Author: Willie Jiang

“Structural SEO” is a process of systematically structuring a website so that its pages rank well on Google for multiple keyword combinations naturally. Like the term “growth hack“, “structural SEO” has been applied widely yet didn’t have a name until someone coined the term.

“Structural SEO” is most commonly applied to growth online marketplaces.

Continue reading “What Is Structural SEO & Why Is It So Useful For Classified Sites & Marketplace Startups?”

• Valuation: $5 billion (recently)
• Type: B2B2C marketplace for no-code App integration
• Overall traffic: 12M visits/mon
• Organic traffic: 5.5M ( accounts for 45.7%)

We all need different software to run our startups smoothly. The average small business uses 102 different apps, while each mid-market business uses an average of 137 apps based on this 2020 research.

And when you need to integrate one software with another software, the thing you do is probably Googling “integrate A software with B software.” At least that was exactly I found Zapier.

According to SEMrush’s data, Zapier ranks for 3.6M keywords and gets 12M visits/mon. 45.70% of its traffic is from search engines.

Continue reading “Zapier SEO Strategy to Reach $5B Valuation”

• Valuation: 4 Billion (as in 2019 Aug)
• Type: B2C marketplace to find home improvement contractors
• Overall traffic: 25M visits/mon
• Organic traffic: 10.6M visits/mon (accounts for 43%)

If you ever tried to find home improvement contractors on Google, you’ll probably notice that Houzz ranks well for almost everything such as “kitchen remodeling company in [XX city]”, “[XX city] interior designer”, and “carpenters near me.”.

Today Houzz has 25M monthly visitors and around HALF of their traffic is from search engines based on SEMrush data.

So here’s the billion-dollar question: How the hell do they do that???

Continue reading “Houzz SEO Strategy Reverse Engineered: Local SEO at Scale”

I found all books I can about two-sided marketplaces. Most of the books I found center around their founders’ founding stories. That’s actually better for me, because, who doesn’t love good stories?

They are my personal reading lists.

Continue reading “Books about Online Marketplace Startups & Network Effects”