Building an SEO-Driven Business (Part I)

I’m no SEO guru but over the past couple of years I’ve talked to enough entrepreneurs who are leveraging SEO to develop a perspective on the impact of making SEO a big part of a startup’s future. I plan on doing a few posts on this topic in the coming days.

It helps to mention some of the key ingredients of the SEO value chain.

action = f1(user_intent, traffic)
traffic = f2(search_query, rank, url)
search_query = f3(user_intent)
rank = f4(content, internal_links, back_links)
internal_links = f5(content, meta-data)
back_links = f6(content, meta-data, partnerships)

There are many complex variables here. SEO has quickly evolved from being a craft to being both an art and a science practiced by some of the best and some of the worst people on the Net. The search engines have evolved in turn not to be duped. However, old habits die hard and the one bad habit I keep seeing in the SEO world is the overwhelming focus on content.

Content, be it expert-generated articles or user-contributed product reviews or the “yo, buddy, what’s up?” on Myspace, is very important but is just one piece of the puzzle. I’m surprised more startups are not focused on scalable approaches for adding value on two other fronts:

  • User intent. Everything stems from that. The search engine marketers know this cold. They know that different search queries lead to different conversions after a paid click. On the SEO side, however, I haven’t seen great examples of recognizing the importance of user intent and the fact that different search queries often indicate different intent. By focusing too much on the content that drives traffic and not enough on the dynamism and adaptability of the user experience visitors get after they land through a natural search link, businesses are leaving value on the table.
  • Meta-data. My friend Glen Daniels says “It’s just metadata.” In most situations we’d be better off by trading off data for meta-data, or volume of content for understanding about the content. There is a reason why e-commerce product reviews are so valuable for SEO. Not only do they provide content but they are organized in context and have all the meta-data associated with the product they are about. Notice how Amazon is smart to display the same reviews for items with different colors, or for the hardcover vs. the paperback version of the same book, or for a newer version of a pair of headphones, etc. They couldn’t do that without meta-data associating the review with a product and then some smarts that associate similar products together. The other reason why meta-data is so important is that it allows for links created through software. For example, WordPress.com is smart to enhance the value of blog posts for both readers and search engines through an auto-generated set of possibly-related posts. I see too many businesses invest to generate a large volume of content but not enough to add great meta-data to the content, which ultimately limits both SEO and monetization.

The next post will be on the three generations of SEO.

About Simeon Simeonov

Entrepreneur. Investor. Trusted advisor.
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4 Responses to Building an SEO-Driven Business (Part I)

  1. I’m building a digital media business, a component of which is helping people find product reviews. I’m absolutely leveraging meta data to find good reviews as well as to eventually to help my site be discovered by search engines.

    I think of “intent” in terms of conversion rate. That is, are the paid clicks converting into active users? I don’t just wants hits or users, I want active users.

  2. Jon Zerden says:

    Sim,

    You are absolutely right – metadata is often more important that the data itself! Now the real challenge, in a small organization, is how do we find content people that get it? Finding someone that can write, edit, proof and publish content in challenging. Adding to their job description, taxonomy, metadata hierarchy, URL configuration and other SEO tasks is that much more difficult.

    Does anyone out there have suggestions on how they have tackled this? In previous lives I have actually hired full time “police” that QA’d all metadata and set the taxonomy. This worked well… but finding Liberian scientists — who want to police, is a bit difficult…

    Should these tasks even reside in the content team?

    Comments / suggestions are welcome!

    Jon

  3. Pingback: Three Generations of SEO (Part II) « HighContrast

  4. Hey, Jon. Two comments:

    1. I agree it is hard to find these people. Which is why my bias is to move much of that capability into software. Software can’t be as accurate so you need much higher volume of data (with meta-data) to feed it from. A scalable meta-data acquisition strategy is the key. Hard to see how this can work with humans on staff…

    2. Take a look at the next post on the different generations of SEO–link at the end of this post.

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