I'm Getting Pretty Tired of Startup Advice that Doesn't Include Any Mention of SEO

Here's what I put on the post-- thought I'd repeat it here for those who don't want to wade thru all of the people bashing Matt Maroon. :-)

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Hehe. The obvious solution for this is to, uh, submit articles to News.YC.

FWIW, a good percentage of my posts (which often appear on YC News) have to do with SEO ( http://www.tonywright.com/category/seo/ ).

(Disclosure: I am a YC08 Founder)

I think it's a "devil you know" issue, to some degree-- I actually offered to help some other YC founders with their SEO plans and didn't get a lot of uptake- people prefer to tackle the problems they understand.

Another issue (and this might be controversial) is that maybe SEO doesn't matter a damn bit for most early stage startups... At least in the very early stages (which is what most people tend to write about).

I always look at startups as a bucket with holes in it. You can focus on increasing the flow of water into the bucket (SEO, viral, PR, marketing) or you can work on patching the holes in the bucket (adding value, improving product/market fit, improving the "lower" part of your funnel). With time being the most scarce resource in a startup, any time you spend improving "flow" takes away from "patching the bucket".

If you've got a great "bucket" (a product people freakin' LOVE and love to talk about), all of the "flow" tasks get a lot easier. If you've got a mediocre"bucket" with lots of holes, great "flow" isn't going to help make patching the bucket easier.

So (as a guy who has built and sold 2 businesses and the third is looking pretty darn good), I'd recommend ignoring a concerted SEO effort in favor of making your product better (if you have to make a choice). Ideally, you're funded and you don't HAVE to make a choice (but most startups do).

April Fools?

"Just by its nature, SEO is bad" This statement is ridiculous. You are a fool is you don't do everything you can to rank for relevant terms. This is the best, most targeted traffic you can get. Gaming the engines is bad, but not trying to rank in them is idiocy.

As a founder (and the website maintainer) of one of the startups "attacked", I'm not too bothered by the criticism. It is valid...we aren't showing up in all the right places on Google, and we're currently paying a buck or more per click to occasionally appear in those right places in ads. But, it's also worth noting that while we'd never turn down more traffic we also aren't experiencing significant pain due to that lack. Our site gets 1800 uniques per day, and is growing at a very respectable clip--I remember vividly celebrating our first week of 1000+ visitor days just a few months back and it won't be long before we're celebrating 2000+ visitor days. For a site that sells a product (rather than sells eyeballs), that's a nice stream of potential buyers. Actually, I sometimes chuckle when I read about sites that are selling nothing but eyeballs bragging about 100,000 monthly pageviews (or whatever) when our product site does significantly more than that (and our four sites combined see an order of magnitude more traffic than that).

We consider our biggest website problems to be conversion rather than bringing the eyeballs in...so even though I readily admit that we're weaker in the engines than we'd like to be, my current focus with the website is on getting those people who come to our site excited enough to buy our product (or, even better, ask their hosting provider to buy it for them), and better serving those customers that have bought.

So, I don't know that we're really a good example of a truckload of SEO fail, even if our SEO results are poorly, since we don't actually live or die by search engine traffic. Only recently did the majority of our incoming traffic shift from our Open Source project pages to other sources, for example, and those clicks from Webmin.com are still far more valuable to us than search-related clicks...they are about 10 times more likely to buy from us than natural search result users. Likewise for users of our Open Source Virtualmin version at places like Joyent, who are proving to be extremely likely to upgrade to the commercial version. This tells me that getting more people using and talking about our Open Source products is a better marketing tactic than almost anything else we could do. So, we balance our efforts, and SEO unfortunately gets put on a back-burner. (We do try hard to have good URLs, though, but mainly because I consider URLs a usability issue, and not because I care what a search engine thinks about them. I just wish Joomla didn't suck so bad for stuff like that.)

The article delivered exactly what it promised and in my opinion that was something that needed saying.