Steve Kaufer advises a marketplace founder building multi-day trip listings on investing in SEO despite AI disruption. Focus on genuinely helpful long-tail pages, use generative AI for content, and monitor time on site, bounce rate, and core vitals closely.
Preeti, do you want to come on? So I use the raise hand.
Sure, thanks. Thanks, Mike. Hi, Steve. Absolutely inspirational for somebody building an IPO-scale company for multi-day experiences. So quick context for my question is we're building a curated marketplace for multi-day trips like TripAdvisor. We started with B2B the last, you know, 3, 4 years, and now is when we're getting ready for B2C. And we started by hiring an SEO team, the guys who built SEO for MakeMyTrip early days. So my question with that context is, in today's changing, rapidly changing world of AI search, you know, how do you make the decisions or investing in initiatives like SEO, you know, which it takes some time to build and see the outcome while, you know, the landscape is changing rapidly. So what's your guidance for someone like us?
Yeah. So with GiveFreely, we built a charity directory. It's not fully launched for SEO. So I can tell you, actually it got crawled pretty quick. So the notion of what I used to believe, you need to let it bake for 6 months. No, you don't. I don't think that's a difficult question. You have to say, can I create a lot of SEO pages that are genuinely helpful to a user who lands on them based upon the title of the page, which is what I'm using to advertise to them? If the answer is, yeah, I'll give a great answer to whatever this Google search question is, if only Google can find my pages. Super. Now, do you use GenAI? Gen AI to create a bunch of those great answers? Probably, or why not? I don't think there's anything wrong with using AI. I don't— can't imagine Google would penalize it if it's offering something helpful to that user. So measure time on site, bounce rate super carefully, make sure your title tags and your link structure and kind of all the core vitals are right. And then there's still good room to come up with pages in the travel category, which has been picked through very carefully. If you have something good, and I would bet, you know, 3-day trip to Machu Picchu probably has not been targeted by any of the big sites and you might have A great set of offerings. It's a long tail term. So you need a lot, you need a page for the 2-day trip, the 3-day trip, the 4-day trip you need. I don't know what the rest of the variations are, but like, make a set of good pages, give it a whirl. And then obviously, you know how to scale. You like the fact that you cover a lot of geographies that really does help scale.
