This past week I had the pleasure of attending the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco featuring thought leaders from all walks of the web 2.0 world. I attended informative workshops led by SEO industry leaders, Stephan Spencer, Rand Fishkin, Eric Enge, and Vanessa Fox, and even had the pleasure of having them sign my copy of “The Art of SEO” (aff link). Aside from feeling like a huge fan boy, I walked away with a more holistic approach to SEO and a sincere belief that the principles of the practice have a lot in common with marketing a web startup.
So you might be thinking that the title of this post was crafted solely for link bait, but there is logic behind it. Before attending the SEO workshops, Adam Smith of Xobni and Drew Houston of Dropbox held a lecture on taking your application from one to one million users. Anyone on the tech scene knows the biggest challenge to getting an idea off the ground is marketing so a large portion of their presentation was geared towards that. Among the points they made was building your user base by organic word of mouth. They didn’t spend too much time on it, but I immediately noticed a link from what they were saying in marketing startups to search engine optimization for brands and companies. To build organic word of mouth on the startup scene, you need to:
- Have a great product
- Generate word of mouth w/ scarcity – invite only launches, waiting lists, etc.
- Sex it up – have fun when building your product
Even though the phrase “organic word of mouth” in itself screams SEO, the supporting arguments behind it can also lead to the same conclusion. To make sure your company or brand gets full exposure on search engines, you need to effectively follow the basic principles of SEO:
- Have great content - create content that people want to read
- Generate buzz and links by having unique content - nobody wants to read the same story and link to the same old thing. Create something unique.
- Sex it up – do things out of the ordinary to support points 1 and 2. Most of all – have fun!
Anyone can go to Google, find out what people are searching for, and build an app or optimize HTML tags to get exposure. Very few, however, can optimize an idea or content that actually solves a problem and is of interest to the user. Startups, companies, and brands that can manage to pull off all three of those points are the ones that can grow from one to one million users, or, in SEO, one to one million page views.