SEO

How to IPO as an SEO

Square IPO – taken at ~ 6 AM as we watched from the SF office

I’ve been lucky to IPO with two incredible companies – Square, a global payments company in November of 2015 and in May of 2019, Uber. There’s basically no guidelines for how to manage your IPO as an SEO because it’s so uncommon. Last year (in the age of tech unicorns) there were but 480 IPOs in all of 2020, the highest ever recorded. That’s a mere 83 more IPOs than in 2000, which is the 2nd biggest year for IPOs in the last ~2 decades. It’s probable that some, but not many of those companies even had SEO teams so my guess is there’s only a handful of us who have ever had to navigate this process. Warning: this isn’t a very technical article and is almost laughingly simple but a good pulse check for SEOs navigating their first IPO. This also almost certainly will not move SEO or business metrics but is a good opportunity to present yourself as a seasoned thought leader, something I think is serially underinvested in yet a (sadly?) strong contributor to your overall success as a small team in a big company.

This article is for you if:

  • your company or client is going to IPO
  • you’re curious about the funny shenanigans of going public

In case you’re just here for giggles, an IPO (or initial public offering) is when a company goes public on the stock market. This is particularly important and exciting for the company but also a time when there are a lot of nuances in what is/what isn’t allowed.

There are 2 key parts as an SEO I’ve found it necessary to know will come: the investor relations page and almost real-time indexation.

Creating the Investor Relations Page

Pictured: Square’s investor relations page

The investor relations page is the hub for all investor-related content. At launch it might include things like: the ticker, your current stock price, and any and all IPO-related content either required by the SEC or placed there intentionally to educate both current and future investors. Later on it will be the hub for all earnings recordings to be stored. This page is essentially identical for all companies, here are examples for companies like Facebook and Uber.

Example of metadata you can copy – it’s a branded term and the norm is to be as generic as possible.

Meta data and internal linking will be your two key focuses for this page:

  • Meta data – Seems silly but remember this will be a highly searched page. It’s a branded term so this is pretty simple and I would follow a tried and true format. There’s no bonus points for getting creative here so I would do some version of whatever Facebook, Apple. etc. do. Do not be a hero. Other on-page optimizations are generally not necessary.
  • Internal linking – this is not usually an issue because by default companies usually put this in the footer of the site. If that doesn’t happen though, get major linking signals in because submitting urls for indexing generally does not compensate for having no internal links, even for branded terms (in my experience). While its likely the page would rank without it given the huge influx in links, it’s still a best practice to internal link.

Indexing Investor Content ASAP

This is a unique quirk of IPOing you don’t know to expect until you see it. There’s a great deal of secrecy around IPOs due to the incredible ramifications of violating SEC guidelines. This means the page can not go live until the IPO event, which means you won’t have days/weeks to leisurely let googlebot crawl your data. To put yourself and your company in the best case scenario, you want to make sure this page is indexed ASAP once you’re given the green light and the page is live.

It is not a good look to realize all too late that there’s an unspoken expectation that right at IPO, the page is findable. Your leadership, legal teams and investors will almost certainly do rapid fire searches for this page so here are some tips to ensure a smooth first day on the market.

Subdomains…subdomains everywhere

How to get the content indexed asap:

  • Make sure GSC is set up for the property EARLY so you can submit the URL for indexing the second it goes live. Adding slight operational complexity to this investor pages are generally built on subdomains (I believe due to all the bespoke media that has to be housed) so you need to register it separately via your GSC code, html files etc. or have a domain property on the investor subdomain in order to do this
  • Submit the url through GSC – self-explanatory but you can learn how to submit urls for indexing here if you haven’t done it
  • Manage the expectations early – delays are understandable if you let your team know its inevitable. Would the page have ranked organically with something like QDF? Maybe it would have but would it take hours? Days? Getting an angry email roughly 3-4 hours after IPO that the page is not showing up in search is not worth losing your internal SEO clout for (been there, done that). Manage expectations early.

So that’s it! I know. Pretty dismal stuff. Really? Write meta data and submit urls for indexing? But it’s the timing and timelines that I think make this worth calling out. Not managing this upfront is painful. This is not the kind of email thread you want to be your first interaction with your CEO/CFO, trust me. And would the page have been indexable organically? Eventually. But search engines can’t optimize immediate indexation for events that happen to a paltry 480 websites a year. And while none of this will move SEO metrics, it will hopefully save you one less day of dumpster fire wrangling so you can go and enjoy a well-deserved celebration with your coworkers.

PS. Don’t bother asking to sneak in loaded SEO anchor text links in the initial PR filing – it’s supposedly illegal. Not like we’d ever ask for such a thing.

One Comment

  • Evan Waters

    Great post Jackie! Would you recommend creating any content specifically for the IPO for the consumer perspective? I’d think content around what the IPO means for the consumer community, how will service change, what is the organization most excited for may resonate.

    Also, have you deployed content on 3rd parties (eg Medium, Quora, Reddit) to help control the IPO messaging?