Something that I am explaining to a lot of seed stage companies:
The effort required to be successful in SEO for an early stage co is several orders of magnitude greater than it is for established incumbents. The game is rigged, and you have to obliterate status quo to win.
Here's content from WeWork that ranks well for "how to prioritize work" it is garbage fluff that doesn't actually help people solve their problems wework.com/ideas/professi… Their domain is dripping with authority in the eyes of search engines though, so they get a pass.
And here's IBM with "what is machine learning?" the piece is almost impossible to read. It's bad SEO fodder, but it gets a pass because it's IBM. ibm.com/cloud/learn/ma…
On the flip side, this is what @GremlinInc published right around their series A, it is a show stopper that demands attention and drips authenticity: gremlin.com/chaos-monkey/
BMC gets to legitimately compete with that Gremlin hub, with this rinky dink, average blog post: bmc.com/blogs/chaos-mo…
What I am saying is, you can't look at the landscape and replicate what's there in the early days, instead you need to make big, outsized bets, that clobber the competition so horribly that it makes other companies think twice about trying to go toe to toe with you...
The one advantage startups have is being able to hold strong opinions. Imagine IBM having opinions that could somehow rub a large account the wrong way? It's not going to happen. Startups can get real and be meaningfully authentic, and authenticity sells.
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When the pandemic first started, I saw a bunch of stuff (i think from conductor?) about how businesses were so happy to have invested in organic search and still have this traffic... as if SEO takes years to work. This might get me in some trouble.... but... (1/2)
The commonly accepted "SEO takes years" maxim is primarily for 1) new businesses or 2) businesses that don't have brands and are tough to promote.
I worked with one established SaaS company, and most of the less competitive stuff they published using our research is 1-4 already
There's plenty of companies out there sitting on a ton of authority, with 10,000+ people on their email list, tons of connections and partnerships with other cos/sites, and they have a chance to rank in ~30 days... sometimes in 30 minutes.