Growing an organic stream of traffic for your business creates a constant stream of traffic, but preparation is needed before you can see the benefits. Like these startups, you’ll need to rethink how your website is built, and make choices about how to organize your information. These brands did not just work on improving their search engine rank, they applied resources toward buffing their social media presence and location-based services.
Location plays a large role in the growth of some of these startups, but often times great coding and interesting content improve a brand even more.
Yelp
Yelp’s growth through localization is fairly well known throughout the tech sphere. Because it is a directory site at heart, a common SEO trip mine for trouble, Yelp needed a way to make their reviews and information accurate. They relied entirely on user generated content, and gave users the tools they needed to create a detailed social profile that describes their food and entertainment interests. By connecting like-minded individuals, Yelp could literally find you some new friends at events you were visiting.
Currently Yelp is a huge business directory that all but rules the review scene for restaurants, bars and businesses across the world. The “People Love Us on Yelp” stickers are beneficial to both businesses and Yelp. The company is also known for sponsoring local events.
Yelp and directories like it, including Trip Advisor and Yellow Pages, continue to be trusted sources because they require various forms of verification to prove that they are real entities. These directories are also good for housing data about your business that Google can easily pull from, like a phone number or an address.
Disqus
The Disqus platform uses iFrames to convey comment information for blogs. Disqus built their new platform with Google in mind from the start. Remaining in communication with the search team, the company learned that Google could understand rudimentary JavaScript, like loading an iFrame.
Disqus also maintains a WordPress plugin that is also compatible with SEO techniques for indexable comments. User generated content is valuable to search, so Disqus builds their business model on incentivizing webmasters to deliver that content through their platform.
WordPress
WordPress itself grew through word of mouth as one of the best CMS tools for blogging because of its ability to scale with SEO. When sites like 29Prime.com talk about increasing search visibility, they often point to blogging because it helps establish your business as an expert entity.
WordPress has a variety of highly rated SEO plugins that help organize your site and create sitemaps that are indexable. These plugins also add functionality like removing pages from Google’s crawl list, and adding authority markup without much effort.
Tools to Use
Any webmaster should be utilizing some of Google’s tools out of the box. Google Analytics is free and robust. It provides detailed real-time data on what your customers are doing when they visit your website, and it also shows you some data on SEO. New integration with Webmaster Tools allows further information on SEO, so you can track your ranking over time and see how you can improve and get more hits to your site.
Lesser known, but highly utilized, communities like Quora and Yahoo Answers are good destinations for easy posts to help qualify you as an expert. Setup a system to collect feedback and data on the key terms you want to target. Google Alerts is a useful, free tool for this purpose. Find blogs posting about your niche and reach out to them with a guest post, or a tip. Many of the brands listed here grew out of a strategy combining social media and SEO.
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