How Good is Your Startup's Visibility?
Blue White Partners, which Finnish and US based team helps Finnish hi-tech companies to go global might shed some light in it. Blue White investigated(pdf, in Finnish) over 1100 Finnish hi-tech companies’ visibility on the web. Average Blue White Web Score for Finnish companies was 39/100 where as global average is 50. The score is made by investigating content semantics, language, search engine rank and index, and presence in social media.
The top100 mostly consisted of big companies but there were even few startups like 8. Muxlim(95), 13. XIHA(93), 14. Kuneri(93), 15. TripSay(92). (On side note ArcticStartup got 94.)
There has been some discussion what is the actual importance of SEO or is it a complete fad. While methods ranging from white to shady black, I wouldn't argue that SEO is the most important thing to consider when building a startup or product, but you shouldn’t ignore it either. Consider making your product crawlable. Provide some information on the inner workings of your service. Every public page should be your landing page. Use Google tools, like Adwords to select keywords for your product.
We living in the online world tend to forget how much less offline people know about current developments of the web. Help them to find you.
What is your experience, how important is SEO? Does search engine traffic stick?
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Edit: Added top42 companies, by Blue White Partners (note: may be subject to change)
| Rank | Company | Score |
| 1 | F-Secure | 99.9 |
| 2 | Tellabs Oy | 98.1 |
| 3 | Continuent | 96.4 |
| 4 | IT Mill Oy | 96.3 |
| 5 | Nokia Corporation | 96.2 |
| 6 | Vertaa.fi | 96.0 |
| 7 | Tekla Corporation | 95.0 |
| 8 | Muxlim Oy | 95.0 |
| 9 | Poutapilvi web design Oy | 95.0 |
| 10 | SaxontheWeb.net | 94.0 |
| 11 | BasWare Ltd. | 94.0 |
| 12 | Optinet Oy | 94.0 |
| 13 | XIHA Oy | 93.0 |
| 14 | Kuneri Oy | 93.0 |
| 15 | Trip Say | 92.0 |
| 16 | TietoEnator | 92.0 |
| 17 | SSH Communications Security | 92.0 |
| 18 | Equal Dreams Oy | 92.0 |
| 19 | MetaCase | 91.0 |
| 20 | LudoCraft | 91.0 |
| 21 | Lingsoft | 91.0 |
| 22 | Smilehouse Oy | 90.0 |
| 23 | Red Innovation Oy | 90.0 |
| 24 | Maxwell | 90.0 |
| 25 | MoonSoft Oy | 89.0 |
| 26 | Louhi Networks Oy | 89.0 |
| 27 | Limbo | 88.0 |
| 28 | Idean Research | 88.0 |
| 29 | Nokian Tyres Oy | 87.0 |
| 30 | QPR Software | 86.0 |
| 31 | Elektrobit Corporation | 86.0 |
| 32 | CSC - Tieteellinen laskenta Oy | 86.0 |
| 33 | Sininen Meteoriitti Oy | 86.0 |
| 34 | Sulake Oy | 85.0 |
| 35 | Codenomicon | 85.0 |
| 36 | IFS Finland Oy | 85.0 |
| 37 | Brain Alliance Solutions Oy | 85.0 |
| 38 | Really Helsinki Oy | 85.0 |
| 39 | GoodMood Oy | 85.0 |
| 40 | Tecnomen Corp. | 84.0 |
| 41 | ExpressionFlow | 84.0 |
| 42 | Innofactor Oy | 84.0 |
6 Comments
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[...] Click here to read more: http://www.arcticstartup.com/2009/02/04/how-good-is-your-startup-visibility/ [...]
In my experience with a couple of startups and web pages SEO is a bit overrated. Converting clickers into customers is about 90% of the effort I would say. This also means that you have a good product. :-)
The best "SEO" is to display useful information on your web page. For example if you are handling the registration and displaying the results of any mass-sports event you don't have to think of internetmarketing at all. :-)
[...] Lue alkuperäinen ArcticStartupin kirjoitus täältä. [...]
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I have been part of 4 start-ups and the latest one is http://www.dooxe.fi where the SEO plays an important role. However, it doesn't matter how much time you use for SEO this is not the thing what will make your service to fly. It requires some magic potion what is something special for your service / company. But, if you have the right magic potion but you haven't done a proper SEO - your service won't fly.
So my opinion is that you need to make a good SEO and have the right magic potion (also in this order) - this will lead to a situation that you have a good possibility to make your service / company to fly.
Thanks Märt and Teemu for sharing your experiences.
I agree that SEO is tied to your service/product/strategy in general and SEO might be generally overrated but underrated in many startups. Of course getting your product to work is the most pressing problem but you should allocate some of your time for other matters, like SEO, as well(even it won't necessarily transfer to sales).
For example recently I have been noticing that my Facebook public profile comes very high in search results, sometimes even first. Yet I have been in IRC-Galleria for several years more and never seen my profile come up in results with my nick, even I would try to actively find it.
These services are now in different leagues, but this shows how much difference there can be with two "similar" kind of services.
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