SEO is here to stay. Google may change its algorithms, the tactics and best practices may shift, but people will always use search engines to find what they need on the internet. As an organic channel, SEO has always been one of the highest ROI things you can do in marketing. In 2021, with the death of third-party cookies changing the nature of tracking for brand advertisers, a solid SEO strategy is more important than ever.
Previously the Global Head of SEO at Eventbrite and currently the Director of SEO at StitchFix, Brendan Baker has more than a decade of experience as a search engine whisperer. From large e-commerce websites to international marketplaces, Brendan knows what it takes to build SEO programs from scratch. He also understands the current SEO landscape and how to optimize your efforts for 2021, 2022, and points beyond. We recently wrangled him into a Friday chat to get his best strategies for getting a startup’s SEO program off the ground.
Carve out some time to listen to Brendan’s top SEO strategies, and read on for an easy-to-digest crash course of his best DIY moves:
First, ask yourself: What role is SEO going to play in our broader strategy?
Before you deploy a bunch of resources to search engine optimization, it’s vital to understand how SEO fits into your broader marketing strategy. Should it be a primary channel or a supplemental one? If your website is a large marketplace with a million pieces of inventory, you’ll need a major SEO strategy to support that kind of surface area. If you have a niche product that people usually don’t search for, sinking a lot of time and money into this channel may not make sense. SEO is not a silver bullet for every company.
Before you optimize, you must search.
Open up that search window before dropping a single minute or dollar on figuring out your keywords. Search for the type of things you think people might use to find your product (or products like yours). Pretend to be your potential customers and search for the pain points, questions, and phrases they might try. This experience is a crucial prerequisite to playing around with keywords. Google like your customers.
Prioritize Google, and the rest will follow.
Should you establish an SEO strategy for every single search engine? There’s a reason the SEO community doesn’t pay much mind to Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo - Google holds more than 92% of search engine market share. It’s by far the world’s most used search engine, and it’s also the trickiest to optimize for. That means if your content is optimized for Google, there’s a good chance it’ll perform well on other search engines.
Understand that B2B and B2C are totally different games.
The most obvious difference between B2B and B2C brands when it comes to SEO is the nature of your company’s website. Many B2B brands will have a smaller website with a handful of landing pages detailing the specific services you provide. For these companies, the blog is the key real estate for quality, optimized content that can bring traffic in through the side door. So for B2B brands, optimizing the top-level landing pages comes first, followed by producing really high quality blog content. Conversely, B2C is often an exercise in scale - you can spin up hundreds or even thousands of pages to catch traffic over a much wider surface area. This means for large B2C brands, focusing on establishing a website structure that can scale is the right place to start.
Agencies give you an edge, but a hybrid approach works best.
There’s a lot of leverage to be gained when working with an SEO agency. Often these search professionals have worked with many companies - potentially even companies like yours. This means they have a blueprint to give you so you don’t need to start from zero. SEO is very much a trial and error process, and agencies have already done that work. However, an external consultant isn’t going to understand your industry like someone on your core team. That type of insider expertise is gold when it comes to keyword research. While an SEO specialist may have current knowledge of the trends, an in-house SEO lead is going to have a better understanding of your customer. A hybrid approach of in-house and external gives you a one-two punch.
Build a cross-functional team.
The central challenge to building a successful SEO program is marshalling the players, resources, and skill sets needed. SEO is a marketing channel, but for early-stage companies it requires pulling resources from pretty much every department. A basic SEO strategy may require an entire new set of pages to be built (product), a template for those pages (design), and written descriptions and blurbs (copy). More sophisticated strategies might even bring in algorithm partners from your engineering team. While some large brands may have a dedicated 10-person SEO team, chances are you’ll need to share product, design, and copywriting resources with the rest of the company.
Be an evangelist for SEO to get internal buy-in.
Even if you have your team in place, getting SEO projects prioritized on an early-stage startup’s roadmap can seem impossible. Most marketers who’ve dabbled in the SEO arts have felt this tension of trying to get buy-in from an exec who just doesn’t “get” SEO. Rankings and indexation may as well mean nothing to those outside the SEO sphere. This is why being an evangelist for SEO is essential. Have one-on-one talks with engineers, host lunch and learns, send out team-wide progress reports. The more you can get your wider team to care about SEO, the easier it will be to get in that queue.
It’s all about the page experience.
If you know only one thing about SEO, it’s probably that Google changes its algorithm on the regular. These days, that algorithm is all about page experience. Very simply, does Google think your website experience on mobile and web is a good experience for users? That’s now a direct ranking implication. Offering a good page experience has always been vital for conversion consideration, and now it’s essential for your page rank. Check your “web vitals” around page speed, loading, and interactivity. A fast website with no pop-up ads can do wonders for boosting your SEO. Google Search Console is a great resource for a quick understanding of your page experience.
Monitor and update your content.
One of the single most effective things brands can do to squeeze more juice from their content is revisit it. There tends to be a “set it and forget it” mindset for blog posts. Even if you created high-performing content that ranks well and drives a lot of your traffic, you still have to keep an eye on it. It’s not uncommon for a competitor to spin up similar content and dip into your search traffic. Revisit those old posts regularly - especially the high-performing ones - and give them a good polish. Try tweaking content to add more audio-visual components, clean up broken links, freshen your keywords, and fold in language that makes it relevant to today’s searchers.
Play the long game.
Just because you’ve built great content doesn’t mean you should expect to see traffic flooding in next month. SEM and paid marketing are like day trading - make good choices and you’ll see swift returns. SEO is more like contributing to your 401k - you’re slowly building a little nest egg for later. Like any long-term investment, it takes time to see results.