Winner: Retail Me Not
Last year, Retail Me Not founder Guy King told SmartCompany that “SEO is bullshit”. But despite his protests, the popular coupon site must be doing something right, with the company now taking out the SmartCompany Web Award for SEO two years in a row.
So does King still think that SEO isn’t worth the effort?
“That’s pretty much still it, but the disclaimer here is that we put a lot of effort into making sites and pages well structured, and with good links.”
“Another reason for me saying that about SEO was because a lot of companies spend so much money on hiring consultants and they ignore the hard work in creating compelling content and useful services. I think some SEO consultants are useful, but a lot of the time SEO tends to be the obvious.”
Stateless Systems doesn’t focus on tactics designed to provide each page with the best possible opportunity to show up on Google, King says. Rather, the company puts as much effort it can into making its pages content-rich and relevant.
And it’s working. Retail Me Not has over 10 million unique browsers a month, 28 million page impressions and turns over about $5 million a year. And yet, King maintains the company spends absolutely nothing on SEO.
“Not a dime. We do spend on SEM, buying search ads and so on, but we consider that something different to SEO.”
“We’re willing to admit that Google is smarter than us. Rather than trying to outsmart Google, it knows how to identify a useful page when it sees one so we just focus on that.”
King doesn’t ignore SEO altogether. The company does employ some tactics including placing the average saving rate of a coupon in the meta-description of that coupon’s page – although he insists that doesn’t fall into the SEO category.
“For example, we figured out how much people were earning from a certain coupon, like Dell, and we come up with an average figure like $108. Then we put that figure in the meta-description of our pages to try and get higher search rankings.”
Judge Fred Schebesta, web traffic guru and founder of Hive Empire, says the site has extremely high page rankings, and is pushing the envelope with some of its link-building methods.
“They have over 124,000 links pointing at their website which is huge, and they have some very authoritative sites that are linking to their site. They have done a great job of building their links slowly and consistently without triggering Google penalties.”
King says businesses shouldn’t become too focused on “tactics”.
“Just make your pages the best they can be.”
