3 ms·

Startup founder here. I can expand on this problem in a bit more detail, but it comes down to one key term: cost of acquisition. There are only so many ways t

Startup founder here. I can expand on this problem in a bit more detail, but it comes down to one key term: cost of acquisition. There are only so many ways that a website can improve traffic flow. The best is if the site somehow goes viral since this is nominally free. This is a longshot and not likely to happen. There are places where you can share your site/app with a receptive audience. FB Groups, Reddit, IndieHackers, ProductHunt, and even Hacker News comes to mind. Whether it works or not is somewhat dependent on the audience of the property. For example, travel apps aren't particularly popular with the HN crowd, but my app was on the top of r/InternetIsBeautiful for a full 24 hours and my initial batch of users came from r/TravelHacks. These are good for "bursts", but hard to sustain because you can't just keep posting to r/TravelHacks or HN with the same link. Then there are paid ads on various ad networks or through content creators. These can be quite expensive and often, the cost of acquisition for a single converting user can be quite high! In the early days, this may not be feasible, especially as you're still trying to figure out your audience. One of the startups I worked at had a CAC over $100 via Facebook ads (!!!), but the product was such that they would make it back in 3 months of a user subscribing; the basic math worked as long as they could retain the user. Then there's SEO. Effectively, this is "free" as long as you can do it well since you'll naturally show up in the resultset for given search terms. Because so much of our user interaction with the web has been initiated from search, this is one of the few things that can be done to improve traffic and visibility. (I think this is changing with generations and with ChatGPT; younger generations may initiate their web journey through a social channel rather than through search.) TL;DR: SEO isn't a "silly strategy"; it can be one of the most cost effective ways to get visibility because the cost of acquisition is cheap and works well over a long time scale compared to other options.

andrewfromx 3y ago
Ok but does it actually work? I’ve never been lucky enough to see my site on the first page of google for any good search terms. It feels like trying to do this is like a kid trying for the NFL or NBA as a plan. Very few will make it. And isn't the best thing you can do is get backlinks? Which has nothing to do with just changing your URL structure and making the HTML nice and searchable. Getting backlinks is all about either 1) being so linkable people just do it 2) business development deals.
- CharlieDigital 3y ago
  It works, but you really, really have to know what you are doing. That's why SEO specialists exist because there are a variety of techniques. Just a few things I've learned along the way: - Google favors mobile web performance. If you want to rank higher, your site needs to render fast on mobile. The reasoning is that Google's search objective is to serve good content (whether they are succeeding at this is a different debate) so they want pages that will load fast for the end user, contain the relevant content, and provide the best experience for the broadest audience of visitors. - To make mobile web performance fast, you need to send tight, compact HTML with CSS inlined where possible. This is why SSG/SSR are all the rage these days because Google favors it for search results. SPAs are indexed in a different pipeline. See: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/javascript/javascript-seo-basics https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/... - In some cases, you'll need to use advanced techniques like using service workers to offload some of the page loading to a background thread to speed up rendering. See libraries like PartyTown: https://partytown.builder.io/ https://partytown.builder.io/ - Google can surface structured markup data (JSON-LD, RDF-A, Microdata formats) which will make your results visually stand out. Incorporating it into your HTML output is a must in some domains like e-commerce since pricing and product data is surfaced via this markup. See: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/intro-structured-data https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structu... - Google's search crawler factors structural HTML into account. Therefore, make use of meta tags, <title/>, <h1/>, and other semantic HTML5 tags to mark up your document. See this link for reference: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/title-link https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/title-l... - Google uses sitemaps to find your content. You can improve your results by properly tagging images, videos, and so on. Make sure you do it well. See: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/sitemaps/build-sitemap https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/... - Google's heuristics change all the time. See: https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2Gw... My lesson learned is that this is a very, very hard game to do well. But if done well, your content will eventually make its way up. Because Google re-indexing could take days or weeks, the outcome can take time to actually see. If your site isn't showing up in search, it's because you're competing against thousands of professionals that are 100% focused on this specific domain of expertise and follow Google's updates to their search heuristics with each release and adjust.

andrewfromx 3y ago

Ok but does it actually work? I’ve never been lucky enough to see my site on the first page of google for any good search terms. It feels like trying to do this is like a kid trying for the NFL or NBA as a plan. Very few will make it. And isn't the best thing you can do is get backlinks? Which has nothing to do with just changing your URL structure and making the HTML nice and searchable. Getting backlinks is all about either 1) being so linkable people just do it 2) business development deals.

CharlieDigital 3y ago
It works, but you really, really have to know what you are doing. That's why SEO specialists exist because there are a variety of techniques. Just a few things I've learned along the way: - Google favors mobile web performance. If you want to rank higher, your site needs to render fast on mobile. The reasoning is that Google's search objective is to serve good content (whether they are succeeding at this is a different debate) so they want pages that will load fast for the end user, contain the relevant content, and provide the best experience for the broadest audience of visitors. - To make mobile web performance fast, you need to send tight, compact HTML with CSS inlined where possible. This is why SSG/SSR are all the rage these days because Google favors it for search results. SPAs are indexed in a different pipeline. See: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/javascript/javascript-seo-basics https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/... - In some cases, you'll need to use advanced techniques like using service workers to offload some of the page loading to a background thread to speed up rendering. See libraries like PartyTown: https://partytown.builder.io/ https://partytown.builder.io/ - Google can surface structured markup data (JSON-LD, RDF-A, Microdata formats) which will make your results visually stand out. Incorporating it into your HTML output is a must in some domains like e-commerce since pricing and product data is surfaced via this markup. See: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/intro-structured-data https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structu... - Google's search crawler factors structural HTML into account. Therefore, make use of meta tags, <title/>, <h1/>, and other semantic HTML5 tags to mark up your document. See this link for reference: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/title-link https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/title-l... - Google uses sitemaps to find your content. You can improve your results by properly tagging images, videos, and so on. Make sure you do it well. See: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/sitemaps/build-sitemap https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/... - Google's heuristics change all the time. See: https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2Gw... My lesson learned is that this is a very, very hard game to do well. But if done well, your content will eventually make its way up. Because Google re-indexing could take days or weeks, the outcome can take time to actually see. If your site isn't showing up in search, it's because you're competing against thousands of professionals that are 100% focused on this specific domain of expertise and follow Google's updates to their search heuristics with each release and adjust.