7 ms·

150k Small Business Website Teardown 2019

298 points by gurgeous 7y ago

gurgeous 7y ago
Apologies for the self-promotion but I think this will be interesting to HN. It's an analysis of a huge crawl of 150k small business websites, correlated with google search rankings. This first chapter is focused on SEO. I'm in the midst of writing more chapters to address things like hosting, site speed, wordpress, etc. I'll probably also add some stats like what % of sites use bootstrap, most popular CDN, etc. This thread is a good place to ask me for more data points!
- quickben 7y ago
  It would be interesting if you can evaluate the UI spam lately somehow: - Sign up for newsletter - This website wants to send you notifications and more, like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9bx5a3PMks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9bx5a3PMks
  - gurgeous 7y ago
    I will have some of this in my "technical factors" chapter coming down the road. I definitely will be evaluating the percentage of SMB websites which use chat clients and various (annoying) marketing tools.
- teh_klev 7y ago
  Bit of a shame, but I can understand why, that you restrict your analysis to the US, and some US-centric optimisations. Perhaps that should be up front in your article about this. The internet is global after all :) However I still found a bunch of things really useful (see later). Yelp as far as I can see from my own experiences isn't really that big of a thing in the UK, but TripAdvisor is, especially for hospitality sector. Google local/My Business is certainly becoming a thing here in the UK as was pointed out to me by a buddy who runs an outdoor activities centre in the Highlands. He has a tremendous understanding of Google and funnelling folks into his biz and banging on about it in the pub the other night. Also in the UK we don't really have such a thing as BBB that google recognises as boosting the juice. Sure we have the British Chambers of Commerce and the CBI, but they're geared towards much larger businesses than your local SME (Small to Medium Sized Enterprise). There are local "Chambers of Commerce" in each council area, but meh. That said, I'm working on unfecking a site that's never had image alt tags, no canonical refs (you can get at the same content from multiple URL's), out of nearly 200 pages there was one solitary H1, page titles were a mess...it goes on. The customer paid their previous "agency" a tidy sum for this site and somehow SEO was never looked at. I did find your article genuinely useful though. I'm a freelancer now, and it seems I need to learn how to SEO as well as be a developer. I look forward to your follow ups.
- hnick 7y ago
  When you mention external links, do you consider nofollow as not existing? I help out with a blog and we get a lot of requests from article writers who assure us all links will be nofollow.
- Fjolsvith 7y ago
  Does your site show a business that delivers to a target city but is located in a different state? For example, a shed manufacturer.
- mlthoughts2018 7y ago
  I think your comments about no-index are a bit disingenuous. For example, when I used to blog, having a way to hide content from showing up in a search engine was important to me. I can imagine that for some businesses this is also true. Not to mention people who are new to creating websites and don’t feel ready for their in-progress site to be indexed, or business that are in the process of closing down. I think Squarespace does the right thing by making this option easy for the user to control. It’s weird to me that you encourage people to “blame” them. That sounds like a hidden agenda sort of bias to me.
patricko 7y ago
Great insights! Thanks for putting this together. It's hard to pick who to root against more, GMB or Yelp.
gdcohen 7y ago
Excellent insights and a well written article. One suggestion - it would be helpful if you explained how someone can tell if they have each of the SEO features enabled.
- gurgeous 7y ago
  You can read the HTML to see if a particular SEO feature is present. Or there are tools for this. There's some talk in the office about taking my report and turning into a scanner that you could point at any website, which would be an interesting project.
- walshemj 7y ago
  There is a tool called Screaming frog its the swiss army knife of SEO. For small sites you can get use the free version you wont be able to save any results and are limited to the number of URLs you can crawl.
- seanwilson 7y ago
  > - it would be helpful if you explained how someone can tell if they have each of the SEO features enabled. You could try my Chrome extension for this which automatically checks multiple pages at a time for technical SEO factors: https://www.checkbot.io/ https://www.checkbot.io/ All the SEO factors checked for and the reasoning behind them are explained here (mostly based on advice from Google): https://www.checkbot.io/guide/seo/ https://www.checkbot.io/guide/seo/
  - hnick 7y ago
    This looks great and I gave it a try. Is there a reason you ignore robots.txt? Example result is 'thin content' on our shopping cart, which we say not to index obviously :)
    - seanwilson 7y ago
      Checkbot ignores robots.txt here because Google can still index pages even when they're included in robots.txt files. If you don't want pages to be indexed, you should use a "noindex" tag instead of robots.txt. It's a common misconception that robots.txt stops indexing when it doesn't. See: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en > Important! For the noindex directive to be effective, the page must not be blocked by a robots.txt file. If the page is blocked by a robots.txt file, the crawler will never see the noindex directive, and the page can still appear in search results, for example if other pages link to it.
sixhobbits 7y ago
Did you have very specific hypotheses to test before doing analysis of the dump? Sentences like "Websites with feature x rank y percent better" are pretty meaningless if they're just patterns that appeared from the dump. Any large enough sample is going to have significant looking patterns which can have a likely reason back fitted to them, but which are simply due to randomness.
LeonM 7y ago
It took me a while to understand what BBB is, maybe the author should have taken into account that non-american readers don't know what it is.
- asdf21 7y ago
  Couldn't you just google it?
  - m12k 7y ago
    I did, and the first three search results were bbbcycling.com, bigballerbrand.com and a local football club. I think people don't realize how much Google actually localizes search results.
  - LouisSayers 7y ago
    I really hate when people have acronyms in articles and don't specify what they are. It doesn't take much effort to spell out what the acronym is when you first introduce it, and you do your audience a disservice by not introducing it. Of course you can google it, but the point is you're making people go out of their way to understand what it is that you're talking about. Be conscientious people, and FFS (for fucks sake), spell out your acronyms.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - xmprt 7y ago
      Or add a tooltip at the very least. I wonder how that would work for a11y though.
- nefitty 7y ago
  What is it?
  - cparsons3000 7y ago
    Better Business Bureau
a13n 7y ago
> 25% of all small business websites are missing an H1 tag. This SEO advice seems dated. Pretty sure Google doesn't care about which tags you use anymore, just that there's a visual heading (some big text at the top of the page). In your research, did you find that sites without an H1 tag performed worse, SEO-wise? The article doesn't seem to mention this. > SMB websites with a meta description rank 17% higher than websites without Hard to tell if this is causal or just correlational. Maybe sites that have meta tags just tend to be better, SEO-wise, unrelated to the fact that they have meta tags. I don't think you should give this advice unless you add meta tags to your site and then see an increase in your organic search traffic.
- walshemj 7y ago
  Really Google do very much care about how content is marked up having a relevant H1 is just the start, use of tables for tabular information, structured markup Hreflang for geo targeting and so on. The brutal truth is many business websites are terrible
- shaki-dora 7y ago
  It's true that there's a correlation / causation problem here, but consider the problem from Google's POV: they rank a certain set of results by hand, then feed those into various learning algorithms to find good predictors for quality. If an analysis such as this finds such correlations, it's likely that Google's algorithms have also picked up on them. In other words: maybe people diligent about meta tags and H1s also write better content and should therefore rank higher (correlation). But "good writing" is hard to judge algorithmically, and Google may therefore well be turning some correlations into causations.
- seanwilson 7y ago
  > Pretty sure Google doesn't care about which tags you use anymore, just that there's a visual heading (some big text at the top of the page). From Google directly: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en > Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide > Use heading tags to emphasize important text > ... > Similar to writing an outline for a large paper, put some thought into what the main points and sub-points of the content on the page will be and decide where to use heading tags appropriately. Nobody is saying you have to have H1 tags to rank well, but it's not going to hurt and is likely to help. It's better to tell Google what the main heading of the site is instead of Google having to guess and getting it wrong. > I don't think you should give this advice unless you add meta tags to your site and then see an increase in your organic search traffic. Google says description meta tags don't impact your search rank but as these descriptions can optionally be shown to users, well written ones should increase click through rates. Google recommend you write meta descriptions in https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en as well. I have a list of SEO recommendations like the above that are mostly sourced from Google here: https://www.checkbot.io/guide/seo https://www.checkbot.io/guide/seo
austinhutch 7y ago
Awesome post. My main issue is with the BBB reference data... to me that smells like correlation not causation. It implies a level of detail and effort spent on the page. I have a hard time believing that the reference to BBB itself serves to improve rankings...
- gurgeous 7y ago
  I too am very sensitive to "correlation != causation" and I tried to call it out extensively in the report. I even included a chart at the bottom from the famous Spurious Correlations project... Hopefully nobody gets too carried away with the report. It's impossible to determine causation at scale, unfortunately. One could argue that business owners who curate great BBB rankings and feature the badge are more likely to instill trust in consumers, which in turn will result in longer time on site and therefore better rankings.
  - austinhutch 7y ago
    You did a great job explaining that in the article, and I'm not trying to muck up the conversation with a generic swat down. Just specifically interested in that particular result. Also it's likely your hard work gets reblogged into "5 things you MUST do to improve SEO!"
  - hinkley 7y ago
    Another member of the cheese lobby, coming here and covering up the truth about the Cheesemonger, a serial killer who strangles his victims with their own bedsheets. :)
elevation 7y ago
Not all businesses need to put effort into SEO. I'm bootstrapping a niche B2B service. In this space I have the luxury of not relying on google for leads; word of mouth referrals have generated consistent growth by bringing in clients who initially need a few hours of consulting but eventually transition to being customers of my service. Because my webpage is more of a statement of legitimacy than a sales tool; it doesn't need to rank on google. By the time my clients need to access my website for some information, they know my domain because they've already corresponded with me via email. Since I haven't needed google's help for my business to grow, and I believe their level of dominance is bad for the world, I use robots.txt to block google's crawler, and generally do anything to avoid receiving any help from them. This strategy could work for a non-SaaS/consulting company too; if I were running a bike-repair shop on main street, I would build my business through word of mouth promotion within niche bike communities to generate referrals. Once a neighborhood, city, or region full of people trust your brand, a negative yelp review or a google algorithm won't sink you. If google doesn't build your business, it can't take your business away.
- cortesoft 7y ago
  Even if people know the domain they are going to, many people still type it into google anyway. I know I do this, for a couple of reasons. One, so I don't have to type in the whole domain. Two, to avoid accidentally hitting a typo-squatter.
  - onion2k 7y ago
    Google will pretty much always put the domain as the first result for things that look like a navigational search. I imagine closely matching a real, known url that other users click on is a strong ranking signal.
    - cortesoft 7y ago
      But I don't think you show up at all if you have 'noindex' set?
- _dczq 7y ago
ksahin 7y ago
I would be really interested by the source code for crawling and generating the stats, do you plan to open source it?
jedberg 7y ago
It makes me sad that "SEO consulting" exists as a thing. I understand the need for it, but it's always just felt so dirty. It's basically someone who is an expert at tricking a single business, and it's a constant cat and mouse game. And Google will even tell you how to get a high ranking, which pretty much boils down to "make content that humans find compelling and Google will too". It's all the other "tricks" that might work for a while until Google gets wise and changes their algorithm and then we all start the dance over. It was just like the spammers on reddit -- they'd come up with some new trick, we'd block it, they'd find another new trick, and so on, but all along, the stuff that got to the top was for the most part things that people found interesting. Post interesting content was always a good strategy, even if there were a trick or two that might work to boost you on any given week. I just wish we could all just make good content and not worry about gaming the directory, but a few bad actors make that impossible for the rest of us. :(
- cooperadymas 7y ago
  There are plenty of bad actors in the SEO world, and it certainly has an overwhelmingly slimy history. But as is usually the case, the issue is more complex than "SEO bad, good content good." I've been preaching basically what you said as the core tenet of SEO for over a decade. (I would add a "that people are actively looking for" clause to "make content that humans find compelling.") This is much more challenging than one would think, and can really benefit from someone experienced. Whether you call that Search Engine Optimization or Content Marketing or Copywriting or just Writing, done correctly it all boils down to this same principle. That alone often warrants someone to assist a business, as most businesses don't have the internal resources or knowledge to do it entirely themselves. But there's more that falls under the SEO umbrella. 1. The technical aspects of configuring a site to be indexable, accessible, and well-architectured. This might have traditionally fallen under the guise of a webmaster, and for larger sites might fall to more specialized experts, but for the large majority of sites the only people working on these issues are "SEOs". 2. Actually going out and promoting a website in some way. The best content in the world will go unnoticed by man and machine if it's not discoverable from some other source. This has traditionally meant "link building" or (for a long time) "guest posting", and might also include PR or advertising depending on who you ask. 3. Monitoring the results and improving the approach. It's great to say "make content that is compelling" but if you're spending the resources to do this then you need to monitor and analyze the effects it has. This can get incredibly complex, but again, for most websites, is performed by an SEO.
comment10 7y ago
> 150k Small Business Website Teardown 2019 What a superb report.
totalityservice 7y ago
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ulucs 7y ago
All those correlations, but not a single regression? Each of those correlation measures are poisoned with the biases introduced by the correlation of other variables :(

298 points by gurgeous 7y ago

Apologies for the self-promotion but I think this will be interesting to HN. It's an analysis of a huge crawl of 150k small business websites, correlated with google search rankings. This first chapter is focused on SEO. I'm in the midst of writing more chapters to address things like hosting, site speed, wordpress, etc. I'll probably also add some stats like what % of sites use bootstrap, most popular CDN, etc. This thread is a good place to ask me for more data points!

quickben 7y ago
It would be interesting if you can evaluate the UI spam lately somehow: - Sign up for newsletter - This website wants to send you notifications and more, like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9bx5a3PMks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9bx5a3PMks
- gurgeous 7y ago
  I will have some of this in my "technical factors" chapter coming down the road. I definitely will be evaluating the percentage of SMB websites which use chat clients and various (annoying) marketing tools.
teh_klev 7y ago
Bit of a shame, but I can understand why, that you restrict your analysis to the US, and some US-centric optimisations. Perhaps that should be up front in your article about this. The internet is global after all :) However I still found a bunch of things really useful (see later). Yelp as far as I can see from my own experiences isn't really that big of a thing in the UK, but TripAdvisor is, especially for hospitality sector. Google local/My Business is certainly becoming a thing here in the UK as was pointed out to me by a buddy who runs an outdoor activities centre in the Highlands. He has a tremendous understanding of Google and funnelling folks into his biz and banging on about it in the pub the other night. Also in the UK we don't really have such a thing as BBB that google recognises as boosting the juice. Sure we have the British Chambers of Commerce and the CBI, but they're geared towards much larger businesses than your local SME (Small to Medium Sized Enterprise). There are local "Chambers of Commerce" in each council area, but meh. That said, I'm working on unfecking a site that's never had image alt tags, no canonical refs (you can get at the same content from multiple URL's), out of nearly 200 pages there was one solitary H1, page titles were a mess...it goes on. The customer paid their previous "agency" a tidy sum for this site and somehow SEO was never looked at. I did find your article genuinely useful though. I'm a freelancer now, and it seems I need to learn how to SEO as well as be a developer. I look forward to your follow ups.
hnick 7y ago
When you mention external links, do you consider nofollow as not existing? I help out with a blog and we get a lot of requests from article writers who assure us all links will be nofollow.
Fjolsvith 7y ago
Does your site show a business that delivers to a target city but is located in a different state? For example, a shed manufacturer.
mlthoughts2018 7y ago
I think your comments about no-index are a bit disingenuous. For example, when I used to blog, having a way to hide content from showing up in a search engine was important to me. I can imagine that for some businesses this is also true. Not to mention people who are new to creating websites and don’t feel ready for their in-progress site to be indexed, or business that are in the process of closing down. I think Squarespace does the right thing by making this option easy for the user to control. It’s weird to me that you encourage people to “blame” them. That sounds like a hidden agenda sort of bias to me.

patricko 7y ago

Great insights! Thanks for putting this together. It's hard to pick who to root against more, GMB or Yelp.

gdcohen 7y ago

Excellent insights and a well written article. One suggestion - it would be helpful if you explained how someone can tell if they have each of the SEO features enabled.

gurgeous 7y ago
You can read the HTML to see if a particular SEO feature is present. Or there are tools for this. There's some talk in the office about taking my report and turning into a scanner that you could point at any website, which would be an interesting project.
walshemj 7y ago
There is a tool called Screaming frog its the swiss army knife of SEO. For small sites you can get use the free version you wont be able to save any results and are limited to the number of URLs you can crawl.
seanwilson 7y ago
> - it would be helpful if you explained how someone can tell if they have each of the SEO features enabled. You could try my Chrome extension for this which automatically checks multiple pages at a time for technical SEO factors: https://www.checkbot.io/ https://www.checkbot.io/ All the SEO factors checked for and the reasoning behind them are explained here (mostly based on advice from Google): https://www.checkbot.io/guide/seo/ https://www.checkbot.io/guide/seo/
- hnick 7y ago
  This looks great and I gave it a try. Is there a reason you ignore robots.txt? Example result is 'thin content' on our shopping cart, which we say not to index obviously :)
  - seanwilson 7y ago
    Checkbot ignores robots.txt here because Google can still index pages even when they're included in robots.txt files. If you don't want pages to be indexed, you should use a "noindex" tag instead of robots.txt. It's a common misconception that robots.txt stops indexing when it doesn't. See: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en > Important! For the noindex directive to be effective, the page must not be blocked by a robots.txt file. If the page is blocked by a robots.txt file, the crawler will never see the noindex directive, and the page can still appear in search results, for example if other pages link to it.

sixhobbits 7y ago

Did you have very specific hypotheses to test before doing analysis of the dump? Sentences like "Websites with feature x rank y percent better" are pretty meaningless if they're just patterns that appeared from the dump. Any large enough sample is going to have significant looking patterns which can have a likely reason back fitted to them, but which are simply due to randomness.

LeonM 7y ago

It took me a while to understand what BBB is, maybe the author should have taken into account that non-american readers don't know what it is.

asdf21 7y ago
Couldn't you just google it?
- m12k 7y ago
  I did, and the first three search results were bbbcycling.com, bigballerbrand.com and a local football club. I think people don't realize how much Google actually localizes search results.
- LouisSayers 7y ago
  I really hate when people have acronyms in articles and don't specify what they are. It doesn't take much effort to spell out what the acronym is when you first introduce it, and you do your audience a disservice by not introducing it. Of course you can google it, but the point is you're making people go out of their way to understand what it is that you're talking about. Be conscientious people, and FFS (for fucks sake), spell out your acronyms.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - xmprt 7y ago
    Or add a tooltip at the very least. I wonder how that would work for a11y though.
nefitty 7y ago
What is it?
- cparsons3000 7y ago
  Better Business Bureau

a13n 7y ago

> 25% of all small business websites are missing an H1 tag. This SEO advice seems dated. Pretty sure Google doesn't care about which tags you use anymore, just that there's a visual heading (some big text at the top of the page). In your research, did you find that sites without an H1 tag performed worse, SEO-wise? The article doesn't seem to mention this. > SMB websites with a meta description rank 17% higher than websites without Hard to tell if this is causal or just correlational. Maybe sites that have meta tags just tend to be better, SEO-wise, unrelated to the fact that they have meta tags. I don't think you should give this advice unless you add meta tags to your site and then see an increase in your organic search traffic.

walshemj 7y ago
Really Google do very much care about how content is marked up having a relevant H1 is just the start, use of tables for tabular information, structured markup Hreflang for geo targeting and so on. The brutal truth is many business websites are terrible
shaki-dora 7y ago
It's true that there's a correlation / causation problem here, but consider the problem from Google's POV: they rank a certain set of results by hand, then feed those into various learning algorithms to find good predictors for quality. If an analysis such as this finds such correlations, it's likely that Google's algorithms have also picked up on them. In other words: maybe people diligent about meta tags and H1s also write better content and should therefore rank higher (correlation). But "good writing" is hard to judge algorithmically, and Google may therefore well be turning some correlations into causations.
seanwilson 7y ago
> Pretty sure Google doesn't care about which tags you use anymore, just that there's a visual heading (some big text at the top of the page). From Google directly: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en > Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide > Use heading tags to emphasize important text > ... > Similar to writing an outline for a large paper, put some thought into what the main points and sub-points of the content on the page will be and decide where to use heading tags appropriately. Nobody is saying you have to have H1 tags to rank well, but it's not going to hurt and is likely to help. It's better to tell Google what the main heading of the site is instead of Google having to guess and getting it wrong. > I don't think you should give this advice unless you add meta tags to your site and then see an increase in your organic search traffic. Google says description meta tags don't impact your search rank but as these descriptions can optionally be shown to users, well written ones should increase click through rates. Google recommend you write meta descriptions in https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en as well. I have a list of SEO recommendations like the above that are mostly sourced from Google here: https://www.checkbot.io/guide/seo https://www.checkbot.io/guide/seo

austinhutch 7y ago

Awesome post. My main issue is with the BBB reference data... to me that smells like correlation not causation. It implies a level of detail and effort spent on the page. I have a hard time believing that the reference to BBB itself serves to improve rankings...

gurgeous 7y ago
I too am very sensitive to "correlation != causation" and I tried to call it out extensively in the report. I even included a chart at the bottom from the famous Spurious Correlations project... Hopefully nobody gets too carried away with the report. It's impossible to determine causation at scale, unfortunately. One could argue that business owners who curate great BBB rankings and feature the badge are more likely to instill trust in consumers, which in turn will result in longer time on site and therefore better rankings.
- austinhutch 7y ago
  You did a great job explaining that in the article, and I'm not trying to muck up the conversation with a generic swat down. Just specifically interested in that particular result. Also it's likely your hard work gets reblogged into "5 things you MUST do to improve SEO!"
- hinkley 7y ago
  Another member of the cheese lobby, coming here and covering up the truth about the Cheesemonger, a serial killer who strangles his victims with their own bedsheets. :)

elevation 7y ago

Not all businesses need to put effort into SEO. I'm bootstrapping a niche B2B service. In this space I have the luxury of not relying on google for leads; word of mouth referrals have generated consistent growth by bringing in clients who initially need a few hours of consulting but eventually transition to being customers of my service. Because my webpage is more of a statement of legitimacy than a sales tool; it doesn't need to rank on google. By the time my clients need to access my website for some information, they know my domain because they've already corresponded with me via email. Since I haven't needed google's help for my business to grow, and I believe their level of dominance is bad for the world, I use robots.txt to block google's crawler, and generally do anything to avoid receiving any help from them. This strategy could work for a non-SaaS/consulting company too; if I were running a bike-repair shop on main street, I would build my business through word of mouth promotion within niche bike communities to generate referrals. Once a neighborhood, city, or region full of people trust your brand, a negative yelp review or a google algorithm won't sink you. If google doesn't build your business, it can't take your business away.

cortesoft 7y ago
Even if people know the domain they are going to, many people still type it into google anyway. I know I do this, for a couple of reasons. One, so I don't have to type in the whole domain. Two, to avoid accidentally hitting a typo-squatter.
- onion2k 7y ago
  Google will pretty much always put the domain as the first result for things that look like a navigational search. I imagine closely matching a real, known url that other users click on is a strong ranking signal.
  - cortesoft 7y ago
    But I don't think you show up at all if you have 'noindex' set?
_dczq 7y ago

ksahin 7y ago

I would be really interested by the source code for crawling and generating the stats, do you plan to open source it?

jedberg 7y ago

It makes me sad that "SEO consulting" exists as a thing. I understand the need for it, but it's always just felt so dirty. It's basically someone who is an expert at tricking a single business, and it's a constant cat and mouse game. And Google will even tell you how to get a high ranking, which pretty much boils down to "make content that humans find compelling and Google will too". It's all the other "tricks" that might work for a while until Google gets wise and changes their algorithm and then we all start the dance over. It was just like the spammers on reddit -- they'd come up with some new trick, we'd block it, they'd find another new trick, and so on, but all along, the stuff that got to the top was for the most part things that people found interesting. Post interesting content was always a good strategy, even if there were a trick or two that might work to boost you on any given week. I just wish we could all just make good content and not worry about gaming the directory, but a few bad actors make that impossible for the rest of us. :(

cooperadymas 7y ago
There are plenty of bad actors in the SEO world, and it certainly has an overwhelmingly slimy history. But as is usually the case, the issue is more complex than "SEO bad, good content good." I've been preaching basically what you said as the core tenet of SEO for over a decade. (I would add a "that people are actively looking for" clause to "make content that humans find compelling.") This is much more challenging than one would think, and can really benefit from someone experienced. Whether you call that Search Engine Optimization or Content Marketing or Copywriting or just Writing, done correctly it all boils down to this same principle. That alone often warrants someone to assist a business, as most businesses don't have the internal resources or knowledge to do it entirely themselves. But there's more that falls under the SEO umbrella. 1. The technical aspects of configuring a site to be indexable, accessible, and well-architectured. This might have traditionally fallen under the guise of a webmaster, and for larger sites might fall to more specialized experts, but for the large majority of sites the only people working on these issues are "SEOs". 2. Actually going out and promoting a website in some way. The best content in the world will go unnoticed by man and machine if it's not discoverable from some other source. This has traditionally meant "link building" or (for a long time) "guest posting", and might also include PR or advertising depending on who you ask. 3. Monitoring the results and improving the approach. It's great to say "make content that is compelling" but if you're spending the resources to do this then you need to monitor and analyze the effects it has. This can get incredibly complex, but again, for most websites, is performed by an SEO.

comment10 7y ago

> 150k Small Business Website Teardown 2019 What a superb report.

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ulucs 7y ago

All those correlations, but not a single regression? Each of those correlation measures are poisoned with the biases introduced by the correlation of other variables :(