Startups face numerous challenges in their early years. They have to establish a notable presence and market their products on a limited budget for business growth and sustainability.
SEO is a marketing discipline that can help you launch your new endeavor off the ground and curate an online visibility on the SERPs. It enables you to garner a massive audience, generate traffic, and create brand awareness. A powerful SEO campaign can propel you to the top of the SERPs so your website enjoys 70% of user clicks.
However, the mind-numbing technicalities of search engine algorithms and a plethora of ranking factors can overwhelm a startup entrepreneur. Combine that with the monumental daily challenges of running a proficient business, and it becomes easier to comprehend why 80% of the companies fail in their first 18 months.
The good news is that once you have grasped the core essence of an efficient SEO strategy, your business is bound to acquire genuine customers and their interest, and of course long-term results.
SEO strategies are most effective when implemented consistently and methodically. To begin with, you have to decide the initial goals you wish to achieve by instituting SEO. Whether you want to attract more visitors, gain more viewers for your blog, acquire new prospects or increase conversion.
Quantify all the values, so that you can measure them to see if your SEO efforts are producing the desired results. Then, align your SEO strategies with your goals. In general, most businesses can gain the coveted positions in the search rankings by following a list of steps:
Keyword research
As a startup entrepreneur, you may be unaware of the most trending keywords in your niche.
A comprehensive keyword research enables you to discover which words work in your line of field and attract the most attention. It also provides you with opportunities to create new content or improvise your previous posts by including relevant keywords.
Keyword selection requires its due consideration. You do not want to select a common, albeit popular, keyword featured in various other contents as it dilutes your visibility. Conversely, you do not want to choose a keyword that is so vague that your content becomes almost non-existent for the users.
Once you have organized a list of keywords you wish to target, you cannot use them as is. You have to get creative!
Use long tail keywords that are very specific to your business to target a particular audience. These phrases epitomize the true essence of your business without coinciding with other related companies. They also provide you with a chance to score high on a search query most pertinent to your products or services.
Do not forget to search your chosen keywords. You can analyze the results of the search, focus on what is lacking and create content that is better than what is already floating in the digital space.
According to Neil Patel, if you don’t conduct appropriate keyword research, your website will fail to drive results to its full potential. He believes that the entire process is so simple that it can be completed in a minute, as outlined in this video.
Content creation
Content creation is the most legitimate and authentic way to expedite your SEO efforts as a startup enterprise. When done right, content marketing leverages your website against the competition and provides credibility to your business. It can earn you a substantial number of followers and position you high up on the SERPs.
However, content creation is an extensive process that requires time, deliberation and consistency. You need to produce quality content that provides valuable insight. Google has enhanced its algorithms to weed out low-quality pages from its index. Therefore, if you are not part of Google’s directory, search engines will not include you in their results. And you can imagine what that can mean for your website!
Whole Foods is a great example of a brand that integrates its principles in its content marketing, effectively. It has established itself as a poster child for a healthy lifestyle and green eating, instead of being just a grocery store.
Its website is brimming with articles that motivate you to switch to a healthier diet plan without burning a hole in your pocket. It offers budget-friendly yet mouthwatering recipes and pre-planned weekly meals that save time and money. The inclusive content attracts new customers and maintains a strong connection with the existing audience. Above all, they create content that revolves around helping the customers and providing guidance about how to embrace healthy living.
Moreover, Google favors websites that are regularly updated. Launching a blog is a great way to keep your site active and prominent. Well-crafted blogs attract not only regular viewership but also promote social media engagements through likes, shares, and retweets.
Neil Patel’s is one of the world’s most successful blogs on search engine optimization. The company morphed from a blog to design business to the market leaders of SEO consultancy niche.
Their highly insightful and widely popular blog played a significant role in their journey to monumental success. It helped them expand their audience reach and gain widespread international appeal.
Neil Patel blog features a plethora of valuable content, which covers all aspects of SEO and help amateur marketers gain saturation and visibility on the online platform.
You can emulate Neil Patel and become versed and competent in your respective fields. Then, utilize your blog to dispel your acquired knowledge to become market influencers that are revered by thousands.
Finally, quality content is an excellent tool for link building, which brings us to our next point.
Organic link building
As a newcomer in the entrepreneurial world, you should build productive relationships with influencers and experts in your fields. This will not only help you expand the radius of your exposure but also help you acquire valuable backlinks.
You can initiate a productive relationship with market leaders by leaving intelligent, perceptive comments on their content, regularly. Then, you can feature them in one of your blogs or videos and send them an e-mail notifying them about it. In addition, you can also request them to share your content and include a link in their articles.
Furthermore, you can ask your loyal customers for feedback on your products or services. It is one of the easiest ways to get links, (and glowing recommendations, provided you offer great products or services) because nine out of ten times the reviewers include a link to your website.
In addition, links incurred from another authoritative website function like a seal of approval. When a high-quality site provides a link to your website on their domain, they enhance the credibility of your website. However, to procure authentic links, you need to create the best content that is worthy of backlinks.
Invest time and efforts into guest blogging as well while maintaining an active blog on your site. Choose relevant, popular websites for your guest posts and embed intelligent links in your article. Initially, add one backlink per post that adds value to the content and is pertinent to the underlying theme. However, once you have developed a rapport with the host website, they might be willing to include more than one link per post.
Moreover, as backlinks are one of the most crucial ranking factors, a substantial number of quality backlinks can have a monumental effect on your search rankings.
It is important to remember though that organic link building does not happen overnight. You have to build a perceptive strategy to generate the highest quality of content and then promote it amongst the influencers of your market to gain organic links.
Here are two great articles on organic link building to help you get started;
SEO audit
SEO audit can help you gain actionable insight about the overall performance of your website on the SERPs, how you can improve it and the proficiency of your SEO strategy.
It allows you to analyze the URLs, titles, and meta descriptions of your web pages to ensure they are unique and concise. URLs should be easy to understand while titles and meta tags should be compelling to optimize the click-through rate.
Your website should be accessible to the search engine crawlers and the users with optimum site-load-speed and needs to be devoid of any broken links or errors. Sites with high accessibility enjoy better rankings than sluggish, faulty websites.
Furthermore, duplication, keyword cannibalism and low word count affect the authenticity of your content and have adverse effects on your positioning.
Therefore, you need to evaluate all the factors of a comprehensive SEO audit with a competent site audit tool, like GrowthRobotics, which can facilitate the auditing process and increase your lead generation.
SEO requires diligent efforts carried out over an extended period to see effective results. But strategic SEO can provide your startup with the much-needed exposure essential for establishing strong footholds and growth.