Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

by Gabriel Weinberg

Find search terms that have enough search volume to move the needle for your company. If you can’t find enough search volume, or can’t rank high for those terms, SEO won’t be a great strategy for your business. If you identify some terms that could work, you can further qualify them by running search ads against them to test whether they actually convert customers. Generate long-tail landing pages by using cheap freelancers. Or, if your product can naturally produce good long-tail content, use it to create the landing pages yourself. Focus on how you will build links. Whether you pursue a fat-head or long-tail strategy, SEO comes down to two things: content and links. Link building is often the more challenging of the two. Creating amazing content is one way to quickly build links. Avoid “black-hat” SEO tactics that violate search engine guidelines, especially buying links. These banned tactics will eventually come back to bite you.