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SEO case study: 8k to 200k monthly organic traffic

460 points by noelceta 7y ago

diminish 7y ago
> done right, SEO can be a game-changer... SEO is still one of the few free ways to get customers. Any ideas how to best leverage it for startups?
- LeonM 7y ago
  It is definitely not free. But the answer is, as always: it depends. A good way to start is RTFM. Google has many guides on how to optimize your website for their indexing service.
  - wolco 7y ago
    Step 2 ignore those and copy what your top 5 are doing.
- Cenk 7y ago
  From personal experience: Yes, correct markup and h1 tags etc (“On-Page SEO“) all matter. Set everything up correctly, that should take your frontend dev a couple days at most for a small to medium site. But that will do almost nothing unless it’s coupled with loads of backlinks. Get a tool like ahrefs or semrush (they’re expensive because they’re good, but a one-week trial is enough to take a look around in the beginning). There you can then see how many backlinks your competitors have and track your own rankings. Concentrate on 1-2 keywords in the beginning and fill your site with well-written content for those keywords, interlink everything on your own site, and then go get backlinks. Yes, you can buy backlinks on Fiver, but those are terrible and will probably do more harm than good. Make something good and get people to write about it.
  - buboard 7y ago
    > ahrefs or semrush OK I gotta ask: these 2 particular bots constantly scan my site once an hour. Why?
    - throwaway77384 7y ago
      Complete speculation: They make their money by assessing back-links. So they crawl as many websites as possible, as often as possible, to establish some kind of view of who is linking to what. From that, they extrapolate some kind of popularity score, which they can probably correlate with keywords and types of users and searches. That is what they sell back to users, presumably. I am actually quite interested to see how clear their data / recommendations would be, but haven't had the time to do so yet.
      - Cenk 7y ago
        > I am actually quite interested to see how clear their data / recommendations would be, but haven't had the time to do so yet. I have tried both, and while ahrefs probably has a better dataset, semrush does very specific recommendations when it comes to link building for example. They will suggest what sites to contact to ask for backlinks (something I have not yet tried, because other people email me all the time asking for backlinks or guest posts so I know how annoying it is).
    - andygcook 7y ago
      It's likely because other companies/people are tracking your site as a competitor in Ahrefs/SEMrush.
    - alvah 7y ago
      There's an arms race in the SEO tools market, to have the largest / most frequently updated / most accurate backlinks database. Ahrefs have used the claim that their bot is the most active (apart from Googlebot) in their marketing.
    - Cenk 7y ago
      Basically what the other commenters said, they scan the entire web to find out who links to whom and how many backlinks each site has. One thing you can do is stop them from scanning your site with robots.txt – some SEO people recommend this to prevent your competitors from finding out where you got your backlinks from, but I haven’t tried it.
- noelceta 7y ago
  Check out SEO guides by Backlinko - some of the best stuff I've read.
- ainiriand 7y ago
  The best guides out there are the ones from HubSpot.
- samscully 7y ago
  Here are some notes I made when I worked for a company that did very well in SEO. This was a few years ago now, so this might be horribly out of date now. Hygiene factors - Never expose an error page to Google. - Never expose an empty page. - Make sure all content is visible on first page load (e.g. not behind pop ups). - Show the same content to Google as to users. - Make sure all relevant content is in the HTML (not loaded dynamically). - Make sure page load times are good. Keywords - Research keywords you need to match. - Build database of search terms you wish to match, grow and improve this database over time. - Carefully curate pages, their URLs and metatags to match these keywords. - Use this database to choose which pages to expose to Google and make sure that all links and pages have the correct follow/nofollow attribute. - Steadily grow the content you expose to Google over time, keeping the quantity and quality of content on pages exposed to Google high. Site structure and internal links - Organise your site in a shallow tree structure. Top level pages should have many links to lower level pages. - All levels of the tree should have keyword rich content which is useful to users. - Not every level of the tree needs to be visible in the Google search results, it is mostly to make things easy for the crawler. External links - Use PR and social media to generate good backlinks for your site. - Use social media like reddit, pinterest and others as well as facebook and twitter. - Do not generate fake backlinks, if Google thinks you are doing this they will give you a severe penalty. Submit your sitemap - Submit your sitemap in Google webmaster tools and make sure it is kept up to date at least weekly. Bounce rate - Carefully monitor your bounce rate and time on site for users coming from Google as these are key factors in Google rankings. Click through rate - Use descriptive and relevant titles and metatags to improve the click through rate from the Google search results to your site. - PR, social media, advertising and other channels can improve brand awareness that in turn improves click through rate. - Regularly check a selection of searches that you rank on to assess the quality of your Google search listings.
  - encoderer 7y ago
    This is really very good.
  - rchaud 7y ago
    Most of these are still current SEO practice, however: > Use PR and social media to generate good backlinks for your site. - Use social media like reddit, pinterest and others as well as facebook and twitter. - FB, Twitter and Reddit may not mark external links as "nofollow" explictly (which would kill their backlink value), but searc engines are smart enough to reduce the power of these links as these are "user-generated content" links and are less valuable as they're not authored by the "site owner" in the way a blog post or web page would be. The impact of these links on social isn't zero, but it's not great either. You're better off trying to get qualified, organic traffic to your site (say from a backlink on a related site or from an email newsletter) as those clicks will likely have a lower bounce rate, which is good for SEO.
- lxcfan 7y ago
  I do SEO work for a large (DJIA component) tech company, so I'm pretty far removed from startup-land, but I'll still share the number one piece of advice I give out internally: Write high-quality content about topics that people are searching for. Simple? Yes. But it still seems so hard to get people to do it. Everyone would rather talk about page load time and HTML markup and structure and meta tags and exactly how many characters their headline or URL should be. Yes, you should make common-sense decisions about those things. But no amount of technical optimization is going to make people start Googling something that they couldn't care less about to begin with. Find out where demand exists for answering questions, and give the user a good experience as you answer those questions, and the search traffic will follow.
  - throwawaypa123 7y ago
    Writing good content is hard. If a writer could do it, they are rarely going to be writing it to sell. So gaming the system and writing average content (much easier to produce) and gaming the system is the best way to go.
  - alvah 7y ago
    Absolutely. SEO is content & links. Good (valuable to the searcher) content earns links (over time), low quality content needs various tactics of increasing dodginess to gain links.
- DrNuke 7y ago
  You can only control your own content while following Google guidelines, so state-of-the-art, world class content will however & pretty always be your best shot?
- dgudkov 7y ago
  >SEO is still one of the few free ways to get customers. If you have to hire and manage a team of content writers it's not that free.
  - naicuoctavian 7y ago
    It's not free even if you put in just your time. In a startup, everything competes for your time. You could spend it on your product or other growth channels.
- markosaric 7y ago
  Create content relevant to what your startup does. Answer relevant questions that real people search for. You can do some keyword research and use tools such as Autocomplete and People Also Ask to get some questions to start with. Answer these questions the best you can. In-depth, clear, easy to understand. Make it informative, make it educational, make it look nice. The focus is on providing the best value possible to the person who is asking the question. Review the posts that currently rank on the first page of Google for these searches. What topics do they talk about? What issues do they solve? And then try to create something that's better, more practical, easier to understand, presented in a better way... than what you've found on the first page. It will take some time and effort of regularly posting quality articles before you start seeing the results but this is a more trusted and more self-sustainable way of driving traffic and leads to your startup.
- puranjay 7y ago
  Forget an overarching strategy. You don't have the bandwidth for it as a small startup. As a start, just find 3-5 core keywords that aren't insanely competitive. Write the best possible content you can on these keywords. Promote them like hell - guest posts, forums, heck even HN. Don't just look for links; get actual people to read your content. This alone can move the needle for small startups. A trickle of high quality leads can give you the confidence to invest more in content and SEO
- ggregoire 7y ago
  Curious to know why you think SEO is free? Someone has to write the content, right?
dhruvkar 7y ago
>> Tallyfy, a SaaS startup based in St. Louis Ironically, I'm based in St. Louis, looking for business automation software for my company based in St. Louis and the only reason I know Tallyfy exists is because of this HN article.
- ec109685 7y ago
  It’s content marketing all the way down…
- a13n 7y ago
  Check out Pipefy instead https://www.pipefy.com/ https://www.pipefy.com/
  - amitkoth 7y ago
    Why? Pipefy sucks. Tallyfy is awesome. Canny sucks too. Lame, conflicted, clueless people.
- duxup 7y ago
  I live in the Twin Cities and I'll be at a meetup and I STILL find out about places and products "Wait that ... is made here?"
philfrasty 7y ago
Would be great to see how this translates into actual $ for the business. Is this mentioned somewhere else? The high CPCs indicate that there IS some value. But in general some people/businesses can make a living with an audience of 100 and others not with an audience of 100k.
- noelceta 7y ago
  That's super situational and really depends on the keyword you rank on. Can't give you the numbers, but yeah, the high CPC keywords are usually the bread-winners.
tilolebo 7y ago
> The main issue was that the writers weren’t SEO specialists: they knew how to write good content, but good content is NOT always the same as SEO content. > The main difference between SEO content and generic content is that the first is written with user search intent in mind. You need to keep in mind what the Googler is looking for when they search for any given keyword. Then, you create content based on that intent. Isn't it sad that nowadays you don't create content for the users but for a search engine crawler...
- noelceta 7y ago
  That's not the case, actually. Your content should be based on the intent of the search. For example, if someone's Googling "how to improve a process," they're looking for practical advice on improving processes. They're NOT looking for "benefits of process improvement," "why you should improve your processes," etc. Sure, you can write the BEST article on one of these topics, but it's not going to rank because that's not actually what the user is looking for. Hope that makes sense :) Edit: and the above is a very common writer mistake. They write interesting content, but it's just not that relevant as a search result.
  - tilolebo 7y ago
    Yep, I didn't mean to criticize the article itself, which is super informative. Thanks for the piece :-)
  - AlchemistCamp 7y ago
    Some of the best content isn't searched for by anyone at all before it was written, though. In the extreme case, consider the Harry Potter series—fantastic content, but it would have been horrible SEO content when it was written.
    - noelceta 7y ago
      True, but in most cases, you won't write Harry Potter - you just want to drive leads from people searching for process management solutions, haha. What you did mention IS an actual strategy though. The idea is, you coin a new term or strategy, and if you PR the content enough, the term will have a ton of searches (and you'll rank #1). More often than not, though, you have to be a big fish to really pull this off
wackget 7y ago
Are they really trying to say that SEO was the sole reason that the organic traffic grew so much? That is ludicrous. It couldn't have anything to do with the fact that the service itself grew in popularity, or relevancy, or reputation, etc.? I'm convinced SEO is modern-day snake oil. If you have a useful website/service with well-written content then the traffic will come to you. The idea of trying to "SEO" a useless/poorly-built website is like an obese person taking herbal pills because the bottle says they help weight loss.
- noelceta 7y ago
  Most of the organic traffic is content SEO, yes. Around ~2k of monthly searches is branded search (people looking for the company). And, well, it IS pretty reasonable - the company IS ranking for most BPM / workflow keywords. I do get why you'd think SEO is snake oil. Yeah, useful website, service + good content is the way to go. You can't just "SEO" a mediocre website and expect anything to happen.
- gwbas1c 7y ago
  It's very easy to know how people came to your site. If they came from a Google search, you can track that and use that data to validate if SEO is working or not.
markosaric 7y ago
Nice post! I would add "per month" to the original headline as "200k per month" sounds much more impressive than "200k in 2 years" which the current headline says.
- noelceta 7y ago
  Thanks! And a very fair point. Fix'd!
kehphin 7y ago
Felt very meta reading this article about SEO while the article itself was employing all the SEO strategies - backlinks, infoboxes, etc :P It was great that the company had already started its SEO pipeline, but what about for companies with no strategy at all? Are there any good tools to help decide which keywords to focus on?
- noelceta 7y ago
  yeah, haha. It's super meta - we're trying to get this article to rank on "SEO case study." It will probably take a while since the domain is pretty new, but we'll get there. As for which keywords to focus on, our rule of thumb is, find one of your competitors that's winning with their SEO, and borrow their ideas. In most industries, if you combine the keywords from your top 3-5 competitors, your keyword strategy is gonna be pretty comprehensive. As for the "how," just run your competitor's website through SEMrush or Ahrefs, and voila!
tailsdog 7y ago
Good results. SEO is not only content there are other factors such as performance, accessibility and structure. Looking at a lighthouse audit on the landing page (https://tallyfy.com/ https://tallyfy.com/) it looks like there can be a lot of improvement there.
finger 7y ago
Small nitpick but title says 0 to 200k, and 3 paragrafs down from the headline it says ~8.000 to 200.000: > which is why we created this guide - a complete step-by-step SEO case study on how we took Tallyfy, a SaaS process management software, from ~8,000 monthly traffic to about 200,000 in less than 2 years. I imagine there is a big difference between starting from 0 and from an already established baseline.
- dang 7y ago
  Ok, we've added 8k to the lower bound in the title above. Thanks!
codingdave 7y ago
Keep in mind that this is posted on the site of an organization that provides SEO services. In my experience, the SEO game is a waste of time if you are looking for long-term traffic. Not that it doesn't work in the short-term - it does. And there are good practices in how to structure your pages, and making sure they perform well on multiple devices. But all of my personal and work-related sites have gotten their long-term traffic by delivering a good product, and having our customers speak well of us. Then people search for us, and when they find and go to our page, our rankings go up. You end up in a positive feedback loop due to the quality of your content and your product.
- noelceta 7y ago
  Yep, a good product / service and happy customers can take you a looooong way. If your product sucks, no traffic in the world is going to make it work. But that doesn't mean that SEO is useless. We might be biased, but there are a ton of benefits - traffic, leads, brand awareness, etc.
- walshemj 7y ago
  Sorry that is bunkum, I see plenty of sites that cant even size and optimise images correctly - for example a mobile hero image that is 1200x800 FFS Last month I had two huge background images fixed and we saw every page go from slow to moderate for mobile use.
- alvah 7y ago
  Your last paragraph doesn't negate the value of SEO. IMO you still need good product / good content / some reason for people to visit your site for long-term success, but if 10 others have an offering (of any quality) in the same category & they all make at least some attempt to optimise their websites, how is anyone going to find your site at the top of page 2?
- untoreh 7y ago
  there is a minimum basket of SEO optimizations that are worth keeping track of and are 'natural', like proper site hierarchy, meta tagging, linking out to connected social accounts, the rest of the time is better spent on what the site is actually about.
usr42 7y ago
Traffic is of course nice but in the end not the goal, just a tool. Traffic by itself even increases costs. In the end, you usually want to have customers, not traffic. To be even more precise, you want HAPPY customers, because then they will remain customers and also bring new ones. That means you still need good content and a good product more than a lot of traffic.
reactking 7y ago
Interesting read. I recently experienced something very similar and wrote about it here: https://upmostly.com/specials/2019-year-in-review https://upmostly.com/specials/2019-year-in-review I went from 0 to nearly 600,000 page views in just under 12 months.
monkin 7y ago
I have a question to author: What is your avg. session duration and bounce rate on those 200k visitors a month?
jonobird1 7y ago
Worth noting also that "ApolloDigital" cofounder and writer of the article is also the Head of Content & SEO for "Tallyfy". So not sure that constitutes as a client, nor take full ownership of this growth. Not saying they couldn't do it, but seems misleading.
superasn 7y ago
From the little experience I have of this domain for me SEO still was all mostly about building backlinks, not your shitty $5 links but making something to which people want to link to naturally. One of my sites was mentioned on Techcrunch which led to lot of other blogs linking to it and within 2 or 3 months we were dominating the first page of Google (happened around 2010 so a lot must have changed too). So yeah getting big sites to link to you is the 80% part. The rest of the SEO stuff like tags, etc is probably the 20%.
geocar 7y ago
What effect on sales did this have? I have a hard time believing those keyword terms are used by people in pipe.
iudqnolq 7y ago
Does anyone know why the screenshot of a keyword spreadsheet is all about prescription drugs? It doesn't seem to match the business described. Could they have uploaded the wrong image?
sixhobbits 7y ago
Why do these SEO people write so dramatically? Why do they use such short sentences and short paragraphs? Want to know? It's simple. They fall fowl of Goodhart's law! But what's that? I'll tell you! Goodhart's law states 'When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.' That's a lot of words, and it's really complicated, so let's simplify! Stay with me -- I'll teach you. We can learn together. You're still reading this, but you're not learning anything. And yet I'm being measured by you reading. To. The. End. So I do anything to make you do that. Anything. It doesn't matter if I'm not adding value for you any more. You've probably figured it out already and are skipping to the end. Thanks for getting this far. Basically, if you aim to game metrics, you can do it. Easy. But why were you aiming for organic searches in the first place? You wanted your visitors to like you. To trust you. And to meet that goal the 'writers who weren't SEO specialists' were actually your friend. They were (if they were good) _reader_ specialists. They created what people wanted to read. Not what would make your KPIs go up. And ironically, now your KPIs look great. But your content is bad, and not useful. Don't aim for your measurement. Aim for your goals, and use your measurements to see how close you got.
- CM30 7y ago
  For the short sentences and paragraphs thing, I think it's about readability more than anything. People tend to scan content when they read online, not go through word by word, and it's probably easier to do that with short sentences and paragraphs. It's also likely in part down to them optimising for readability tests. Stuff like Yoast grades your content based on the results of a Flesch-Kincaid readability test, which marks it as easier to read if there are less words and syllables per sentence, with the recommended score being roughly equivalent to a grade 8 reading level. Hence these SEO writers are basically writing for 13-14 year olds.
- sessy 7y ago
  Probably time to bring this up again: The internet is an SEO landfill. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20256764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20256764
- shill_predictor 7y ago
  I've got the urge to kick you in the balls while reading it. You have really represented a problem with this writing style.
Alir3z4 7y ago
I hate any SEO case study and companies that want to make it happen for you. Just write content that help people and solve people problem. Have you seen how Digital Ocean has lots of useful tutorials and articles, they get tons of visits and lost of customers and exposures, they solve people problem. How about StackOverflow ? is the content written with SEO in mind ? No, they solve people problem, problem that people seek an answer for; https://alireza.gonevis.com/how-to-write-for-seo/ https://alireza.gonevis.com/how-to-write-for-seo/
- rchaud 7y ago
  You are using 2 examples that couldn't be more different. Digital Ocean's tutorials are often written by third party contributors, not DO staff. Those third parties are doing their own SEO by linking to their own websites, if you haven't noticed. It's a win-win for both DO and the writers. Having set up a few DO droplets, I'll say that the documentation around their own services is less than great, and I often find myself Googling how to do this or that in DO and finding help on third party sites. StackOverflow is like Facebook or Reddit; it's all user-generated content. SO staff don't contribute besides moderating the discussions. SO does well on SEO because it's been around for a long time, and the content is set up in a question and answer form, which is tailor made for search engines.
claudsaille 7y ago
I invite you to see this site : https://www.apprentus.fr/ https://www.apprentus.fr/ you can find SEO specialists

460 points by noelceta 7y ago

> done right, SEO can be a game-changer... SEO is still one of the few free ways to get customers. Any ideas how to best leverage it for startups?

LeonM 7y ago
It is definitely not free. But the answer is, as always: it depends. A good way to start is RTFM. Google has many guides on how to optimize your website for their indexing service.
- wolco 7y ago
  Step 2 ignore those and copy what your top 5 are doing.
Cenk 7y ago
From personal experience: Yes, correct markup and h1 tags etc (“On-Page SEO“) all matter. Set everything up correctly, that should take your frontend dev a couple days at most for a small to medium site. But that will do almost nothing unless it’s coupled with loads of backlinks. Get a tool like ahrefs or semrush (they’re expensive because they’re good, but a one-week trial is enough to take a look around in the beginning). There you can then see how many backlinks your competitors have and track your own rankings. Concentrate on 1-2 keywords in the beginning and fill your site with well-written content for those keywords, interlink everything on your own site, and then go get backlinks. Yes, you can buy backlinks on Fiver, but those are terrible and will probably do more harm than good. Make something good and get people to write about it.
- buboard 7y ago
  > ahrefs or semrush OK I gotta ask: these 2 particular bots constantly scan my site once an hour. Why?
  - throwaway77384 7y ago
    Complete speculation: They make their money by assessing back-links. So they crawl as many websites as possible, as often as possible, to establish some kind of view of who is linking to what. From that, they extrapolate some kind of popularity score, which they can probably correlate with keywords and types of users and searches. That is what they sell back to users, presumably. I am actually quite interested to see how clear their data / recommendations would be, but haven't had the time to do so yet.
    - Cenk 7y ago
      > I am actually quite interested to see how clear their data / recommendations would be, but haven't had the time to do so yet. I have tried both, and while ahrefs probably has a better dataset, semrush does very specific recommendations when it comes to link building for example. They will suggest what sites to contact to ask for backlinks (something I have not yet tried, because other people email me all the time asking for backlinks or guest posts so I know how annoying it is).
  - andygcook 7y ago
    It's likely because other companies/people are tracking your site as a competitor in Ahrefs/SEMrush.
  - alvah 7y ago
    There's an arms race in the SEO tools market, to have the largest / most frequently updated / most accurate backlinks database. Ahrefs have used the claim that their bot is the most active (apart from Googlebot) in their marketing.
  - Cenk 7y ago
    Basically what the other commenters said, they scan the entire web to find out who links to whom and how many backlinks each site has. One thing you can do is stop them from scanning your site with robots.txt – some SEO people recommend this to prevent your competitors from finding out where you got your backlinks from, but I haven’t tried it.
noelceta 7y ago
Check out SEO guides by Backlinko - some of the best stuff I've read.
ainiriand 7y ago
The best guides out there are the ones from HubSpot.
samscully 7y ago
Here are some notes I made when I worked for a company that did very well in SEO. This was a few years ago now, so this might be horribly out of date now. Hygiene factors - Never expose an error page to Google. - Never expose an empty page. - Make sure all content is visible on first page load (e.g. not behind pop ups). - Show the same content to Google as to users. - Make sure all relevant content is in the HTML (not loaded dynamically). - Make sure page load times are good. Keywords - Research keywords you need to match. - Build database of search terms you wish to match, grow and improve this database over time. - Carefully curate pages, their URLs and metatags to match these keywords. - Use this database to choose which pages to expose to Google and make sure that all links and pages have the correct follow/nofollow attribute. - Steadily grow the content you expose to Google over time, keeping the quantity and quality of content on pages exposed to Google high. Site structure and internal links - Organise your site in a shallow tree structure. Top level pages should have many links to lower level pages. - All levels of the tree should have keyword rich content which is useful to users. - Not every level of the tree needs to be visible in the Google search results, it is mostly to make things easy for the crawler. External links - Use PR and social media to generate good backlinks for your site. - Use social media like reddit, pinterest and others as well as facebook and twitter. - Do not generate fake backlinks, if Google thinks you are doing this they will give you a severe penalty. Submit your sitemap - Submit your sitemap in Google webmaster tools and make sure it is kept up to date at least weekly. Bounce rate - Carefully monitor your bounce rate and time on site for users coming from Google as these are key factors in Google rankings. Click through rate - Use descriptive and relevant titles and metatags to improve the click through rate from the Google search results to your site. - PR, social media, advertising and other channels can improve brand awareness that in turn improves click through rate. - Regularly check a selection of searches that you rank on to assess the quality of your Google search listings.
- encoderer 7y ago
  This is really very good.
- rchaud 7y ago
  Most of these are still current SEO practice, however: > Use PR and social media to generate good backlinks for your site. - Use social media like reddit, pinterest and others as well as facebook and twitter. - FB, Twitter and Reddit may not mark external links as "nofollow" explictly (which would kill their backlink value), but searc engines are smart enough to reduce the power of these links as these are "user-generated content" links and are less valuable as they're not authored by the "site owner" in the way a blog post or web page would be. The impact of these links on social isn't zero, but it's not great either. You're better off trying to get qualified, organic traffic to your site (say from a backlink on a related site or from an email newsletter) as those clicks will likely have a lower bounce rate, which is good for SEO.
lxcfan 7y ago
I do SEO work for a large (DJIA component) tech company, so I'm pretty far removed from startup-land, but I'll still share the number one piece of advice I give out internally: Write high-quality content about topics that people are searching for. Simple? Yes. But it still seems so hard to get people to do it. Everyone would rather talk about page load time and HTML markup and structure and meta tags and exactly how many characters their headline or URL should be. Yes, you should make common-sense decisions about those things. But no amount of technical optimization is going to make people start Googling something that they couldn't care less about to begin with. Find out where demand exists for answering questions, and give the user a good experience as you answer those questions, and the search traffic will follow.
- throwawaypa123 7y ago
  Writing good content is hard. If a writer could do it, they are rarely going to be writing it to sell. So gaming the system and writing average content (much easier to produce) and gaming the system is the best way to go.
- alvah 7y ago
  Absolutely. SEO is content & links. Good (valuable to the searcher) content earns links (over time), low quality content needs various tactics of increasing dodginess to gain links.
DrNuke 7y ago
You can only control your own content while following Google guidelines, so state-of-the-art, world class content will however & pretty always be your best shot?
dgudkov 7y ago
>SEO is still one of the few free ways to get customers. If you have to hire and manage a team of content writers it's not that free.
- naicuoctavian 7y ago
  It's not free even if you put in just your time. In a startup, everything competes for your time. You could spend it on your product or other growth channels.
markosaric 7y ago
Create content relevant to what your startup does. Answer relevant questions that real people search for. You can do some keyword research and use tools such as Autocomplete and People Also Ask to get some questions to start with. Answer these questions the best you can. In-depth, clear, easy to understand. Make it informative, make it educational, make it look nice. The focus is on providing the best value possible to the person who is asking the question. Review the posts that currently rank on the first page of Google for these searches. What topics do they talk about? What issues do they solve? And then try to create something that's better, more practical, easier to understand, presented in a better way... than what you've found on the first page. It will take some time and effort of regularly posting quality articles before you start seeing the results but this is a more trusted and more self-sustainable way of driving traffic and leads to your startup.
puranjay 7y ago
Forget an overarching strategy. You don't have the bandwidth for it as a small startup. As a start, just find 3-5 core keywords that aren't insanely competitive. Write the best possible content you can on these keywords. Promote them like hell - guest posts, forums, heck even HN. Don't just look for links; get actual people to read your content. This alone can move the needle for small startups. A trickle of high quality leads can give you the confidence to invest more in content and SEO
ggregoire 7y ago
Curious to know why you think SEO is free? Someone has to write the content, right?

dhruvkar 7y ago

>> Tallyfy, a SaaS startup based in St. Louis Ironically, I'm based in St. Louis, looking for business automation software for my company based in St. Louis and the only reason I know Tallyfy exists is because of this HN article.

ec109685 7y ago
It’s content marketing all the way down…
a13n 7y ago
Check out Pipefy instead https://www.pipefy.com/ https://www.pipefy.com/
- amitkoth 7y ago
  Why? Pipefy sucks. Tallyfy is awesome. Canny sucks too. Lame, conflicted, clueless people.
duxup 7y ago
I live in the Twin Cities and I'll be at a meetup and I STILL find out about places and products "Wait that ... is made here?"

philfrasty 7y ago

Would be great to see how this translates into actual $ for the business. Is this mentioned somewhere else? The high CPCs indicate that there IS some value. But in general some people/businesses can make a living with an audience of 100 and others not with an audience of 100k.

noelceta 7y ago
That's super situational and really depends on the keyword you rank on. Can't give you the numbers, but yeah, the high CPC keywords are usually the bread-winners.

tilolebo 7y ago

> The main issue was that the writers weren’t SEO specialists: they knew how to write good content, but good content is NOT always the same as SEO content. > The main difference between SEO content and generic content is that the first is written with user search intent in mind. You need to keep in mind what the Googler is looking for when they search for any given keyword. Then, you create content based on that intent. Isn't it sad that nowadays you don't create content for the users but for a search engine crawler...

noelceta 7y ago
That's not the case, actually. Your content should be based on the intent of the search. For example, if someone's Googling "how to improve a process," they're looking for practical advice on improving processes. They're NOT looking for "benefits of process improvement," "why you should improve your processes," etc. Sure, you can write the BEST article on one of these topics, but it's not going to rank because that's not actually what the user is looking for. Hope that makes sense :) Edit: and the above is a very common writer mistake. They write interesting content, but it's just not that relevant as a search result.
- tilolebo 7y ago
  Yep, I didn't mean to criticize the article itself, which is super informative. Thanks for the piece :-)
- AlchemistCamp 7y ago
  Some of the best content isn't searched for by anyone at all before it was written, though. In the extreme case, consider the Harry Potter series—fantastic content, but it would have been horrible SEO content when it was written.
  - noelceta 7y ago
    True, but in most cases, you won't write Harry Potter - you just want to drive leads from people searching for process management solutions, haha. What you did mention IS an actual strategy though. The idea is, you coin a new term or strategy, and if you PR the content enough, the term will have a ton of searches (and you'll rank #1). More often than not, though, you have to be a big fish to really pull this off

wackget 7y ago

Are they really trying to say that SEO was the sole reason that the organic traffic grew so much? That is ludicrous. It couldn't have anything to do with the fact that the service itself grew in popularity, or relevancy, or reputation, etc.? I'm convinced SEO is modern-day snake oil. If you have a useful website/service with well-written content then the traffic will come to you. The idea of trying to "SEO" a useless/poorly-built website is like an obese person taking herbal pills because the bottle says they help weight loss.

noelceta 7y ago
Most of the organic traffic is content SEO, yes. Around ~2k of monthly searches is branded search (people looking for the company). And, well, it IS pretty reasonable - the company IS ranking for most BPM / workflow keywords. I do get why you'd think SEO is snake oil. Yeah, useful website, service + good content is the way to go. You can't just "SEO" a mediocre website and expect anything to happen.
gwbas1c 7y ago
It's very easy to know how people came to your site. If they came from a Google search, you can track that and use that data to validate if SEO is working or not.

markosaric 7y ago

Nice post! I would add "per month" to the original headline as "200k per month" sounds much more impressive than "200k in 2 years" which the current headline says.

noelceta 7y ago
Thanks! And a very fair point. Fix'd!

kehphin 7y ago

Felt very meta reading this article about SEO while the article itself was employing all the SEO strategies - backlinks, infoboxes, etc :P It was great that the company had already started its SEO pipeline, but what about for companies with no strategy at all? Are there any good tools to help decide which keywords to focus on?

noelceta 7y ago
yeah, haha. It's super meta - we're trying to get this article to rank on "SEO case study." It will probably take a while since the domain is pretty new, but we'll get there. As for which keywords to focus on, our rule of thumb is, find one of your competitors that's winning with their SEO, and borrow their ideas. In most industries, if you combine the keywords from your top 3-5 competitors, your keyword strategy is gonna be pretty comprehensive. As for the "how," just run your competitor's website through SEMrush or Ahrefs, and voila!

tailsdog 7y ago

Good results. SEO is not only content there are other factors such as performance, accessibility and structure. Looking at a lighthouse audit on the landing page (https://tallyfy.com/ https://tallyfy.com/) it looks like there can be a lot of improvement there.

finger 7y ago

Small nitpick but title says 0 to 200k, and 3 paragrafs down from the headline it says ~8.000 to 200.000: > which is why we created this guide - a complete step-by-step SEO case study on how we took Tallyfy, a SaaS process management software, from ~8,000 monthly traffic to about 200,000 in less than 2 years. I imagine there is a big difference between starting from 0 and from an already established baseline.

dang 7y ago
Ok, we've added 8k to the lower bound in the title above. Thanks!

codingdave 7y ago

Keep in mind that this is posted on the site of an organization that provides SEO services. In my experience, the SEO game is a waste of time if you are looking for long-term traffic. Not that it doesn't work in the short-term - it does. And there are good practices in how to structure your pages, and making sure they perform well on multiple devices. But all of my personal and work-related sites have gotten their long-term traffic by delivering a good product, and having our customers speak well of us. Then people search for us, and when they find and go to our page, our rankings go up. You end up in a positive feedback loop due to the quality of your content and your product.

noelceta 7y ago
Yep, a good product / service and happy customers can take you a looooong way. If your product sucks, no traffic in the world is going to make it work. But that doesn't mean that SEO is useless. We might be biased, but there are a ton of benefits - traffic, leads, brand awareness, etc.
walshemj 7y ago
Sorry that is bunkum, I see plenty of sites that cant even size and optimise images correctly - for example a mobile hero image that is 1200x800 FFS Last month I had two huge background images fixed and we saw every page go from slow to moderate for mobile use.
alvah 7y ago
Your last paragraph doesn't negate the value of SEO. IMO you still need good product / good content / some reason for people to visit your site for long-term success, but if 10 others have an offering (of any quality) in the same category & they all make at least some attempt to optimise their websites, how is anyone going to find your site at the top of page 2?
untoreh 7y ago
there is a minimum basket of SEO optimizations that are worth keeping track of and are 'natural', like proper site hierarchy, meta tagging, linking out to connected social accounts, the rest of the time is better spent on what the site is actually about.

usr42 7y ago

Traffic is of course nice but in the end not the goal, just a tool. Traffic by itself even increases costs. In the end, you usually want to have customers, not traffic. To be even more precise, you want HAPPY customers, because then they will remain customers and also bring new ones. That means you still need good content and a good product more than a lot of traffic.

reactking 7y ago

Interesting read. I recently experienced something very similar and wrote about it here: https://upmostly.com/specials/2019-year-in-review https://upmostly.com/specials/2019-year-in-review I went from 0 to nearly 600,000 page views in just under 12 months.

monkin 7y ago

I have a question to author: What is your avg. session duration and bounce rate on those 200k visitors a month?

jonobird1 7y ago

Worth noting also that "ApolloDigital" cofounder and writer of the article is also the Head of Content & SEO for "Tallyfy". So not sure that constitutes as a client, nor take full ownership of this growth. Not saying they couldn't do it, but seems misleading.

superasn 7y ago

From the little experience I have of this domain for me SEO still was all mostly about building backlinks, not your shitty $5 links but making something to which people want to link to naturally. One of my sites was mentioned on Techcrunch which led to lot of other blogs linking to it and within 2 or 3 months we were dominating the first page of Google (happened around 2010 so a lot must have changed too). So yeah getting big sites to link to you is the 80% part. The rest of the SEO stuff like tags, etc is probably the 20%.

geocar 7y ago

What effect on sales did this have? I have a hard time believing those keyword terms are used by people in pipe.

iudqnolq 7y ago

Does anyone know why the screenshot of a keyword spreadsheet is all about prescription drugs? It doesn't seem to match the business described. Could they have uploaded the wrong image?

sixhobbits 7y ago

Why do these SEO people write so dramatically? Why do they use such short sentences and short paragraphs? Want to know? It's simple. They fall fowl of Goodhart's law! But what's that? I'll tell you! Goodhart's law states 'When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.' That's a lot of words, and it's really complicated, so let's simplify! Stay with me -- I'll teach you. We can learn together. You're still reading this, but you're not learning anything. And yet I'm being measured by you reading. To. The. End. So I do anything to make you do that. Anything. It doesn't matter if I'm not adding value for you any more. You've probably figured it out already and are skipping to the end. Thanks for getting this far. Basically, if you aim to game metrics, you can do it. Easy. But why were you aiming for organic searches in the first place? You wanted your visitors to like you. To trust you. And to meet that goal the 'writers who weren't SEO specialists' were actually your friend. They were (if they were good) _reader_ specialists. They created what people wanted to read. Not what would make your KPIs go up. And ironically, now your KPIs look great. But your content is bad, and not useful. Don't aim for your measurement. Aim for your goals, and use your measurements to see how close you got.

CM30 7y ago
For the short sentences and paragraphs thing, I think it's about readability more than anything. People tend to scan content when they read online, not go through word by word, and it's probably easier to do that with short sentences and paragraphs. It's also likely in part down to them optimising for readability tests. Stuff like Yoast grades your content based on the results of a Flesch-Kincaid readability test, which marks it as easier to read if there are less words and syllables per sentence, with the recommended score being roughly equivalent to a grade 8 reading level. Hence these SEO writers are basically writing for 13-14 year olds.
sessy 7y ago
Probably time to bring this up again: The internet is an SEO landfill. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20256764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20256764
shill_predictor 7y ago
I've got the urge to kick you in the balls while reading it. You have really represented a problem with this writing style.

Alir3z4 7y ago

I hate any SEO case study and companies that want to make it happen for you. Just write content that help people and solve people problem. Have you seen how Digital Ocean has lots of useful tutorials and articles, they get tons of visits and lost of customers and exposures, they solve people problem. How about StackOverflow ? is the content written with SEO in mind ? No, they solve people problem, problem that people seek an answer for; https://alireza.gonevis.com/how-to-write-for-seo/ https://alireza.gonevis.com/how-to-write-for-seo/

rchaud 7y ago
You are using 2 examples that couldn't be more different. Digital Ocean's tutorials are often written by third party contributors, not DO staff. Those third parties are doing their own SEO by linking to their own websites, if you haven't noticed. It's a win-win for both DO and the writers. Having set up a few DO droplets, I'll say that the documentation around their own services is less than great, and I often find myself Googling how to do this or that in DO and finding help on third party sites. StackOverflow is like Facebook or Reddit; it's all user-generated content. SO staff don't contribute besides moderating the discussions. SO does well on SEO because it's been around for a long time, and the content is set up in a question and answer form, which is tailor made for search engines.

claudsaille 7y ago

I invite you to see this site : https://www.apprentus.fr/ https://www.apprentus.fr/ you can find SEO specialists