SEO Advice from SurveyMonkey [audio] | Hacker News Reader

SEO Advice from SurveyMonkey [audio]

blog.ycombinator.com

53 pointsandygcook7 comments

First off, I think it's great that you're trying to address this key topic for non-marketers on HN and YC in general.

That being said, there's not much here that will move the needle for most people. I would highly recommend that people checkout either Moz's blog or Brian Dean's Backlinko to see what you need to win at SEO in terms of actionable steps.

"Create good content to get good backlinks" is pretty much the same as "build it and they will come".

A critical part of a link building campaign once you've created a piece of content is the outreach.

I was also surprised that none of the amazing tools used by marketers were mentioned. Just Google Search Console and Keyword Planner. There's BuzzSumo to find existing top content that you can improve on and reach out to people who linked to the original as a low hanging fruit. Ahrefs, SEMrush, the list goes on.

Digital marketer here. This is spot on. Brian Dean's "Sky Scraper Technique" is quite effective as well. Neil Patel's blogs[1][2] are also extremely helpful.

[1]https://www.quicksprout.com/blog/ [2]https://neilpatel.com/blog/

Neil Patel is not a good resource anymore. His blogs are all about quantity, not quality.

Brian, on the other hand, is a great resource. Not sure why you didn't link to his post on the Sky Scraper Technique, yet posted both of Neil's blogs?

https://backlinko.com/skyscraper-technique

What's missing is how not to do terrible outreach.

I help operate a blog with a fairly high domain authority that accepts guest posts.

Every morning I have to spend time mass-deleting guest posting requests that are just so bad there's not even a point in reading them. Poorly written but "customized" spam about how much the writer loves our site and why he or she thinks a listicle about online gambling would be a great fit for our audience. But the "legitimate" requests often don't look much better or different than the purely spam ones.

Dear SurveyMonkey, please let me filter by custom variables when I query the API.

Thought this interview was interested.

For startups specifically trying to get off the ground, I highly recommend the Atrium article SEO Playbook for Seed Stage Startups: https://www.atrium.co/blog/seo-seed-stage-startups/

Animalz blog Content Marketing Strategy is pretty good too https://www.animalz.co/blog/

If you are interested in a good surveymonkey alternative checkout https://www.surveyking.com it has everything my company needs and it’s only $19 a month. They have been trying to get noticed for a while bu Google won’t rank anyone who doesn’t pay an arm and a leg.

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