As a start-up SEO can help you get traffic from your target customers that are ready to buy your products or purchase your services.
There are many things you will need to focus on when you want to build your startup.
From developing your business products to planning a killer and excellent digital marketing strategy to start your business sales.
It is both a fun and challenging activity before a business startup can be built up and become successful.
Meanwhile, more often than not, many startups don’t recognize search engine optimization (SEO) as an important strategy to add to their digital marketing campaign.
There are many reasons why startups business doesn’t consider SEO in their marketing campaign.
It might be because SEO takes time before its result can be measured or because some business owners don’t believe that SEO is a valid strategy for their business.
Unfortunately, many startup businesses, don’t know that SEO can be a really effective way to get ahead of their competitors and compete with the big players in their niche that advertise with more heavy capital than they do.
Although SEO is a long-term marketing strategy, it can also act as a strong building block for your startup business's inbound marketing strategy.
Today, I want to talk about some effective techniques on how to implement SEO for your startup business.
Before I dive deeper into this, let’s first discuss the benefits of SEO services for startup businesses.
Benefits of SEO for Startups
1. SEO Start from Content, And Content is King
As a business, your website is a passport for you to reach your world, and it is really important you have one as it can be used as a promotional tool for your business.
Now, in the competitive content-driven world that we have today, your well-designed business website would not give your business much value without compelling, educative, and engaging content.
The most common misconception for many startup SEO is that we marketers are only optimizing the website contents for the search engine, but the fact is that optimizing for human readers that will visit your website is the most important aspect of SEO.
This is because the search engine will only favor your website if your website visitors love your content and find it educational.
So, SEO let you optimize your website content to make your website visitors who are likely to be your potential paying customers find your content compelling.
2. SEO Marketing Campaign is Cost-Effective
If we are to compare SEO to other types of digital marketing strategies for startups such as PPC advertising, social media marketing, influencer marketing, and much more.
It is even cheaper than traditional marketing. SEO for a startup business is a low-budget and affordable marketing option and it delivers quality results compared to other forms of digital marketing strategy.
SEO does not have a quick marketing impact like paid advertisement and social media marketing.
However, it is a great long-term marketing foundation for your startup business's online presence.
If you have a low budget for advertisement and you are really interested in investing in your business then an SEO campaign is the best option.
Not only is SEO campaign cheap, but it is the only digital marketing method that let your business website become visible to those that are actually interested in your business.
3. Search Engine can increase your business Market Share
A lot of people are online searching for information and solution about how to solve their problems.
According to internet live statistics, Google now processes more than 3.5 billion searches every day, and yet the number continues to increase.
With this huge number of online users searching for information and looking for businesses that can solve their problems.
Skipping an SEO campaign for your startup simply means that you are missing out on a huge market of potential customers that are already looking for your business.
You should not also forget the fact that people now use most of their time on their mobile devices doing one thing or the other.
The search engine is a bigger pillar of our daily lives as we all have one problem or the other we are trying to solve and without organic SEO you will make it hard for your potential customers to reach you on the search engine.
SEO is no longer an option but a necessity to any well-established or startup businesses.
It is no longer a luxury digital marketing strategy, it is a must-have digital marketing strategy.
The fact is now how you can apply the best SEO practice for your startup business to make it a success.
In the rest of my article, I want to show you the steps you will take that can help you to develop an effective SEO strategy for your startup business.
Implementation of SEO for Startups:
1. The Right Mindset
When you hear the term SEO, what is the first thing that comes to your mind? What comes into your mind can be different from others.
Many people think that the term SEO is all about cheating the Google search engine and other search engines to rank higher and become visible.
Although it is true that in the early 2000s black-hat SEO is prominent but that is no longer the case nowadays.
Notwithstanding, there is still a lot of popular misapprehension about SEO for startups, and before I begin let me address a few of the important ones.
You can’t cheat the search engine because SEO is not a get-rich-quick scheme
Although, there are black hat SEO tactics that can give your business short-term SEO results.
However, you need to know that they are highly risky SEO methods to try and if Google gets to know about it, your business website will get penalized or even get banned from ranking on the Google search engine result pages (Google SERPs)
Have it at the back of your mind that SEO is a long-term strategy with organic traffic.
If you want to see result for your SEO campaign then you will need to invest at least 6 to 12 months of excellent work, but the results pay off in the end because your business will become visible to online users that are actively looking for you.
2. SEO is not always about ranking
While new SEO practitioners are too focused on getting a high search engine ranking, SEO campaign is more than that.
This is simply because being the first-ranked site would not mean too much if you don’t get your marketing investments back as the traffic drove to your website.
You might have a question that "isn’t getting ranked high the way to get traffic"? I would say yes it is, but not always as expected.
There are high-ranking websites on Google SERPs with high bounce rates.
There are also websites with enough traffic, yet nobody is interested in buying their products or requesting for their services.
So if you eventually want to start an SEO campaign and set up your goal, avoid focusing too much on your website ranking on the Google SERPs, it is just a vanity metric.
Instead of focusing on trying to be on the top of Google SERPs, you should try to focus on your end goals: traffic, conversion, and revenue.
3. SEO is NOT dead
“SEO is dead” is a popular misapprehension.
There is not a single year that you are not likely to stumble upon an article proclaiming the death of digital SEO campaigns.
This SEO misapprehension is tied to certain changes in Google search engine algorithm.
Meanwhile, the truth of the matter is that SEO is still the best digital marketing campaign that can drive huge organic traffic to your business website.
SEO is getting stronger and stronger, and it is now stronger than ever, SEO is the digital marketing campaign that saves a lot of businesses during the pandemic.
Although it is true that Google's search engine algorithm changes every time, a strategy that works last year might not work this year.
However, the good news I have for you is that as far as you are following the best SEO practices you don’t need to worry about major changes every time Google's search engine algorithm is updated.
Step By Step on how to Implement SEO for Startups
Step 1: Defining Your Campaign Objectives
As I have discussed earlier, Google SERPs ranking shouldn’t be the only goal you have for your startup SEO campaign, conversion and lead should be considered and added to your goal.
Defining a clear and proper SEO campaign objective is necessary so that you will be able to adjust your objective priority in implementing the SEO campaign – which is a long-term goal.
Knowing your startup SEO campaign objectives can significantly save you time and resources while you maximize your campaign return on investment (ROI).
The general concept is that your startup SEO campaign objectives should fall in line with your marketing goals and your startup business's overall marketing objectives.
While the ideal marketing objectives might vary depending on different factors, let’s take a look at some SEO goals you need to consider.
- 1Increasing organic traffic: Get more visitors to your website. More website visitors by your potential audience would equal more opportunities to convert them into prospects and customers.
- 2Lead generation for startups: Most of your content should be more about encouraging your potential audience to submit their personal information (Email address, Phone number). Lead generation should also be added to your business customer acquisition strategy.
- 3Brand awareness: You need to let more people know about your brand and its product offerings or services.
- 4Sales: This is mostly for an eCommerce business that performs direct sales on their website, with sales objectives in mind you will need to focus more on driving relevant traffic that will maximize your transactional sales.
- 5Customer service: This objective is to target individuals that need solutions with your website content to provide value.
- 6Reputation management: This objective has to make sure that your startup brand ranks on top of its branded keywords query to maintain a positive reputation in the eye of your potential customers.
Define what your objectives are and make sure that you have clear, specific, and measurable objectives so that you can integrate these objectives into the next steps.
Step 2: Conduct Keyword Research
Finding your Keyword research is the next thing you will have to work on.
There are several different approaches you can use to achieve this; you do a competitive analysis on your industry competitors and search for keywords they are ranking for.
You can also target keywords query based on what your potential customers are searching for online.
Generally, we have two main principles in performing your keyword research:
- 1The target keyword you use should be relevant to your target audience.
- 2The target keyword you use should be a relevant one for your brand, the product you are trying to sell, or your services.
Step 3: Planning Of Your Content.
The next thing you have to do is to plan your content based on your target keywords.
Unlike the old days when SEO content writing is all about stuffing keywords into your blog articles, it is not like that anymore.
For you to be successful in your SEO content campaign you will need to deliver valuable, educational, and problem-solving content to your potential customers.
SEO copywriting is about the consistent posting of quality content, if you can publish high-quality content consistently Google will trust your website and perceive it to be a credible and trustworthy website which will make Google rank your website high in the SERPs.
When writing an SEO copy for your website, you should have the search engine and your potential customers in mind and you should be more focused on delivering value to your customers through your SEO content.
Step 4: Website Technical Optimization
The next step you have to take is to optimize the on-site technical aspect of your website, and we have two main objectives for why you need to optimize your website;
- 1To make sure that the search engine can properly index your website and correctly recognize all the different elements on your website.
- 2To improve the readability of your website content and to also improve the user experience of your website with the objective to let your potential audience stay longer on your website.
Optimizing all the technical factors of your website can be overwhelming, especially if you are a novice.
But in this article I will list the important ones you will need to focus your energy on;
I. XML Sitemap;
Having an XML sitemap installed on your website is really important because it let the search engine properly index your website.
If your website is hosted on WordPress there are some WordPress plugins you can use to achieve this; plugin like Yoast SEO, Rank Math, etc.
You should also not forget to submit your sitemap to Google webmaster central.
II. Title Tags;
Your SEO content focus keyword should be included in your title tags, and you should also make title tags interesting enough for your website visitors to click.
III. Meta Description;
It is not a direct website ranking signal but it will improve your website click-through rate (CTR).
You should keep your potential audience in mind when writing to optimize your Meta description, your Meta description should be interesting and unique.
IV. Heading and Subheading;
Using proper headings in your SEO copy will make it easier to read.
V. Page load speed;
According to research slow loading websites have more bounce rates and they are not always favored by the search engine because they give internet users bad experience.
You can analyze your website speed using Google’s PageSpeed Insights, and Gtmetrix, and optimize your website to be as fast as possible.
VI. Mobile-Friendliness;
Because of the large amount of time that people spend on their mobile devices, the search engine now prioritizes mobile-friendly/mobile-responsive websites to rank on the SERPs.
You need to make sure that you have a mobile-responsive website.
VII. HTTPS;
If your website is not using security encryption then now is the time to do so you don’t get blocked by chrome browser.
You will need to migrate your website from HTTP to HTTPS to let both the search engine and your potential audience know that your website is secure and doesn’t pose any threat.
VIII. Crawl Errors;
You need to make use of Google Search Console to analyze your site and fix any existing crawl errors you might have.
Step 5: Link Building
After the basics of your website on-site optimization has been done.
You will have to start moving your focus off-site.
While on-site SEO is essentially about creating content with the right focus keyword and proper structure, off-site SEO on the other hand is the process of putting your content out there and linking it back to your website in the form of earning a backlink.
A backlink is known as a vote of confidence on the search engine.
When a site link to a particular content on your website what they are basically saying is that the content in your website is trustworthy.
You also need to have at the back of your mind that a few quality backlinks that pointed to your website are more important than plenty of low-quality backlinks.
A backlink that points to your website from authoritative sites that are relevant to your business industry will be worth more than a link from websites that are totally unrelated to the service you offer.
Step 6: Evaluate and Re-optimize Your SEO Campaign
The last step is to evaluate your SEO campaign progress so that you can make the necessary adjustment.
Since an SEO campaign is a long-term project, monitoring your campaign progress is really an important thing to do and you will most likely have to do some adjustments and re-optimization along the way.
Like evaluating the following metrics;
Key Take Away: Do’s and Don’ts
Implementing a perfect SEO strategy for a startup business is not an easy task to do, especially if you are a novice in the SEO game.
Nevertheless, if you follow the steps that I write above, you will have a strong building block on your SEO journey.
Before I end this article I want to share some Do’s and Don’ts you can start implementing in your SEO campaign.
Do’s:
Don’ts: