Getting Started With SEO

5 Dec 2024 · 2 min

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1:38

In this segment of the YouTube video "Getting Started With SEO," speakers A and B discuss how a newly launched marketplace should approach SEO. They argue that the most effective early‑stage tactic is to target the highest‑intent, lowest‑scope queries by creating manual listicle pages (e.g., "plumbers in San Francisco"). Rather than building a full backend browse experience, they recommend using a simple site builder like Webflow to manually publish these pages for the top cities. The listicles are expected to outperform browse pages because they capture high search intent, generate significant traffic, and require minimal development cost—critical for a seed‑stage company with limited resources. The conversation also touches on the choice between programmatic and editorial SEO, suggesting that starting with editorial‑style listicles is the pragmatic choice for early growth.

You know, when we think about, you know, programmatic and then editorial, is there one maybe that, you know, might make sense to kind of start at an earlier stage versus the other?
I think I would start with the highest intent ones. And usually for marketplace, highest intent and lowest scope, usually that's listicles. So if you took an example with Thumbtack, let's say that they didn't have anything at all, I would start with listicles. So plumbers in San Francisco, And the reason I would start with listicles is because the scope is not that high. The intent is very high and the traffic potential is also high. So if I'm Thumbtack and I have a limited, you know, I'm like 6 months in and I just raised a seed round, I would go manually create for the top 10 cities plumbers in San Francisco. And I would, you know, go into Webflow, no backend, Manually select some of these. Don't worry about building browse pages because then you need a whole search engine and then just manually create a ton of these listicles. The listicles are probably going to outperform the browse page. They're not going to cost that much money. There's no backend and it's really high intent, really search volume. So that's how I would start.
And so you mentioned as far as, you know, are these listicles kind of based off like location and kind of categories or?
A listicle is literally just a duplicate version of a browse page, but reframed. As an article. So literally, and we did a test with one company where we literally just recreated their category page, browse page as a listicle with the exact same set of SKUs and the listicle outperformed the browse page. And, you know, at scale you can actually auto-generate listicles, but that's what I mean by that.