Invest in SEO early. And I mean invest all the way, including all the different structured metadata into all of your pages to get your website to appear the best on search results [1]. The long tail and residual effects of it get pretty insane.
I second that. SEO is a slow growing channel and it takes some time to get effects. Starting earlier can help out.
Also, make sure that your page loads fast - especially the content that you are trying to index. Low hanging fruit like optimising image size or cleaning up your imports can have a big effect. When just starting out with little backlinks, good page speed loads can be the differentiator that will put you ahead. Use https://pagespeed.web.dev to check how fast your website loads.
There's more to it, but I've focussed on WordPress pages in the past.
Some things I'd start with:
- Minimize images (tinypng/tinyjpg)
- Deactivate/Remove what you don't need (Plugins (!!!), RPC, Emojis, stuff like that which is ON by default in WP -> will strip down the code)
- Strip down & combine scripts
- Reduce third-party dependencies, try making them first-party (fonts, analytics)
- Minify scripts and CSS
- Use caching on the client-side through htaccess rules
Normally those things are enough to get a 85+ score on Lighthouse, GTmetrix and alike.
These are overly technical things that technical founders will be drawn too.
But it's not what matters (at least, until you have hundreds of pages ranking).
Google Search is very similar to LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram in the sense that the better your UX metrics are (time on-site, pages visited, return visitors, etc) the more visibility Google will give you in the SERPs.
For most SaaS, there aren't a few valuable keywords, there are hundreds of valuable pages representing thousands of keywords to drive a qualified audience.
This means after you learn how to create highly valuable content, the next step is to scale your publishing velocity to increase your footprint in the SERPs.
I've brought 4 websites from 0 to 100,000+ organics/month by focusing on creating more reader value than any other page of content Google could show for the keywords I want to rank for, and publishing hundreds of pages of content.
> the better your UX metrics are (time on-site, pages visited
IMHO actually good UX metrics mean as low time on-site and pages visited as possible. An ideal user experience (I would, as a user, be glad to pay for) is when you visit the page, immediately find what you want, do you job as quickly as possible and go away.
A good valuable website caring about users rather than ad-spamming them would optimize for this, not for users to waste huge amounts of time wandering through pages until they can achieve their goal.
"Good UX" is dynamic, and depends on the search query, and the UX metrics of the websites you're competing with.
Recipe related searches will have different UX metric gradient than "creating a PTO policy"
I also kindly disagree with your assessment.
All things being equal, if you're Google, and you want to keep users coming back to Google Search, and you could show one of two pages for any search query, I think the only reliably metric to evaluate whether one page adds more value to the user than another page is through UX metrics.
Generally, if you can't find what you're looking for - you'll bounce and look somewhere else.
But if you Google something, then get drawn into the website because the writer knew the 'intent' behind the search, the writer/website should ALSO know what you need to know next, or likely questions to have, and serve you that content after they finish answering whatever is you originally Googl'd for.
For example, if someone searches "content writer job description", I can guess that
1. This is an employer that is actively in the hiring cycle
2. The next things they might need to know are average comp for content writers, the best place to find content writers, the best way to evaluate / test / interview them, etc.
So, if I'm competing with a page of content that is just strictly about "content writer job description", and I go above and beyond to educate you on what you'll need to know next - I should end up with better UX metrics that reflect an increase in value I provided over the page.
Love this. Have you written any more detailed content about this journey taking any one of these such websites from 0 to 100k? I'd love to read the play by play.
This exactly. Focus on value for the person that hits your website and organic search will follow. I've had a slow SPA site for years but the (user generated) content, long on-site time and high rate of return visits all made it one of the top pages in my niche. Not because I was fine tuning image size, speed or meta tags.
> - Reduce third-party dependencies, try making them first-party (fonts, analytics)
I'd add that third-party dependencies are sometimes useful. Especially when they aren't served from the same location which gives and opportunities for the browser to open more HTTP connections: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-does-your-browser-limit-n...
Actually this isn't always the case. Some people just make mistake of using few mbs of some high-quality PNGs on their landing pages which can be much worse than just mere JS framework bundle.
Also both Angular and React are not as heavy as one might expect, but 3rd-party components might bring tons of unnecessary deps.
Not exactly correct or incorrect. Some projects built as a single page app (SPA), using a fancy framework like React or Angular with little configuration, end up loading all DOM content client side via javascript which has a number of drawbacks on performance and SEO.
It doesn't have to be that way though. If you want to use React, there are tools to help you easily make something like a static site generator (SSG) which will transform your React code down into pre-rendered HTML pages. Two popular ones are Gatsby (https://gatsby.dev/) and Next.js (https://nextjs.org/) which also supports Server Side Rendering (SSR).
So out of the box plain HTML / CSS might be more optimized than a fresh create-react-app repo, but if you prefer to use the toolset provided by React to build your site (or Vue or Angular, etc), there are plenty of options to make that equally performant.
> To me this sounds like "code in pure HTML, no React/Angular or anything like that". Am I correct?
That's not what I meant. With optimising page speed, there is a diminishing curve of returns from the perspective of time invested and the improvement that you make.
My idea, adding to the top comment mentioning the SEO, was to make sure that you don't slow down your landing pages / content unnecessarily which might lead to less organic growth and discovery.
While I wouldn't argue that this is the most important thing that will take your business off, a fast website and good content with keywords might provide you nice boost long term.
That’s a bit too extreme since you still probably want all the UI libraries readily available to make your life easy. You could use server side rendering instead. And as others have said, package “marketing” landing pages without any heavy plugins/modules. Look into chunking, lazy loading etc.
Question to all, what has been your experience with non-technical SEO. What things are worth pursuing with limited resources, how to measure it and what are good resources to learn?
I'm asking, because every time I read up on these topics, or interact with an "expert", I get the feeling, that it is one of the more snake-oiley fields around.
If you excuse piggybacking on your comment - this and other advice is super context/market dependent. Before you try following it try to talk to people in your market segment first to figure out how much it applies to your specific business.
You may want to try https://www.sitelint.com/ for SEO testing, but not only. We have just launched a platform recently and the main idea behind is that all audits are performed on the client-side, as opposed to crawling. I'm happy to get the feedback and improve anything that can be improved there.
[1] - https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...