Spencer Rascoff explains why companies ignore SEO: it's boring and takes time to pay off. At Zillow, he created a "Googlebot" persona and desk reminders to convince product teams that building for search engines would massively increase reach. Cultural change is hard but worth it.
Questions this video answers
Because SEO takes a year or two to see results and is perceived as boring work compared to building new, shiny features; it requires cultural change and sustained effort to embed it into product teams.
Really appreciate the time here, Spencer. So I'm an SEO by background and the question that's always been on my mind is why do companies so poorly invest in it? And I've got my own speculation about that and I think it's to do with ROI and incremental investment per quarter. Apologies, it's a very niche question.
Yeah, no, it's a great question. I love the question. I just spent half hour on this topic yesterday at Picasso where I said to my co-founder and CEO, I said, you know, it's been a couple months since like I've heard anybody say SEO. Like I sit in these meetings, I'm in exec meetings, I'm not day to day, I'm chair and founder, but nobody's talking about SEO. And I literally just talked to him about this yesterday and another startup this morning, same conversation. So it's a great question. Zillow was good at SEO kind of like maybe plus, like, yeah, we sort of knew it was important, but once we bought Trulia, we were like, holy shit, now I get it. And truly a total credit to Pete and Sami, co-founders of Trulia, especially Pete. Pete, the CEO and founder, was basically like the PM for SEO at Trulia. He is personally one of the world's leading experts on SEO and invested and like learned everything he's learned and was It built it into the whole culture of the company. I'll tell you why companies don't invest enough in SEO. It's partly what you said, which is it takes a year or 2 to see results, but it's mostly that it's just, it's not sexy, fun work. Like building new features is much sexier and shipping a new, you know, a new shiny feature versus building a link, you know, breadcrumbs and a Linktree and new landing pages and better perf. I mean, like, let's face it, all that stuff is kind of boring. I know it's interesting to you, but like, it's not, you know, and actually we did a thing at Zillow when we, after we bought Trulia, I was like, okay, we got to get serious about SEO across the Zillow brand, not just Trulia brand. We were a persona-driven company. So we had Beth the buyer, Susan the seller, Harriet the homeowner, Alan the agent, Larry the lender, Bob the builder. So you walk around Zillow and there are posters to this day. Well, Mostly remote now, but, you know, in the empty office space with like tumbleweeds rolling through, there are posters on the walls of these personas. And we created a new persona, which was Googlebot. And we made it a little picture, like an Androidy kind of, you know, Google face thing. And we put these little like index card things behind everyone's desk that was like, I am Googlebot. You are designing for me, like blah, blah, blah. And it was like, it took 6 months to convince the product teams that it was like that building for Googlebot was good. Like that was the way to get your, if you're an engineer or you're a PM, you're a designer, you want your code and your feature to be viewed by many tens of millions more people, then you need better SEO and you should care about this stuff. And it required a huge, a heavy lift. culturally to get people serious about it. And even at Picasso, starting from scratch again, you know, in 20-whatever, 2020, with a team from Zillow. And I still would give us like a B+, maybe A- in terms of like really caring about SEO and building it into the inner works of the company. So it's hard, but boy, is it important.
