Not all businesses need to put effort into SEO.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>If google doesn't build your business, it can't take your business away.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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. :(
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!
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.
> 25% of all small business websites are missing an H1 tag.<p>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).<p>In your research, did you find that sites without an H1 tag performed worse, SEO-wise? The article doesn't seem to mention this.<p>> SMB websites with a meta description rank 17% higher than websites without<p>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.<p>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.
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 :(
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...
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.