frankly speaking

1 year ago

Why SEO Still Matters

Chris Dixon recently wrote a post on why SEO is no longer a viable marketing strategy for start-ups. Chris went on to make a few great points, namely that not a lot of post 2008 start-ups have gained a lot of traction in SEO and that Google’s secret algorithm may be biased towards older companies who have gained a lot of in-bound links.

Here’s where I disagree - SEO is a long-term marketing strategy. It would be a mistake for any start-up to solely rely on getting significant traction through SEO. They would be better served focusing on mobile, paid media buying or even viral. Having said that, it would be a mistake for ANY start-up to completely ignore SEO. Having worked at two major ecommerce companies who have had to completely re-architect their websites for SEO purposes (because this was not done when the companies launched) it’s much more time efficient and less painful for all involved to correctly architect a site for SEO from the beginning.

Secondly, not focusing on SEO can hurt your overall customer acquisition costs. Most companies think of SEO as a ‘free source’ of traffic (hint: it’s not). That said, acquiring a new customer from an organic link in Google is significantly more cost effective than acquiring that customer from paid media. What’s more, the Lifetime Value of that customer is probably richer than from a paid media source.