Is SEO Still Important for Startups?

Speaker 0: alright. we talked briefly about seo at the beginning, and i wanted to bring it back to that because we're talking about content. and one, is seo still important? should we be focused on, you know, driving seo to our sites, or should we be saying, alright. everything is changing in the seo industry. from a brand perspective, maybe we should be focusing on creating brand awareness on linkedin, on medium, on these other platforms that drive more eyeballs. so how important is seo for canadian startups nowadays, and what would you suggest are some of the ways to go about to improve it? daniel?

Speaker 1: i i yeah. i just wanted to give a quick comment. i'm sure someone else has a more detailed answer. but before you invest in all the related seo activities, which, again, are a slow build over time, find out what the search volume is for the thing you are selling. right? like, what if your app or your product or your tool like, is it extremely competitive? is no one searching for it? like, find out what that is before you start investing in that. like, what are those keywords? what that is that demand? and the second thing is, are they searching on or is your audience searching on social more than it is on search engines? because with, with certain demographics, they go straight to instagram and search things on there before they go to google, at times. right? so, those are the two considerations i'll throw out there, and i'd love to, turn it over to everyone else to add.

Speaker 0: who's next?

Speaker 2: so to yeah. so to daniel's point, yeah. it's very important because if you figure out where the eyeballs are, then it's much easier to figure out what you need to do to get there. as far as improving your tactics and what and what you're doing, i mean, obviously, having somebody who knows how that game works, who can advise you or who could perhaps point you in the right direction is helpful if you've never done it before. i mean, obviously, going to google university is can be a good thing if you wanna try to teach yourself that kind of stuff. but if you really want to advance your knowledge right away, find a mentor or somebody who's really skilled at doing that who will help guide you through that process. whether or not you should pay for something like that, i don't know. the jury is still allowed on it because just because you can get people to your page doesn't necessarily mean you can get them to convert if they don't like what it is you're talking about. so that's a whole different story altogether on how to get them to actually convert into, paying customers once you've got them on your page.

Speaker 0: any thoughts, mark?

Speaker 3: i'm not really an seo person. i mean, i agree that with daniel that, you know, if you're writing content, you should be focused on the keywords that your target audiences are using. in the chat, i listed a link to, amanda natividad's. she's in sparktoro, and they've been rallying on this idea of zero click. marketing is the idea when people go to a platform like linkedin or facebook or instagram, they're not clicking through. so it's the idea that when you post something on linkedin, that's where your audience stays. it's not necessarily related to seo, but i think it's a reality of our content world these days is that, you know, search is still powerful, seo is still powerful, but there's lots of other ways that you can get content. and daniel may have a better view of this than either, but i think chatgpt is turning this seo world upside down. maybe not as fast as people expected, but definitely having a major impact.

Speaker 0: i've dropped most of my keyword research tools and just use chat, gtp, and stuff like that to do that for me now or perplexity, because they'll you know, couple of quick prompts, and you'll know what people are searching for, the high search volume, low competition keywords, and you've got a place to start. now follow that up with using google's, keyword tool just to make sure that everything is accurate, because ais can hallucinate. but you mhmm. but, you know, if you just wanna find out what they're searching for, it's a quick tool that you can use with a couple of quick prompts just to give that back rather than paying for some of them. but ahrefs does some free stuff. semrush does some free stuff. they're great seo tools to find out. you know? you're absolutely right. with, one of my person in my end, seo course was just one word away from, you know, almost fifty thousand hits a month because they used the wrong word on the, article. and when they went home and changed it, their volume went through the roof. it was just the wrong keyword. and when you talk about staying on the page, like linkedin or medium, if that's where they find it, they don't necessarily click through to your page. that's that's good to know if you're trying to sell, but if you're working on seo, it's irrelevant. what's relevant is that you consistently post in these platforms. they get indexed by google. their domain rank ninety plus platform, so you have links back to your website from domain ninety ranking websites. the only thing i'd suggest potentially pay for from an seo strategy point of view is backlinks because backlinks are pain to get, and they are worth their weight in gold. so that might be something worth paying for from an seo perspective.

Speaker 2: just don't buy from somebody in russia.

Speaker 4: well, why not? that's

Speaker 0: don't go to black hat world and say, give me ten thousand black link backlinks. hire somebody who's going to go out and do the outreach properly or fig or figure out a strategy for you. you know? be a guest podcaster where they're gonna put backlinks, but, you know, figure out your strategy outreach to be a guest on a hundred podcasts this year so you can get a hundred backlinks there. you know, there's a bunch of different ways to do it. you just have to, figure that out.

Speaker 4: so seo is very important for startups.

Speaker 3: i think it is yeah.

Speaker 0: i think it is right now. i've created, pages that are, long term content that get me, you know, two hundred, five hundred hits a month, just that page.

Speaker 4: yeah. no. i'm just joking. i think seo has always been important, always will be important because at the core of it, i've always seen seo, like, as i think even mark evan, like, i feel like because he writes, he is a seo person because a lot of it has to be a balance between yes. it has to have all the, you know, keywords and all tags to hit the search engine for it to pull the information, the index information. but at the same time, on the flip side, if i'm the one searching for the content and i read through it, it just sounds like chat gpt nonsense. i'm not gonna stay on the page. so guess what? it's gonna record how long i've been how long is the person who searched for that item on the search engine staying on the page? so if i'm reading mark's article versus a chat gpt article produced by somebody else, i'm probably gonna, like, you know, enjoy reading mark's because he obviously seems like based on just, you know, interacting with work, it's very very thoughtful content his, on his page. so, yeah, i think with, seo, one of the easiest thing you can also do is linkedin because, the other day, i was searching for, like, some publishers online, editors, just for a client of mine, and then, someone's popped up on the search engine. right? and then i clicked on it, connected with her, and i'm now working. like, i'm just, like, well, trying her out, but let's see how it goes. but still, it's still a great tool because i think linkedin also all the social media platforms still come up on search engines. so it's just a matter of, you know, making it easy for people to find you and making sure that you have the right stuff there that people actually wanna read. i think that that really can make a difference, and that's super simple things that you can do, you know, free stuff that you can do on your, platforms so that are already available to you.