Google is one of the best channels for growth. But, it's also an ultra-competitive channel, one where you're competing with every other brand.
It's hard to get a competitive edge. Sometimes to get that edge, we forget to pay attention to the fundamentals. For Google, that means the technical elements of SEO.
In this episode of the GrowthTLDR, we talk to Geoff Atkinson, who is the CEO and founder of Huckabuy, a software company that makes it easier for Google to crawl large websites.
On this episode of the GrowthTLDR, we cover:
- The story behind Huckabuy, and how Geoff realized the importance of technical SEO after increasing revenue from $0 to $300 million at Overstock from organic search.
- How Geoff helps large enterprise companies dramatically grow their search traffic by helping them with page speed, structured data, and dynamic rendering.
- What Geoff did to sell into large brands like SAP, Concur, Salesforce even though Huckabuy is a company of 14 employees.
Happy Growing!
Time Stamped Notes
[2:50] - Geoff realized how powerful SEO could be when working at OverStock, where he increased revenue from organic search traffic to $300 million from a starting point of $0. At OverStock, he realized how important it was for a website to be fast, have structured data, and be easy for Google to crawl, Huckabuy helps companies do all those things. They're $1.4 million in ARR, 14 employees, just raised a $2.3 million seed round, and are based on Utah.
[5:00] - Huckabuy aims to give Google the perfect crawl experience when they come to any site. Their product helps optimize a website for structured data, provides fast page speed, and offers dynamic rendering so Google can more easily crawl the dynamic elements of a website.
[7:20] - Geoff feels businesses can make gains in organic traffic if they adhere more closely to what Google wants. Google advocates for websites to be fast, mobile-friendly, make use of both structured data and dynamic rendering.
[9:00] - Geoff got lucky with his first client; he knew someone at SAP who wanted to try out their software. They managed to get SAP some great results, which they could leverage for selling into other big companies like Salesforce.
[11:40] - Geoff talks about how they managed to increase traffic to SAP. They made the site easier to crawl and automatically added structured data.
[13:45] - Geoff tells us how complex it is to sell into large enterprise companies.
[16:20] - As a founder, in the last year, Geoff has spent most of his time raising their seed round. After they completed that round, Geoff focused most of his efforts on sales and marketing.
[18:28] - Huckabuy is profitable, so they had a lot more leverage when raising their seed round. VC's are a lot more interested when the company is making money.
[19:45] - A few engineers built the first version of Huckabuy. It was a very lightweight product, but enough to get them their first clients. Geoff took on a CTO 18 months ago and invested a lot more in building out the functionality of their product.
[22:05] - Geoff thinks voice search is the most significant trend to pay attention to for how search will evolve. At the moment, it's not that well adopted, but Geoff thinks it's going to follow a similar path as mobile search that only took off when the iPhone was released, and cellular speeds got significantly better.
[25:25] - Geoff talks about a recent trend where people care more about the immediacy of the answer to their question than that answer coming from a recognized brand. That's why you'll continue to see Google invest in featured snippets to answer people's questions fast.
[27:00] - Geoff talks about voice search and why he thinks Google is ultimately going to become the dominant player over Amazon, Apple, and other companies who're investing in that space.
[30:20] - We talk about the best potential use cases of voice search. At the moment, it's hard to predict how prevalent voice search will be in our day to day usage. One of the best examples of voice search outside of just information queries is Alexa buying off Amazon.
– Geoff on Twitter / LinkedIn
– Kieran on Twitter / LinkedIn / Medium
– Scott on Twitter / Linked / Medium
Topics: Podcast, Founder, Customer Acquisition
