#95 - Eli Schwartz

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Eli Schwartz.
Eli is the Director of SEO and Growth at SurveyMonkey. He came in to answer commonly asked questions about SEO. Eli blogs about SEO and growth at elischwartz.co, and you can find him on Twitter at 5LE. All right, here we go.
All right, Eli, let's jump right into it. So first question, does SEO still matter in 2018, or can companies ignore it and focus on other channels?

**Eli Schwartz** (0:32)
So this is a question I get asked a lot, and I've been asked this question many years past, and sometimes the answer could have been maybe, but now I definitively think that SEO absolutely matters and will matter even more. And the primary reason is companies were using other channels to drive acquisition. Startups could start their company and think of, say, PR or paid media, they've raised some money, they can use paid media to generate buzz and generate new clients, but those channels have now gotten significantly more expensive. Brand CPCs on AdWords have gone up.
Facebook has made it a lot harder to get organic reach, and now you're paying for traffic on Facebook.
PR in our world where we want to measure everything, it's not as measurable. And then what happens is companies do spend a bunch of money on those different channels. They're maximizing their paid budgets on Google.
They're maximizing their paid budgets on Facebook. They may even go into Bing and say, hey, maybe I have some potential market opportunity on Bing.
And then they're like, what's next? And what they do is they look in their analytics tools. They're like, all right, we've got, break down all the channels. We've got all this direct traffic. Don't know anything about that. Don't know what to do to get more. We have referral traffic. Those are outbound deals. Some of those people linked to us. Some of those things we did intentionally. We have our paid channel. Great, we know what we're doing there. Organic. So this is an untapped channel. We don't know what we did. We followed some best practices. We read SEO for Dummies. We did what we thought was right. It's driving business.
Very, very little investment. And then they think maybe if we invest in it, now we'll get so much more, and we'll intentionally be working on this channel. So I think that's where we are in 2018, where this is the untapped channel. This is the channel which has been driving business for free, and now if companies put effort in it, it'll actually generate significant returns.

**Craig Cannon** (2:21)
And where should they get started? Say they're at just like the bare minimum. They have a little bit of content, maybe they have a blog or something, but where should they really focus their energy in the beginning?

**Eli Schwartz** (2:32)
It really depends on the kind of company. So if it's an e-commerce company, they want to think about architecture. And companies, any e-commerce company thinking about SEO, they should have thought about SEO before they chose their e-commerce platform. So they want to make sure the site is structured properly to scale. So what do you do if you get a new distributor and now you're ready to add 10,000 products, and your website can't handle 10,000 products, and now you're going to load it up, and each URL is going to be 1234567 Next one's 1234568
So that's not going to scale for SEO. You're not going to have any way of putting in your right product descriptions and optimizing against likely competitors that are selling the same products. So that's e-commerce. They should focus on good architecture, or should have focused on good architecture long before.
Media, that's kind of different. That's where they can look at what has worked for them in the past. And my favorite search tool is Google Search Console because it's from Google. It may or may not be as accurate as can be, but it's probably more accurate than other tools which are sort of projecting what the actual truth is.
Using that tool, they can see what's working. Here's what we're getting traffic on, then marry that data with analytics. Like here's what's actually performing and converting for us. That's where they should double down. Like build more content there, build more conversion elements on that and expand.

**Craig Cannon** (3:54)
Who's doing it really well?

**Eli Schwartz** (3:56)
I think media companies have actually gotten around to doing this really well. Like the way they cross-link and just have every sort of page possible. So you take like an item in the news today, they've got all these cross-links to things they've written in the past, which suddenly can become relevant to the searcher.