I'm bootstrapping a niche B2B service. In this space I have the luxury of not relying on google for leads; word of mouth referrals have generated consistent growth by bringing in clients who initially need a few hours of consulting but eventually transition to being customers of my service.
Because my webpage is more of a statement of legitimacy than a sales tool; it doesn't need to rank on google. By the time my clients need to access my website for some information, they know my domain because they've already corresponded with me via email.
Since I haven't needed google's help for my business to grow, and I believe their level of dominance is bad for the world, I use robots.txt to block google's crawler, and generally do anything to avoid receiving any help from them.
This strategy could work for a non-SaaS/consulting company too; if I were running a bike-repair shop on main street, I would build my business through word of mouth promotion within niche bike communities to generate referrals. Once a neighborhood, city, or region full of people trust your brand, a negative yelp review or a google algorithm won't sink you.
If google doesn't build your business, it can't take your business away.
Google will pretty much always put the domain as the first result for things that look like a navigational search. I imagine closely matching a real, known url that other users click on is a strong ranking signal.
I am trying to bootstrap a niche B2B service myself and having much less success getting off the ground. I would love to hear more about how you identify, qualify and communicate with new leads/referrals.
Simply put, I asked an industry contact for referrals to my consulting business, and built a service to address the common needs of the new clients.
For years I'd moonlighted as a backend developer; I'd meet graphic designers who were making amazing-looking websites but were in over their heads when it came to integrating database or API functionality into a client's project since they were more into design than coding. I would code up an integration and bill them for a few hours of effort. This would always lead to an hour or two of future maintenance, but wasn't a reliable revenue generator.
On one project, the client required an web integration with an ERP system so their website could reflect inventory status; the ERP vendor provided an API but it was rate limited and couldn't support production web traffic volume, so I coded up a cache layer and a few custom reports. During the process, I discovered that the API documentation was incomplete so I ended up corresponding with the CTO in order to complete the work.
After that project was over, I hoped to leverage my newfound familiarity with the API to win more business, so I asked the CTO to forward any of his customers that needed integrations beyond the scope that his company usually supports. After a few referrals, I was able to see some common patterns of needs not supported directly by the 3rd party API and was able to develop a service to support those use cases. Referrals from the CTO of the ERP company carry weight with my clients, who in turn have been happy enough with my service that they have also been a source of new leads.
The combination of 2nd and 3rd party referrals has continued to generate new clients for me almost every month, and since my infrastructure costs are relatively fixed, every new client is gravy.
Long term, I will need to automate more of the onboarding process in order to scale up the number of new clients I can onboard in a week. And there are many other considerations as a business grows. But doing good consulting work and then asking clients for referrals was the pattern that allowed me to find the market for the niche SaaS that I developed.
1) Have a solid offer that gets existing clients results and makes them happy.
2) ask for referrals in a polite systematic way.
3) send hyper personalized outreach to similar folks introducing yourself and sharing a bit about the results you’ve achieved for clients. Email and LinkedIn work great right now for B2B.
If you’d like to chat more happy to do so. I help B2B SaaS companies breakthrough $1M ARR and we generally start off with these types of strategies to get predictable higher quality revenue quickly.
B2B can be notoriously difficult without having connections or simply a proper sales function in your business. You have two options:
1) Go out there and meet people
2) Do marketing and try to generate leads
Depending on where you live, there might be some industry group meeting, exhibitions, online formums,Linkedin groups,etc. Often it cascades pretty quickly after the first few, as business people are willing to recommend companies/people. Just a couple of days ago went to a fantastic training session with this guy,so from now on,if anyone asks,I'd point them his way.
It depends on what you mean by "take business away". A businesses lack of presense could allow the diversion of potential customers to your nextdoor neighbor easily. While you're slaving away trying to drum up word of mouth amd for some reason preventing searchability, regular customers are searching for "deli near me" and you the deli owner aren't coming up hypothetically.
It makes me sad that "SEO consulting" exists as a thing. I understand the need for it, but it's always just felt so dirty. It's basically someone who is an expert at tricking a single business, and it's a constant cat and mouse game.
And Google will even tell you how to get a high ranking, which pretty much boils down to "make content that humans find compelling and Google will too". It's all the other "tricks" that might work for a while until Google gets wise and changes their algorithm and then we all start the dance over.
It was just like the spammers on reddit -- they'd come up with some new trick, we'd block it, they'd find another new trick, and so on, but all along, the stuff that got to the top was for the most part things that people found interesting. Post interesting content was always a good strategy, even if there were a trick or two that might work to boost you on any given week.
I just wish we could all just make good content and not worry about gaming the directory, but a few bad actors make that impossible for the rest of us. :(
There are plenty of bad actors in the SEO world, and it certainly has an overwhelmingly slimy history. But as is usually the case, the issue is more complex than "SEO bad, good content good."
I've been preaching basically what you said as the core tenet of SEO for over a decade. (I would add a "that people are actively looking for" clause to "make content that humans find compelling.") This is much more challenging than one would think, and can really benefit from someone experienced. Whether you call that Search Engine Optimization or Content Marketing or Copywriting or just Writing, done correctly it all boils down to this same principle.
That alone often warrants someone to assist a business, as most businesses don't have the internal resources or knowledge to do it entirely themselves.
But there's more that falls under the SEO umbrella.
1. The technical aspects of configuring a site to be indexable, accessible, and well-architectured. This might have traditionally fallen under the guise of a webmaster, and for larger sites might fall to more specialized experts, but for the large majority of sites the only people working on these issues are "SEOs".
2. Actually going out and promoting a website in some way. The best content in the world will go unnoticed by man and machine if it's not discoverable from some other source. This has traditionally meant "link building" or (for a long time) "guest posting", and might also include PR or advertising depending on who you ask.
3. Monitoring the results and improving the approach. It's great to say "make content that is compelling" but if you're spending the resources to do this then you need to monitor and analyze the effects it has. This can get incredibly complex, but again, for most websites, is performed by an SEO.
"For the most part" is just not all that relevant. It's much smaller subsets of the whole that drive what happens.
Google "recipe for X." Mostly, the first 3 results will be recipe pages preceded by junk text describing recipes in paragraph/narrative form... tailored to the ranking algorithms.
Google "online dating sites." The first couple of acreens will be ads (high value ones). Mostly, they'll be "aggregators" which rank the top 5 dating sites that pay affiliate fees.
The first few organic results will be similar to the ads, but worse, because these need to cater to search engines, first and worry about getting users to their customers second.
Where the value of clicks is high, what happens with search results isn't at all like the "for the most part." For the most part, person people search for "penguins" or "Penelope Cruz." Here, the advertisers and SEO guys aren't involved. It's in specific little, high revenue areas where spam/advertising/SEO outguns everything else. You can feasibily "just write good content" about penguins and rank highly.
It's not even that the SEO consulting exists, for me it's that Google's dominance has made the web very samey and bland.
For one example "content people like" on YouTube is apparently headshots with exaggerated expressions, large colourful text, and arrows and circles and other "exciting" features. Not to mention the trend towards a generic "YouTube voice" inflection that they all seem to share if they stay on the platform long enough.
There's plenty of great stuff, but it doesn't seem to find its way onto my suggestion feed at all.
> make content that humans find compelling and Google will too
I just switched to DDG as my default search because Google's results are so bad now that the first three or more pages are all zero information e-commerce sites. I used to never click beyond page one.
SEO Consulting isn't necessarily a bad thing. If it takes someone from completely bad site for SEO -> reasonable white-hat SEO site then that's great for everyone involved.
Apologies for the self-promotion but I think this will be interesting to HN. It's an analysis of a huge crawl of 150k small business websites, correlated with google search rankings. This first chapter is focused on SEO. I'm in the midst of writing more chapters to address things like hosting, site speed, wordpress, etc. I'll probably also add some stats like what % of sites use bootstrap, most popular CDN, etc. This thread is a good place to ask me for more data points!
Bit of a shame, but I can understand why, that you restrict your analysis to the US, and some US-centric optimisations. Perhaps that should be up front in your article about this. The internet is global after all :)
However I still found a bunch of things really useful (see later).
Yelp as far as I can see from my own experiences isn't really that big of a thing in the UK, but TripAdvisor is, especially for hospitality sector. Google local/My Business is certainly becoming a thing here in the UK as was pointed out to me by a buddy who runs an outdoor activities centre in the Highlands. He has a tremendous understanding of Google and funnelling folks into his biz and banging on about it in the pub the other night.
Also in the UK we don't really have such a thing as BBB that google recognises as boosting the juice. Sure we have the British Chambers of Commerce and the CBI, but they're geared towards much larger businesses than your local SME (Small to Medium Sized Enterprise). There are local "Chambers of Commerce" in each council area, but meh.
That said, I'm working on unfecking a site that's never had image alt tags, no canonical refs (you can get at the same content from multiple URL's), out of nearly 200 pages there was one solitary H1, page titles were a mess...it goes on. The customer paid their previous "agency" a tidy sum for this site and somehow SEO was never looked at.
I did find your article genuinely useful though. I'm a freelancer now, and it seems I need to learn how to SEO as well as be a developer. I look forward to your follow ups.
I will have some of this in my "technical factors" chapter coming down the road. I definitely will be evaluating the percentage of SMB websites which use chat clients and various (annoying) marketing tools.
I think your comments about no-index are a bit disingenuous. For example, when I used to blog, having a way to hide content from showing up in a search engine was important to me.
I can imagine that for some businesses this is also true. Not to mention people who are new to creating websites and don’t feel ready for their in-progress site to be indexed, or business that are in the process of closing down.
I think Squarespace does the right thing by making this option easy for the user to control. It’s weird to me that you encourage people to “blame” them. That sounds like a hidden agenda sort of bias to me.
When you mention external links, do you consider nofollow as not existing? I help out with a blog and we get a lot of requests from article writers who assure us all links will be nofollow.
Great point - I will update. For those reading here, BBB stands for the Better Business Bureau. It is a US based nonprofit that tries to collect and address complaints about small businesses. Very well known in the US.
The Better Business Bureau has a history of using extortion-like tactics, pressuring businesses into paying for memberships to extract higher ratings. The show 20/20 from ABC did a segment on them in which they were able to procure an A-rating for Hamas.
As a former owner/operator of a small golf facility, I have experienced this diet-extortion first hand, and heard about similar experiences from other owners of similar businesses in our area (Chicago).
I did, and the first three search results were bbbcycling.com, bigballerbrand.com and a local football club. I think people don't realize how much Google actually localizes search results.
Excellent insights and a well written article. One suggestion - it would be helpful if you explained how someone can tell if they have each of the SEO features enabled.
This looks great and I gave it a try. Is there a reason you ignore robots.txt? Example result is 'thin content' on our shopping cart, which we say not to index obviously :)
Checkbot ignores robots.txt here because Google can still index pages even when they're included in robots.txt files.
If you don't want pages to be indexed, you should use a "noindex" tag instead of robots.txt. It's a common misconception that robots.txt stops indexing when it doesn't. See:
> Important! For the noindex directive to be effective, the page must not be blocked by a robots.txt file. If the page is blocked by a robots.txt file, the crawler will never see the noindex directive, and the page can still appear in search results, for example if other pages link to it.
Thanks, that makes perfect sense. And I'm definitely guilty of that misconception. This would definitely be last on a long list of things to clean up for my site.
You can read the HTML to see if a particular SEO feature is present. Or there are tools for this. There's some talk in the office about taking my report and turning into a scanner that you could point at any website, which would be an interesting project.
> 25% of all small business websites are missing an H1 tag.
This SEO advice seems dated. Pretty sure Google doesn't care about which tags you use anymore, just that there's a visual heading (some big text at the top of the page).
In your research, did you find that sites without an H1 tag performed worse, SEO-wise? The article doesn't seem to mention this.
> SMB websites with a meta description rank 17% higher than websites without
Hard to tell if this is causal or just correlational. Maybe sites that have meta tags just tend to be better, SEO-wise, unrelated to the fact that they have meta tags.
I don't think you should give this advice unless you add meta tags to your site and then see an increase in your organic search traffic.
> Similar to writing an outline for a large paper, put some thought into what the main points and sub-points of the content on the page will be and decide where to use heading tags appropriately.
Nobody is saying you have to have H1 tags to rank well, but it's not going to hurt and is likely to help. It's better to tell Google what the main heading of the site is instead of Google having to guess and getting it wrong.
> I don't think you should give this advice unless you add meta tags to your site and then see an increase in your organic search traffic.
Google says description meta tags don't impact your search rank but as these descriptions can optionally be shown to users, well written ones should increase click through rates. Google recommend you write meta descriptions in https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en as well.
I have a list of SEO recommendations like the above that are mostly sourced from Google here:
It's true that there's a correlation / causation problem here, but consider the problem from Google's POV: they rank a certain set of results by hand, then feed those into various learning algorithms to find good predictors for quality.
If an analysis such as this finds such correlations, it's likely that Google's algorithms have also picked up on them. In other words: maybe people diligent about meta tags and H1s also write better content and should therefore rank higher (correlation). But "good writing" is hard to judge algorithmically, and Google may therefore well be turning some correlations into causations.
Really Google do very much care about how content is marked up having a relevant H1 is just the start, use of tables for tabular information, structured markup Hreflang for geo targeting and so on.
The brutal truth is many business websites are terrible
All those correlations, but not a single regression? Each of those correlation measures are poisoned with the biases introduced by the correlation of other variables :(
Awesome post. My main issue is with the BBB reference data... to me that smells like correlation not causation. It implies a level of detail and effort spent on the page. I have a hard time believing that the reference to BBB itself serves to improve rankings...
I too am very sensitive to "correlation != causation" and I tried to call it out extensively in the report. I even included a chart at the bottom from the famous Spurious Correlations project... Hopefully nobody gets too carried away with the report.
It's impossible to determine causation at scale, unfortunately. One could argue that business owners who curate great BBB rankings and feature the badge are more likely to instill trust in consumers, which in turn will result in longer time on site and therefore better rankings.
You did a great job explaining that in the article, and I'm not trying to muck up the conversation with a generic swat down. Just specifically interested in that particular result. Also it's likely your hard work gets reblogged into "5 things you MUST do to improve SEO!"
Another member of the cheese lobby, coming here and covering up the truth about the Cheesemonger, a serial killer who strangles his victims with their own bedsheets.
Did you have very specific hypotheses to test before doing analysis of the dump? Sentences like "Websites with feature x rank y percent better" are pretty meaningless if they're just patterns that appeared from the dump. Any large enough sample is going to have significant looking patterns which can have a likely reason back fitted to them, but which are simply due to randomness.
I'm bootstrapping a niche B2B service. In this space I have the luxury of not relying on google for leads; word of mouth referrals have generated consistent growth by bringing in clients who initially need a few hours of consulting but eventually transition to being customers of my service.
Because my webpage is more of a statement of legitimacy than a sales tool; it doesn't need to rank on google. By the time my clients need to access my website for some information, they know my domain because they've already corresponded with me via email.
Since I haven't needed google's help for my business to grow, and I believe their level of dominance is bad for the world, I use robots.txt to block google's crawler, and generally do anything to avoid receiving any help from them.
This strategy could work for a non-SaaS/consulting company too; if I were running a bike-repair shop on main street, I would build my business through word of mouth promotion within niche bike communities to generate referrals. Once a neighborhood, city, or region full of people trust your brand, a negative yelp review or a google algorithm won't sink you.
If google doesn't build your business, it can't take your business away.