Website creation is the foundation for many small businesses marketing strategies, though a foundation alone is not enough for a business it is what can be built on that foundation that matters much.
Search engine optimization is one of the most effective, rewarding, and highly competitive digital marketing channels that drive organic traffic from target customers to businesses.
Because of how competitive SEO is, it most times becomes a distant dream for many startup businesses, which often causes them to make the huge mistake of neglecting it.
Below are the 4 reasons why startup businesses must incorporate SEO into their marketing campaign;
An Effective Small Businesses SEO Campaign Begins at The Planning Phase of The Startup Marketing Strategy
Startup business with a robust marketing plan has a clear direction, and a plan is necessary for the growth of a company.
Some of the most relevant aspects of any marketing plan are to set up goals and objectives, identify your business target markets, competitor analyses, marketing budget, and setting up your business priorities by focusing on your strengths.
There is no one size fits all for any SEO strategy, and it will necessary not succeed if you approach it in that manner.
This means that your business marketing plan must be strategically aligned with the creation of a specific SEO strategy that resonates with your startup goals and objectives.
SEO aims to improve the organic ranking of your business website on the search engine result pages (SERPs).
Getting any organic traffic to your business website from your target customers might not be among your business goals and objective.
Therefore, the aspect in which your marketing plan stand will determine your SEO campaign strategy.
Your SEO strategy serves as the framework for your website structure and new content generation that translates your business goals and objectives.
Your website domain name is related to SEO – all the more reason to include it in the pre-website marketing planning phase.
Web Design: Do it Once And do it Right
Startups have a crucial time of doing things, and a sense of urgency is a commendable trait that is needed, but at the same time it shouldn’t be the cause of any complacency.
Meanwhile, complacency is what transpires if you don’t include SEO in your website design and this will cause issues along the line.
Search engine marketing is highly user-centric, it can only thrive on providing high-quality, educational, compelling, and valuable results to user search queries, and they rank high-quality websites that are seen as the best answer to user queries on top of their SERPs.
The search engine has a web crawler that crawls millions of websites on the internet to discover, index, and rank them according to users’ queries and website relevance and quality.
Another aspect is technical SEO which is a big part of every business website design and part of the solution to your SEO strategy.
Your website technical SEO optimization makes it easy for the search engine to crawl and index your website, and each of your website optimized aspects indicated the value of your website to the search engine which in turn increases the possibility of your website becoming popular among your target customers.
The most important technical SEO aspect you must be familiar with and must be included in your website design is the webpage loading speed, website security (SSL encryption), user interface, mobile friendliness, responsive web pages, XML sitemap, absence of duplicate content, robot.txt and structured data.
SEO is Not an Entity of its Own
Improving the organic visibility of your business website might seems to be a plain and simple objective of your SEO campaign.
The different factors that are needed to achieve this objective are much broader, and their implementation can have a positive impact on numerous aspects of your business.
As I stated earlier technical SEO has all the elements that can be implemented to increase your website user’s experience.
The building of website links and online mentions is a substantial part of any SEO strategy and a necessary ranking factor for the search engine.
SEO professionals build links and mentions using content marketing, directories, guest blogging, digital PR, local listing, and influencer marketing.
These SEO strategies can give your business exposure that will results in high engagement by your target customers and earn your business backlinks from numerous authoritative websites that are relevant to your business.
Getting backlinks and mentions display a vote of authenticity and confidence in your business products and services both to the search engine and your target customers.
Keyword Research is Market Research For Your Target Customers.
You will get to know more details about your target customers by doing keyword research.
With keyword research, you will get to know the exact questions that your target customers are searching for on the search engine that are related to your business and you will also get to know the countries your target customers are located.
These are very powerful insights that you can rely on to grow your sales as a small business, it will also help you to discover new key phrase that matters to your target customers.
Keyword research is a crucial aspect of an SEO strategy.
You will need to do the research about the popular keywords and phrases that are used by your target customers to search for services and products on the search engine.
After your research you will incorporate these keywords into your web content to drive high traffic of your target customers to your website.
Apart from short keywords and phrases that have high search volume and competition.
You should also target long-tail keywords with low competition but related to your business because long-tail keywords are more user centric than short keywords and phrases.
Building Your Business Awareness, Trust, and Credibility
Becoming visible on the first page of the search engine result pages for keywords that are related to your business and services is important to reaching the pinnacle of your business visibility, awareness, trust, and credibility.
Your business SEO strategy must align with the building of your business awareness, trust, and credibility.
These are the three important benefits of an SEO strategy that are important to both the search engine and your target customers.