A) You are like a TripAdvisor (a content site) where SEO is the only thing that will allow you to win if you can do SEO better than your peers.
2) OR
B) You get "decent" CTR on Google AdWords (if you had the organic equivalent would it be worth it to spend time on?)
And you are post PM fit.
3) Even @bernardjhuang 's co is an SEO tool! And he is post PM fit. But working on SEO for his own company @Clearscope is not even top priority.
Other cust acq channels are higher priority.
4) GOOG has gotten smart & nuanced. Does your topic require recency, location, education?
E.g. if you are writing news, when you publish matters a LOT.
if your content is location based, you need to be local.
if it's on how-to content, the medium (such as video) matters.
5) Click-through-rate matters a LOT. Google will test your webpage for a particular set of keywords and seed your page at a certain rank.
If you do well relative to your rank, you will move up. Or opposite, you'll move down.
6) If your website is already credible, you will be seeded in a better position to start.
But it's possible to be a nobody and move up if you can keep CTRs up.
7) However, GOOG is smart about ppl trying to game the system.
Typing "click here" in the title is not going to help. They look for relevancy of your whole content as part of this.
You may be penalized if Google thinks you are gaming the system.
8) Google even looks to see if a user repeated the search. Ultimately, if your site didn't deliver what ppl are looking for, that will affect your rankings.
9) Don't focus on keywords. The old way of doing SEO was to try to game particular keywords.
You want to dominate on topics.
If you rank high for a topic, Google will be smart enough to rank you high for very related topics or auto-complete variations of that topic
10) You can use SerpAPI to see how you rank in different locations and can test your searches there.
11) Variations on the English language doesn't matter. E.g. American English vs British English.
SEO tools incl as his own @Clearscope may recommend a particular spelling but in the end, the variation of spelling doesn't have a strong effect
12) Ok - there was so much packed into this talk, I can't even tweet it all.
I tried Paperclip - an open source project that lets you set up an "autonomous company" with multiple AI agents. The concept is wild: you act as a board member setting vision while agents coordinate to build and run the company. More >>
1) What works: The agent orchestration is surprisingly smooth out of the box and was easy to get going. AI content writers, SEO agents, and engineers all coordinate without much manual intervention. It's the closest I've seen to truly autonomous business operations.
2) However, I found that even "autonomous" companies need nudges. My workers would get stuck, or the SEO specialist needed better direction, and coordination would break down more than expected. Still way less work than building a company manually, but not hands-off.
I'm seeing a lot of founders, incl myself, build AI apps with tons of integrations.
It's tempting to integrate to everything - Gmail, Notion, Slack, Telegram, SendGrid... but there's a cliff your app will fall off of if users connect with all these integrations. More >>
1) Latency stacks fast: Every integration adds round trips. What starts as snappy responses becomes sluggish as integrations compound.
2) Context window bloat: More tools = more tokens loaded per request, even for unused integrations. Your token budget gets eaten up before you even start.
The startup landscape has changed dramatically in the last 2 years with AI's rise. But there are 5 specific changes that have been absolute head fakes for many people. Here's what I'm seeing: π§΅
1) Product-market fit is really easy to lose now. I used to believe that if you got past $10M ARR, you were pretty set. These days, that's not true. I've seen companies reach high levels then go to zero because of fast followers and AI-powered competition.
2) Software moats are much harder to come by because anyone can vibe code something in a day. This has made older, less tech-savvy industries MORE attractive because once you get in with your workflow, they're less likely to rip you out for new software.
-Pre-seed rounds are getting done at low valuations.
-Hot pre-seed rounds are getting done all over the map
-Seed rounds are getting done at say $8m+ post with companies that have lots of traction -- sometimes $1m+ rev runrate