Over the past 5 years, 75 percent of all founders that reached out to us for digital marketing did not have a specific plan for Search Engine Optimization. A significant number of them would rather prioritize other marketing options but most of them did not see the need to set up SEO for a startup as part of their launching plans.
If you’re a startup founder with a marketing plan that exempts SEO as a part of your launch strategy then you do have a lot of work to do because search engine optimization is not only important, it is one of the top shot strategy for a sustained brand visibility, web domination and digital footprint distribution.
Even if you are a startup built to function on social media platforms, you still have to control the positioning for your brand. You still need an organic, targeted and sustained traffic to your startup so you definitely must fix up SEO for your startup.
Is SEO Important for Startups
SEO is crucial for startups because it drives sustained traffic, growth and visibility. Unlike paid advertising that can generate a buzz for your startups in a short while, search engine optimization creates a more targeted and sustainable traffic for your business.
It also improves your digital imprints, builds credibility while also attracting a more streamlined and qualified audience that are ready to patronize your products or services.
SEO strategies for Startups
There are a number of SEO strategies for startups but in this guide, I’ll be sharing some of the top 9 strategies that has delivered on visibility for the startups we have worked with.
Decide on your Goals
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All search engine optimization strategies are global but SEO campaigns can be optimized to deliver a specific outcome for a particular brand, based on their own unique needs and expected outcomes.
I always advocate a clear identification of goals before the commencement of any campaign. Because regardless of what you’re building for, before setting up SEO for startups, you need a set of goals or one specific goal that outlines clearly, the things you want to achieve with this campaign.
Doing this gets your campaign defined. And with your goal in place, you can now evolve strategies and a clear marketing plan that will lead you to achieve these goals. Without this in place, it can be difficult to create a custom plan. Or even deliver on your expected outcomes.
It doesn’t matter if you’re working with an external SEO expert, you need a clear set of goals for your campaign. And this has to be communicated to the search engine optimization expert, working on your project.
Every aspect of your campaign will have to be built around this goal(s). And at the completion of the project, this is part of what you’ll use to measure the success of the search optimization campaign.
Conduct an SEO Audit
You need an SEO audit to understand how your website is performing, find out aspects of the search engine optimization that will need more of your attention and of course, the specific areas that you’ll target with different strategies. This gives you an overview of the website.
Sometimes an SEO audit might reveal details that will realign your SEO goals and overall campaign strategy. For example as a new business with fewer buyers, a part of your goal might be focused on attracting more traffic but an audit could reveal that your current audience are not interested in your product or services.
Such outcomes will automatically affect your keywords preference and content development strategies as you’ll now have to focus on evolving strategies that will attract an audience that will be more interested in your product or services.
This is why you need to conduct an audit before setting up SEO for a startup. There are a number of tools you can use for this like Pingdom or Google Page Speed Tools for speed test, Ahrefs for backlinks, Google Analytics & Search Console for deep traffic research and indexing testing etc.
While conducting your audit, look out for each area of the search optimization you’ll implement. For example, consider auditing internal linking, Meta tags and Meta Description for specific pages, including current keywords placement overall performance.
Additionally, evaluate existing technical search optimization settings. Find out things like broken links, 404 error pages, orphaned content, indexing related issues etc.
Identify SEO Keywords
Every successful SEO campaign must have the right keywords as a core driver of search optimization. And these keywords must be carefully selected in line with the specific goals set out for the campaign.
At this point, you want to get back to your SEO goals as set out in step one. Use this alongside your product and services as well as target audience to identify the keywords that will get you to achieve your goals.
Let me be specific. If your goal is to drive traffic to your web development training classes for example, you have to focus on identifying and using the keywords that best describes the said class for a potential candidate that will search for it.
Sometimes you may not know exactly what a potential keyword could be. But not to worry as there are tools that can give you insights into what you can use as a keyword, including the number of people potentially interested in those keywords.
For starters, we have free tools like Google Keyword Planner Ahref, Wordstream etc. including paid tools like SEMRush among others. You can log on these tools, type in your preferred words and the tools will suggest keywords for you, based on what your target audience is using.
In addition to this, you can further carry out a keyword research when setting up SEO for a startup by identifying and studying your top performing competitors. Try to understand their keywords choices, page performance and use these insights to optimize your strategy.
Implement Technical SEO
Technical optimization is one of the most important first parts of any SEO campaign. It is one of the first part we implement whenever we’re working on SEO for a startup.
The success of your technical search optimization can set the tone for the other aspects of your campaign. I always recommend you get this sorted out before embarking on your campaign. The following are some key areas you must consider:
- Website Speed: Website speed is an important factor that can affect a website’s ranking. Based on the outcome of your speed audit in step 2 above, optimize your website to make it fast loading.
- Crawlability & Indexing: Ensure that all pages on your website can be discoverable and crawled by search engine bots. Setting up a sitemap can be very useful for this purpose.
- Mobile Friendliness: Search engine platforms like Google prefer websites that are easily accessible to mobile users as majority of search engine queries are from mobile devices. For this reason you want to make your website mobile friendly and accessible across all devices
- Site Security: Users need to feel safe while on your website. To achieve this, you must implement a secret socket layer security protocol to encrypt user data.
- Duplicate & Thin Content: Remove all duplicate and thin content from the website as this can dilute the impact of your search optimization efforts.
Outside this list, there are a number of other technical optimization measures you have to take when setting up SEO for startups like URL structure optimization, website architecture and accessibility, redirection and internal links etc. You need to have all of this sorted out.
Set up On Page SEO
On page SEO are search optimization strategies aimed at optimizing individual website pages to improve their ranking on the search engine. It is one of the most important aspects of every optimization campaigns.
As part of your startup SEO strategies, you need an on page optimization plan that aligns with your campaign goals, incorporates your target keywords while prioritizing the important pages on your website.
While optimizing your on page SEO, you have to consider the following:
- Optimize Existing Pages: Optimize all existing pages on your website with the target keywords relevant to the each page.
- Content optimization: Create and share valuable, well targeted and optimized content aimed at solving the needs of your target audience consistently. This is a crucial part of your on page SEO that cannot be ignored.
- Optimize Meta Tags & Meta Descriptions: Your meta tags and meta description are key part of your website that must be optimized effectively. Use the right keywords, mixed with compelling adjective and phrases that appeals to both human users and search engine bots
- Content Structure: Structure your content, using H1, H2, H3 and other sub headings to improve your keywords placement and overall schema markup for a better display on the SERP.
Overall, when optimizing SEO for a startup, your On Page optimization strategies are part of what you’ll use to target individual pages and get them all set up for improved visibility however, be sure that you’re not over optimizing your pages as this can potentially cause serious consequences in the long run.
Create SEO Optimized Content
Content is the currency of the web. It is one of the most important part of any search optimization, including SEO for startups. Still, creating and posting content alone is not a guarantee that you will experience improved traffic, visibility or even conversions.
To create a decent impact with your content, you have to understand what matters to an ideal user of your platform and then get your content to address these needs, specifically.
Let me explain. Let’s say you’re running a law firm and your job is to provide legal services to clients. Your content naturally is meant to revolve around providing solutions for people that will potentially be interested in getting your legal services.
In order to create this kind of content, you have to first of all, pick up things like your search optimization goals, your service area for a start. Let’s say your optimization goals is to attract more traffic and your area of focus are IP Law, Energy Law, Entertainment Law etc.
In such a scenario as above, you have to create content around popular topics on IP Law, Energy Law etc. these topics have to be popular enough to attract the interest of a large number of people interested in that topic.
Another example, let’s say your core area is IP Law. You’ll have to find out the topical things people search for under IP law. This could be topics like “how to protect copyright online, Steps to Patent an Invention, Cross Border Intellectual rights protection” etc.
To further streamline things, you can then use your keywords research tool as we initially indicated in step two, to identify the search interest of people interested in such terms.
It is important that your content is not only unique but it is valuable to your audience. As much as possible, beyond your keyword optimization, try to understand specific user intent behind a search. This will help you in creating content that aligns with user expectations.
Finally, if you plan to get the best results while optimizing SEO for a startup, using content marketing, avoid thin content, low value content and mass produced content with AI tools as much as possible.
Optimize for Local SEO
Local search engine optimization is a strategy focused on optimizing a website to attract traffic and sales from users in a particular geographical region. It is one of the strategies that can get you walk-in traffic from your website.
As a founder, while optimizing or negotiating to build up SEO for a startup, consider local search optimization as a good option to generate unique traffic, especially in the early days where your business is getting all set up.
Even where you’re building your startup for an international audience, a strong presence in your target geographical location will give you a head start as you build up momentum for a much broader audience base.
One of the key things to do while setting up local SEO for a startup is to identify and use target keywords relevant to users around the particular geographic location both in your content and across specific website pages relevant to that audience.
Also, consider creating content around topics that users in that region will be interested in. even where you’re inclined to create content on topics that can be beneficial to users both locally and internationally, consider giving it a local flavour, adding geographical based nuances they can easily relate with.
Build Targeted Backlinks
Backlinks are part of the cardinal rubrics of search optimization. They are important because they act as vote of confidence, signalling the credibility of a piece of content to search engine platforms like Google, Bing etc.
Backlinks can also improve your credibility, authority and overall placement on the search engines results page (SERP) so you have to take steps to attract as much backlinks as possible. But before you do this, you have to take the following into consideration:
- Choose Relevant Backlinks: In as much as you do need a lot of backlinks to improve your ranking, you do not need just any backlinks. While optimizing SEO for a startup, choose backlinks that are relevant to your brand, niche, industry etc. over others.
- Avoid Spammy Links: Spammy links, links from low quality website and link farms will cause more harm to your website in the long run. Avoid them as much as possible.
- Prioritize Link from High DA: Links from high authority domain will add more value to your link profile than links from just any website. As much as possible, prioritize these kind of links.
Backlinks are so important in search optimization. Even where all other aspects of your SEO has been sorted, without a decent link profile, your website might not be getting as much visibility as it should.
A number of SEOs have mentioned how they prioritize backlinks over other aspects of SEO, I always recommend a balance. Do not abandon link building if you really want to experience all round improvement with your startup business
Prioritize EEAT
In recent years, Google’s EEAT which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness has become a core part of what Google uses to access the quality of a website and its content.
With EEAT means is that, Google believes that you need to have a first-hand experience with the subject matter of the content you’re creating, your expertise has to be reflected in the content just as you must build authority in the subject matter and become widely known in that niche and your information must be credible before you can be regarded as a trustworthy source.
All of this might be very difficult to build if you’re a beginner that’s just starting out but EEAT is not built in a day. It takes intentional and strategic effort to build a reliable EEAT that Google can recognize and use in gauging your content but you must have the long term plan from the start.
To improve your EEAT, prioritize creating high quality and original content. Establish your expertise on the subject matter of your startup website. This could also mean listing your credentials, certifications and qualifications as part of your author bio.
Furthermore, take steps to improve the authoritativeness of your website by attracting backlinks, recognitions and mentions from top platforms in your niche. Also, take steps to ensure accuracy and transparency through your content and website by linking to quality sources and sharing proofs where necessary.
In a nutshell; while EEAT might take a long time to build, while optimizing SEO for a startup, play the long game from the get go.
Final Words
You can set up SEO for a startup and get your website to deliver a very decent turnaround for your business but before this can be achieved, you have to put in the right amount of work, using the right resources and strategies.
This guide you just read today can get you started on this journey but pay attention to measure your outcomes at intervals, commit to consistency and unfailingly learn and evolve your own custom strategies. This will help you even more in the long run.
While waiting for your search engine optimization effort to deliver results, you can also consider using paid advertising and other advertising options if you’re in a hurry to get more sales. And, our team can work with you to deliver faster outcomes like we’ve done for others, if you reach out here.
Now, it’s over to you. When it comes to SEO for start-ups, what’s the hardest part for you? Drop your comments below.
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