What Does Mark Cuban Know about SEO That He Is Not Telling Us?

Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram have helped fuel Red Dress’s growth in part because these are platforms where they can shape the conversation with their audience (with the clothes they use) and interact with their community via comments. The main focus of the Beyond the Tank episode was the desire of the owners to redesign their site to make it faster—not to help with their Google rankings, but to improve the user’s experience. The Red Dress owners were concerned that the slow loading site was causing some of the images to pixelate, decreasing the user’s experience. My takeaway from the show and the Red Dress site is that Cuban is focused on Red Dress maintaining its hockey stick growth. He does not want anything to get in the way of that. Cuban is extremely intelligent, and if he thought there was an opportunity or market that the company was not targeting, then he would mention it. An analysis of the Red Dress Boutique website indicates that search is just not a key component of their growth plan. And that has to worry Google and the SEO industry. It is clear that Cuban is perfectly fine with the Red Dress Boutique’s current online marketing strategy of using social media to grow its brand, control the message, and interact with its community without the sudden curveballs that Google has been giving website owners the last two years. Will we see more e-commerce sites turn their attention and advertising dollars away from search and toward social networks? And if we do, what will that mean for search practitioners?