At last month’s Early Stage virtual event, channel growth experts joined TechCrunch reporters and editors for a series of conversations covering the best tools and strategies for building startups in 2020. For this post, I’ve recapped highlights of talks with:
- Ethan Smith, founder and CEO, Graphite
- Susan Su, startup growth advisor, executive-in-residence, Sound Ventures
- Asher King-Abramson, founder, Got Users
If you’d like to hear or watch these conversations in their entirety, we’ve embedded the videos below.
Ethan Smith: How to build a high-performance SEO engine
Relying on internet searches to learn about growth topics like search engine optimization leads to a rabbit hole of LinkedIn thinkfluencer musings and decade-old Quora posts. Insights are few and far between, because SEO has changed dramatically as Google has squashed spammy techniques “specialists” have pushed for years.
Ethan Smith, owner of growth agency Graphite, says Google didn’t kill SEO, but the channel has evolved. “SEO has built a negative reputation over time of being spammy,” Smith says. “The typical flow of an SEO historically has been: I need to find every single keyword I possibly can find and auto-generate a mediocre page for each of those keywords, the user experience doesn’t really matter, content can be automated and spun, the key is fooling the bot.”
Artificial intelligence has disrupted this flow as algorithms have abandoned hard-coded rules for more flexible designs that are less vulnerable to being gamed. What SEO looks like today, Smith says, is all about trying to “figure out what the algorithm is trying to accomplish and try to accomplish the same thing.” Google’s algorithms aren’t looking for buckets of keywords, they’re looking to distill a user’s intent.
The key to building a strategy around SEO as a company breaks down into six steps surrounding intent, says Smith:
- Target by intent
We want to cluster the intents at a high level so each strategy should be specific to that intent. A common set of intents for a commerce site or a shopping site is this learn/browse/buy framework. There’s content where I want to learn something or find out a piece of information, versus I want to browse a set of options, versus I want to buy a specific thing and you’ll see very strong patterns for each of these different intents. - Build topical authority
Authority just means how important is our website and how important is it for a particular concept. So we can look at inputs like branded search, how much traffic we’re getting from other channels, whether or not we have a lot of shares. All of these things can be measured as authority and those are ways to build authority without just focusing on back-links. - Design UX to fulfill intent
The page types that ranked 10 years ago were mostly auto-generated search pages where you type in a keyword and then you land on another page that is just a search result on another site … One of the keys is just making sure you have the right page type, so for “learn” it’s usually just an article or a recipe, whereas with “browse” it’s usually a list like a top 10 list, whereas “buy” is probably going to be a product page. - Create premium content to fulfill intent
Google talks a lot about good content, but that of course is algorithmically assessed by them so we can try to reverse engineer what they mean by good content … If you are mentioning the key words enough but you miss a key concept, then you’re going to lose … We see a pretty strong correlation of articles ranking that are at least 1,000 words, and it depends on the query but Google cares about sufficient main content. Depending on the keyword, you want to make sure that you have the right media, essentially what Google is trying to do is make sure that the user gets their answer to their question with one page. - Drive users to convert on their intent
More and more we’re seeing a very strong weight of engagement, and by engagement we mean are you clicking on the result on Google and are you staying on the page.
Dive in deeper to these concepts and check out my full interview with Ethan below.
Susan Su: Minimum viable email
Sound Venture’s Susan Su broke down growing a business through email marketing, a crowded channel that is home to plenty of strategies, metrics for success and pitfalls.
Su says that email serves a couple of pretty distinct roles when it comes to growth.
“The first role email plays in growth is as a tool to help you accelerate your reinforcing feedback loops. For example, email growth can help you expand LTV if you’re building a consumer e-comm or it can help you shorten your sales cycle if you’re a B2B, or enterprise SaaS business. It’s also really powerful for reducing attrition or churn, which is key, obviously, and sometimes it’s an overlooked way of actually increasing growth,” Su says.
“The second role that [email] plays in growth is as a two-way channel connecting your product and your user, and that channel can carry information either about your product value from your brand out to your user, or it can carry information about your users needs and preferences from them to you.”
Asher King-Abramson: How to create great growth assets for paid channels
So often, brand marketing is about finding the messaging the highlight the metrics you care about.
“At this point, I’ve consulted with over 1,000 business now … making really good growth assets can be the difference between whether they’re profitable or not,” Got Users founder Asher King-Abramson tells TechCrunch.
Landing pages for venture-backed startups with design agencies on payroll all seem to have a very similar look. While there’s something to be said for originality, a lot of the messaging has homogenized because the data indicates that concise assets in the first screen that encompass the gist of the sell are essential. That’s imagery, text and overall messaging about what your product is and what most people need to know about it.
“Whenever someone comes to a landing page or a home page, they’ll usually be there for 2 or 3 seconds and then 60%-70% of people bounce,” King-Abramson says. “You have a very short period of time to convey your value to them and explain your product to them because if you can’t hook them immediately, they’re gone. I’ve seen a ton of data. They just will not scroll past this first part of the page.”
One of the keys of a good landing page, King-Abramson says, is to focus the bulk of your site on what the bulk of your users are likely coming to it for. Rather than sticking an “Our Mission” tab in a static top bar because you feel like you’re supposed to, toss it to the bottom of the page and keep the first screen less concerned with what 2% or 3% of users might want. What users rarely want is huge paragraphs of text explaining what a product does.
“What I’ve done with clients … I’ll look at screen recordings of people actually reading a page and you can sometimes see them highlighting what they’re reading and people tend to gloss over this huge wall of text,” he says.
These same takeaways hold true for advertising. King-Abramson breaks down some real-world landing pages alongside advertisements that also encapsulate his views on brand marketing below.