What Are Healthy SEO Growth Rates?

0:00All right, we're going to talk about what are healthy SEO growth rates? So first and foremost, Neil, what do we even mean by that? SEO growth rates is how much are you growing year over year? So you're growing 20%, 30%, 50%. Are you declining? Are you growing by magnitude of 200%, 300 % a year? At smaller numbers, people I've seen grow like even 10, 15, 20 plus X a year. Yep. So I wanted to call out this piece. Shout out to Kevin Indig for writing this piece. So he's a very strong SEO, worked at companies like Shopify. So really smart. worked at companies like G2 as well. So what he did was he analyzed the annual growth of three companies at different stages and in different verticals that get at least 50 % of their business from SEO.

0:43So here's what his conclusion is. So he says strong SEO growth is at least one to four X annually. I don't know what he means by one to four X. Is that like double? So I analyzed the growth of sleep foundation.org door dash and tiny bird.co over the last years to get a good feeling for good annual growth rates before we jump in a few caveats. Okay. So we're not going to cover the caveats, but so we can see the graphs over here. So this is tiny bird SAS startup stage, and we can see their growth over the years. And I'm just going to look at the bar graphs over here. So in 2019, 140%, 135%, 454%, 175%.

1:20So that's from 2019 to 2022. And so what he says here is they grow their SEO traffic at a hundred percent year on year growth is accelerating and will be for a while since tiny bird doesn't yet rank for keywords in the, for the most important keywords. Okay. Interesting. No, you want to read this one off. This is for sleep foundation. Sleep foundation. I can't really read the screen much, but 2018, 446%. If I'm reading that right growth, 2018, 74%, then 131 % in 2020, 39 % in 2021 and 27 % in 2022. Yeah. It's interesting to me. I mean, I would like to see the revenues for these companies. I'm not, So I'm not sure how he's getting to this.

2:03Traffic, right? Like where did it start at? Because getting 400 % on 10 ,000 visitors isn't much, but getting 400 % on a million visitors is a lot. Yeah. Well, this graph is super helpful over here. I would like – I just like to compare it to revenue. Like, okay, all this traffic growth. The top graph actually shows the traffic numbers, right? Yeah. These are the traffic numbers, but I want to know the revenue numbers. It's like, okay, you've got all this traffic growth, but what does this mean for your revenues and also your bottom line? So let's end it with DoorDash over here. So DoorDash here, they get a ton of visits.

2:35So you can see the blue graph over here. They're like probably around a million ish or so it's growing. This is 2018. The red graph over here, 2019, they're growing to about 5 million a month to end the year. And then 2020, it's kind of all over the place, maybe pandemic here. And it ends the year at about 10 million or so. And then 2021, it's kind of stays flat. And same thing for 2022. but in 2023, I don't know what happened. It went from basically like 10 million-ish to about 15 million-ish. Yeah, it seems like DoorDash has been doing really, really well. Yeah, so here's his key takeaways. Okay, traffic is growing.

3:12Growth rate falls between one to 4X year over year, blah, blah, blah. Maturity site ranks for almost all top five keywords in top three with an average annual growth rate of 50%. This stage goes on indefinitely with the biggest challenge being to grow at all, especially when the company has executed well for decades. So I'm like, do you agree or disagree with strong growth being 1 to 4X? I think 1 to 4X is really strong growth for someone who's established. I think it's really hard to get 1 to 4X. I think if you're in early stages, like 10 ,000 visitors a month, 1 to 4X isn't crazy growth. Yeah.

3:54It also depends on the vertical. Like if you're in health, dude, you know how much traffic there is for health. But on the flip side, if you're in, if you're talking about sales software, right? And you're at a hundred thousand visitors a month, that's a lot of traffic. Going from a hundred thousand visitors a month to 400 ,000 for something related to sales software for organic traffic is going to be tough. Yeah. My feedback on this piece is I think it's, if you're going to produce a piece like this, go ahead. It's a good article overall. It's a good start. And so he said this in the very beginning.

4:25He said, before we jump in a few caveats, three companies is a very small sample size, and we need more data for better insights. This is merely an appetizer. So I would like to see the full meal. A piece like this can truly deliver. I think if you're going to create a piece like this, this is more of a content marketing lesson. Just do the full meal, right? And then that way, like when other people decide to maybe cite it or talk about it on a podcast, for example, there's more meat to go off of. But I think it's a great piece to start with. And so, and then I think you need a caveat to like what is strong growth for small businesses, medium sized businesses, enterprise companies, that's how you might want to do a study like this.

5:00So that's a lesson for content marketing. But that is it for today. Eric's getting out with content marketing. It's worth going all in versus just not doing it all because doing some doesn't get you enough links, social shares and traction, but then going all in really can get you the results. It's either all or nothing with content marketing. That's a sad truth. And for Kevin, look, I think he's a really smart guy. This is a good start, but I need more, Kevin. Give me more next time. He also may not have access to the data. Get the data, Kevin. Get the data. I think he did a really great job, right?

5:34I think – I don't think it's Kevin. I think he just doesn't have the data. Get the data, Kevin. All right, that is it for today, and we will see you tomorrow.