SEO

Casey discusses how startups can assess whether they should focus on search engine optimization (SEO) and, if so, how they should develop an SEO strategy. He recommends beginning with keyword research, using a variety of terms to identify how much search volume exists for your products or services. He advises creating combinations of keywords in a spreadsheet and using the Google Adwords Keyword Planner to determine how competitive those search terms are. He lays out 4 SEO scenarios depending on the level of search volume and competition: 1. High Search Volume/Low Competition: Make SEO a Priority 2. High search volume/High Competition: Play for Long Term/Make Core Competency 3. Low Search Volume/Low Competition: Focus on Content Marketing 4. Low Search Volume/High Competition: Ignore SEO Finally, Casey provides tips on how to work on SEO, such as making pages discoverable and readable, optimizing the page title and H1 and H2 tags, and ensuring that the page is unique compared to others in the index.

Jeff describes the following 9 initiatives: 1. Investing in an SEO experiment framework 2. Running title and description tests 3. Scaling the number of pages 4. Running experiments on the content format of the page 5. Increasing the content on the page 6. Build real time graphs and alerts for traffic 7. Make language specific pages 8. Improve page performance 9. Invest in AMP

Casey Winters, a scaling and growth advisor, has suggests that startups explore an overlooked growth approach: building a content loop. Content loops pay dividends, and he cites his own success as the growth marketing functions leader at Grubhub and Pinterest. At Grubhub, Winters' content and SEO strategy helped turn the online food ordering site into a $10bn public company with three million users and 1,000 employees. At Pinterest, he introduced a content loop and scaled SEO strategy that led to over 200 million users and a $12bn valuation. Winters outlined the five-step process he followed and shared three more advanced strategies for early-stage startups looking to build a plan for steep and sustainable growth.

Arun revealed how SlideShare's focus on Accessibility and user experience helped to create an effective SEO machine: • Designing for bots as well as humans and structuring on-page content in a semantically meaningful way led to better SEO • The use of related content and an embed and share value enabled SlideShare to generate more backlinks • The use of human editors helped to curate quality content, which led to SEO equity being distributed from the highest authority page on the domain.

Zapier, the app integration and automation platform, has used programmatic SEO to drive millions of high intent searchers to its product every month. The company created 70,000 search-optimised Landing Pages with unique content by outsourcing content creation to app partners. It also relied on those partners to get initial backlinks to the Landing Pages, which enabled the platform to generate a bunch of high-quality backlinks right out of the gate. Zapier leverages the power of organic search to create a more powerful network effect. According to SimilarWeb, Zapier receives 5.8 million visits a month, of which over half comes from search.

This article describes how Airbnb measures the effectiveness of its search engine optimization efforts to ensure that its Landing Pages appear at the top of search engine results. To improve its rankings, Airbnb optimizes the content of its pages for relevance, performance and authority. They used a new landing page called “Magic Carpet” that is designed to increase relevance and decrease page load times, among other improvements. Since exact rankings cannot be measured, Airbnb relies on traffic as a proxy for an increase in rankings. However, since A B Testing is not suitable to measure increases in traffic caused by changes in external search engine rankings, Airbnb uses a market-level approach. This approach utilizes canonical URLs, which are unique to different cities, towns and regions, and are surfaced on search engines. Airbnb sets the unit of randomization of its experiment to a specific canonical URL, meaning that when a search engine bot scrapes the site, it consistently sees the same treatment for each page, and the ranking for that page updates accordingly.