SEO Growth Strategy

"SEO was and continues to be an important channel for us. We took advantage of our PR and content groups to drive traffic and links to our site, and created the most comprehensive database of homes with deep details of every home in the country (not just the ones for sale)."

"Research topics where searchers are underserved, and create content that delivers compelling, valuable, and differentiated value to those searchers."

"Internal links allow search engine crawlers to index your site’s pages more effectively by showing how your content is interconnected. This helps the search engines understand the hierarchy of your content."

"Using a program like Screaming Frog, crawl your site to pull data for an internal link audit. You’ll learn the total number of internal links, find any broken links that take visitors to an error page, and gain performance metrics that show you which pages are most in need of improvement."

"These high-authority and popular pages, called “crawl points,” are locations where Google enters your site. And a page’s proximity to a crawl point influences its share of the link juice."

"When you’re running an SEO experiment you’re testing on the page level. Thus, you need to have an experimentation system that can do your bucketing on the page level."

"You’ll want to let the experiment run for a while so that Google can discover the changes, and make the necessary adjustments. SEO experiments take more time than A/B tests to show impact."

"Your single source of truth is incoming organic traffic. Anything else is unreliable. If more people are coming into your site through organic traffic, then your experiment was a success."

"It’s worth noting that building out an SEO experimentation framework isn’t a trivial task and that in 95% of cases, I recommend most startups avoid doing so."

"Since the title tag is truncated, there's a good chance you cut off keywords and content before they even appear there. The current implementation isn't bad, but since files do have tags associated with them, using the tags is probably a better solution."

"Anything your heart desires, as long as it’s an on-page change and the effects are limited to only one page. If you want to test your title tags, meta descriptions, or image alt tags – run wild."

"Anything your heart desires, as long as it’s an on-page change and the effects are limited to only one page. However, if you want to measure the effectiveness of internal linking, that’s an entirely different beast."

"SEO was a big bet because it takes a long time to see results. Often you start investing in it, and the first results you see are six months in and they’re not very encouraging. You only start to see results that impact the business after 12, 18, 24 months."

"Templates help you attract a diverse set of potential users by showing how you help them achieve *their* specific goal in *their* own language."

"Not much content is needed—just enough to convey value and the context of how you help a user achieve their goal—but this content gets multiplied to be discoverable no matter the user’s context."

"Most tech companies have put significant energy into documentation to let users troubleshoot problems and get help on their own. This documentation tends to be hard to find, poorly indexed in search, sitting on a separate web domain, or lacking in quality calls to action back to your product."

"Generally, the lower volume/longer tail keywords will lead to high conversions because the user is further down the funnel. (“flower shop” versus “where to buy flowers in Burbank”)"

"SEO is all about creating web pages. Lots of web pages. But not just any web pages. The secret is to create pages that are as helpful to search engines as they are to your users."

"Instead, you want to create pages that capture a specific and valuable user intent. SEO isn’t about capturing the top keywords — it’s about capturing the long-tail of keywords. Sure, you won’t catch the white whale of “flowers”, but if you can capture all of the keywords that follow a common formula such as “{flower type} for sale in {location}”, you’re going to be capturing valuable, high converting traffic and see a much higher ROI."

"Instead, you’ll want to create the content programmatically, using the data points that you’ve outlined in the previous exercise, and then apply it to the keywords that you’re targeting. Think of your page as a very elaborate page from a Mad Libs, and you’re using internal and publicly available data to fill in the blanks."

"Internal linking: This is far and away the most overlooked SEO feature. This is the biggest optimization recommendation that I make to every company that I’ve ever consulted for. Internal links are links that you have on your page that point to a different page that is still on your domain. This is extremely important, as Google uses internal linking as a means of determining the hierarchy of information on your site (the more internal links pointing to a page, the more important it is), and how they discover new pages on your site."