Does SEO still work in 2018?

#107

Post by nige123 » Wed, Apr 18, 2018, 6:05 AM UTC

Google is not a search engine.

It's an association engine.

We know what Google is trying to do - associate the best solutions to search questions.

To game Google you need to help them achieve their objective - associate their search queries with your solutions.

Broadly there are three types of search desire:

1. navigational - the user wants to find a resource or place?

2. informational - the user wants to learn something?

3. transactional - the user wants to perform an action (pay a bill, book a flight, hotel, restaurant etc)

If a page satisfies a user's search desire - they won't search for it again.

This missing search trail is a valuable signal to Google. It provides some evidence that page A satisfies query B. The more these signals fire the stronger the association.

SEO 2018?

Ideally make pages that solve your users' search problems without them needing to go back to Google to search again.

Re: Ask HN: Does SEO still work in 2018?

#108

Post by jackgolding » Wed, Apr 18, 2018, 6:24 AM UTC

JoshMnem wrote: post #100

codingdave wrote: post #40

SEO works, and always will. However, trying to figure out the latest tricks is a losing game. Even if you do figure out how to make something work today, algorithms will change and you'll be punished for having gamed the system. Instead, write 'honest' content. Write it well. Write it for humans. If you find yourself adding content in hopes the search engine will pick it up, that is a short-term gain for long-term pa…

In addition to clean markup, render the HTML on the server and don't try to be too clever with the frontend code. Reading a lot about it and experimenting with many sites is the best way to learn. It requires more than just good content if the keywords are competitive.

The latter is what I assume people talk about when they mean SEO - if you don't write copy and you aren't technical like most SEOs aren't what are you actually doing? (Obviously Keyword research is a part.)

Re: Ask HN: Does SEO still work in 2018?

#109

Post by dorgo » Wed, Apr 18, 2018, 6:29 AM UTC

nige123 wrote: post #107

Google is not a search engine. It's an association engine. We know what Google is trying to do - associate the best solutions to search questions. To game Google you need to help them achieve their objective - associate their search queries with your solutions. Broadly there are three types of search desire: 1. navigational - the user wants to find a resource or place? 2. informational - the user wants to learn somet…

.... Or let bots do searches on google, clicking on your link and never search again with same IP/browser/... combination. Or let bots do the opposite for your competitors.

As long as google uses a metric to determine how good a page A satisfies query B there always will be the possibilty to optimize for this metric instead of actually to solve users search problems.

Re: Ask HN: Does SEO still work in 2018?

#110

Post by jackgolding » Wed, Apr 18, 2018, 6:31 AM UTC

IllIllIllIll wrote: post #57

cookiecaper wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't run a web agency and make 0 dollars from selling SEO. This is not true. Google has been gamed for well over a decade. On a past enterprise, I believed the lie "write good content and it will magically rank" and paid a content writer for about 9 months. She posted lengthy original content about 3 times per week, all highly relevant to the search terms we cared about. I did the same about once a week. A competi…

^^This. Agreed. Google is certainly advanced, but it certainly isn't fair, despite what their guidelines tell content writers and webmasters. Google wants people to write high-quality, relevant content, so they altered their guidelines to simply tell everyone to write high-quality, relevant content. Yet, just as the YouTube lottery exists -- where two creators can produce videos of similar quality and one sees enormo…

I'm not the best at SEO but I agree with this - it seems that writing good content is only part of the story (but an important part.)

Similar to startups, I am curious as to how much of professional SEO success is about outreach. i.e. if I am mates with a uni professor and I write something about his topic, can I get a backlink from their valued .edu domain? What about .gov? Does this outrank better content? To what extent are forbes.com, entrepreneur.com, inc.com etc writers gaming this? (Or are they just looking for the virality?)