My talk from FounderCon in November 2012.

1. Startups and SEO
FounderCon 2012
How Startups Should Think About SEO
John Doherty | Distilled

2. Who Am I?
Director of Distilled NYC
t: @dohertyjf Former
Entrepreneur
e: john.doherty@distilled.net
http://www.distilled.net
http://www.distilled.net/u/
t: @distilled

3. SEO is part of inbound
marketing
It fits here.
Image credit: @randfish

4. SEO ≠ linkbuilding

5. Keyword Research
Technical SEO
Internal Linking
External linking
Content
The main SEO tasks.

6. Why SEO Is
Relevant/Essential for
Startups

7. 243% Organic Improvement in 6 months
14,000 13,967
12,129
11,206
10,500
7,000
6,012
5,087
4,072
3,500
0
Dec-11 Jan-12 Feb-12 Mar-12 Apr-12 May-12
Startups can see good
growth

8. Paid Paid
18% of clicks go to ads
Organic
82% of clicks go to organic
Organic
Organic gets 82% of clicks

9. Rich snippets
Ecommerce
Local/Maps
There are opportunities

10. Author photos
Videos
And these give better CTRs.

11. Why SEO matters for
startup success.

12. Paid Paid
Organic
Organic
It’s scaleable. Traffic keeps coming
as opposed to ads. It’s still work.

13. SEO is a longterm play
Two years
4x growth (established
company)

14. Startups can move quickly to exploit
opportunity.

15. How Startups Win

16. Education
http://www.distilled.net/u/ or http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

17. Build Branded Mindshare
through Content
Build, outreach through SEO/PR, design it well. Video can work well.
Also, don’t put your blog on a subdomain. Links to it won’t count towards
your overall site.

18. Pro tip – Make people happy to
share their profile.
Delight your users, whoever they are.

19. Get Coverage for Content
through Outreach
Find your audience, build content for them, leverage PR

20. Be Solid Technically
Use SEOmoz Pro (30 day free trial then $99/mo). It’s worth it.

21. Case Study
Traffic Tripled
Made technical fixes

22. Case Study
This stuff works
Traffic Tripled
Made technical fixes

23. Mistakes I’ve Seen Startups
Make

24. No Content Outside Login
Dropbox grew because they targeted content at Digg. Their homepage
doesn’t rank for anything. [cloud storage]? You won’t find them.

25. “Go build links, and I want
some SEO text.”
Do cool sh*t instead.

26. “We’ll do SEO later”
Retrofitting is much harder than doing it right the first time.

27. Not integrating SEO
into all marketing.

28. Where do you start?

29. Where do you start?
1. Hire a consultant to at least do a technical and content audit of your
site.
2. Look for opportunity for links from places you’ve already been
mentioned.
3. Give content away in exchange for a link. Create content targeted at
your ideal users. Where do they hang out online?
4. Build rich pages, not squeeze pages. Squeeze pages don’t rank.
5. Read The Beginner’s Guide to SEO
http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

30. Learn More
http://www.slideshare.net/dohertyjf/startup-content-marketing-distilled-
meetup

31. Three Burning Questions
1) Think about keywords your site should rank for. Why did you choose
this keyword?
2) Where does your audience hang out online, and how can you meet
them where they are? Brainstorm one piece of content that will get you
press, links, and new users.
Bonus - Who will help you get there, or who do you need to meet?
3) What other inbound marketing channels could you leverage to hack
SEO and get links? Be creative.
4) What’s one thing you can do tomorrow to delight your customers so
that they will tell all their friends about your product? How can you then
encourage them to link to you?

32. Thanks.