SEO and CEOs – Never the Twain Shall Meet

This is a placeholder post for a future possibility that I hope does not occur. If it does, this is the “I told you so.” record. Hence identifiable details are missing. One of my hobby horses is that the C-suite of companies does not place much importance on SEO. Either they acknowledge it but don’t want to know anymore, or they reject the idea completely. This story is the latter kind.

It’s about a small, VC-funded company that has just raised a third round. It was founded more than six years ago. It has a brilliant, niche technical product and its customers are B2B professionals. To obscure the company’s identity further, let’s say the product is a left-handed electric drill and the company name is Acme. It has almost no competitors. There is also a software suite to manage such a drill – two products, at best. I think I’m more excited about the product than its CEO.

Site Crawl

The WordPress website is hosted at WPEngine and built with WPBakery. A two-product website should have about 20-25 core pages at best and any number of blog posts. A site crawl should take less than an hour. The crawl took 53 hours, running at around 5 URLs per second! Google crawls much faster.

The image shows 81,671 HTML pages out of a total of over 800,000 URLs, which include supporting code files (JS, CSS) and images. For just two products?

The page load time is poor, but it’s not the biggest challenge for the company.

SEO Challenges

There are a few red flags:

• The company name ranks #1, as it should. (This is not a red flag.) The name is shared with at least two, perhaps more, products in other industries. Many companies have chosen their brand names like that, but it’s too late to change it. As an aside, a previous employer’s name was changed to an everyday verb! It did not survive the name change.
• 99% of third-party mentions of the company are about its VC funding efforts.
• If you search Google for this niche technology, this company does not show.
• The website is nowhere to be found for its likely unbranded keywords.
• Unsurprisingly, according to Ahrefs, the highest number of daily organic visits in the past 12 months was 13. OK, I don’t have access to their analytics data, but external estimates are usually in the ball park.
• I cannot find any independent product reviews. A lone “review” was written by their own consultant two years ago after some seed units were installed in a few dozen locations.
• Several relevant forums and social platforms have no mention of this company or its products.
• Experienced SEOs can easily work out the likely reasons for the huge URL count. I’m not spelling it out here, as this isn’t an audit.
• I have known the CEO for many years, but he has ignored two emails asking to discuss their SEO.  Being on two continents and time zones, email is the best channel for now. As another aside, at least 10 other CEOs I have known personally showed no interest in discussing SEO.

Why are CEOs like this?