Congrats – you’ve just turned your passion into a business!
However, the odds are not in your favor. According to Failory, about 90% of startups fail, 10% do so in their first year. The reasons behind such a high startup failure rate are inadequate understanding of market demands, lack of capital, powerful competitors, poor marketing, to name a few.
It seems as though all these have a single issue in common – your prospective clients simply don’t know you exist. Thus, in order to transform your startup into a full-grown business, you have to put your brand out there where people will look for it – and that’s the Internet.
But, not just any part of the Internet – Backlinko’s study suggests that the No.1 website on Google’s search results page has a CTR (click-through rate) of 31.7%, ten times more compared to the tenth result on the same page. So, your goal is to get your new website to the very top.
How? With some good old SEO.
What is Search Engine Optimization & Why Your Startup Absolutely Needs It?
As Search Engine Land defines it, SEO is a “process of improving your site to increase its visibility when people search for products or services related to your business in Google, Bing, and other search engines.”
Better visibility means more people visit your website; more visitors mean more customers, which means your business goes sky high.
Generally, SEO is considered an expensive and lengthy process which results often take too long to see. Yet, money and time aren’t exactly the strengths of your startup, so why even bother with SEO?
Well, because SEO, when tailored to your brand’s specific needs and executes effectively, yields tangible, impressive, and lasting results.
Thus, here are seven efficient tactics for improving the SEO of your startup website.
#1 Build an SEO-Friendly Website From the Start
Your brand new website perhaps lacks domain authority, backlinks, and content your digitally older competitors have in abundance. Still, there’s one advantage to creating a new website – you can build it to fit the SEO standards.
Learn about Google’s ranking signals and create a website accordingly:
- Increase the loading speed by optimizing the page content, such as images and videos
- Design an intuitive, user-friendly experience
- Make the site accessible across devices
- Publish useful and engaging content
- Form a good internal linking structure
- Integrate the right keywords, including longtails and synonyms, in URLs, headings, and content
With a solid SEO foundation, you’ll only need to tweak your website a bit to adapt to the future Google ranking algorithm updates. There are many search engine optimisation services available that can help you achieve your SEO goals if you don’t have the time or skills to do it yourself.
#2 Define Which Metrics Matter
Many good marketing strategies fail because those who executed them didn’t know what results actually matter to their business.
Your website metrics, such as bounce rate or organic visits, going green unfortunately mean nothing if your site fails to transform visitors into customers.
So, to know which tactics work, you need to know how to analyze your website metrics. Defining goals is especially important before you begin advertising on search engines and/or social media.
So, make sure to chat with marketers from some of the best PPC marketing agencies who’ll help you clarify your startups’ crucial metrics.
#3 Publish Content That Others Will Want
Whichever SEO guide you read on the Internet, we can bet that you’ll find ‘writing a blog’ among the top website optimization tips.
Both quantity and quality matter, as they signal to Google that you have the EAT – expertise, authority, and trustworthiness in your industry.
The blog posts you publish should be well-written, easy to understand, inspiring, and brimming with new ideas – so much that other websites will love citing you.
In addition, unique and educational content can get you plenty of backlinks, increasing your brand visibility and domain authority.
#4 List Your Website on Directories
Besides being a great backlink opportunity, directories are amazing for supporting your brand awareness efforts.
Look for quality directories that allow you to add various details about your business, and make sure you enter the correct info, such as phone number and address, and update them if they change.
#5 Target Longtail Keywords
If you type “web design company” on Google, you’ll get over 7 billion search results. “LA web design company” has 2.8 billion. “Custom WordPress Miami web design company” is down to 46 million results.
See the pattern?
More specific queries have fewer searches and fewer results, which means less competition and a greater chance for your website to reach the top in SERPs.
Moreover, users searching for longtail keywords are at the low sales funnel, meaning they’re already evaluating your proposition and are more likely to transform into your clients.
#6 Employ SEO Tools and Platforms
Search engine optimization is way past the legwork, and without powerful tools, you probably won’t get too far. Today, the market is brimming with free and paid tools built to assist in different SEO aspects.
The musts are the platforms offered by Google, such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google Tag Manager. These offer you in-depth insight into your visitors’ behavior and demographics, website conversions, SERP rankings for specific keywords, website health, and an array of different information.
Other tools – Moz, Ahrefs, and SEMRush, to name a few – offer such detailed monitoring of your and your competitors’ websites, social media profiles, brand mentions, etc. Some of these tools are so robust that there are SEO experts specialized in a single platform.
Google’s services are free, whereas other SEO tools generally have free plans, but these don’t offer much compared to the paid plans. However, investing in relevant and actionable data is one of the pillars of a successful business.
#7 Monitor Your Performance & Stay Up-To-Date with the Trends
SEO is a never-ending effort.
Google, and other search engines, incessantly do their best to improve user experience through algorithm updates that are becoming more frequent in the past few months. Thus, you should keep up with the latest optimization trends and integrate them into your SEO tactics.
And, to make your optimization strategies worthwhile, you need to regularly monitor and analyze your performance and modify your website optimization strategy accordingly.