In the process of launching a startup company, we believe building a strong online presence to increase brand awareness is key to surviving in today’s highly digital marketplace.
53% of consumers report that they research products on search engines before making a purchase.
One of the best ways to generate sales is by helping your content stay visible on search engine results pages. This is where SEO comes into play.
If you’re a startup looking for new ways to energise your organic traffic with SEO, we’re going to explore everything you need to know about using SEO to your business’s advantage in this article.
Search engine optimisation, otherwise known as SEO, are the strategies essential for helping content rank high on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) on platforms such as Google or Bing.
The better a brand’s SEO tactics are, the greater their likelihood of grabbing a coveted spot on the first page of search results.
Perhaps the number one reason why implementing SEO is so critical for startup businesses is the fact that many individuals only engage with the top content on Search Engine Results Pages.
In fact, around 75% of search engine users don’t even take the time to click past the first page of content.
This means that SEO is an essential practice for getting sufficient traffic to your website.
Ready to give SEO tactics a try? Let’s dive into some of the best practices for using SEO to boost your organic traffic and awareness within the first year of your startup’s operation:
One of the most important ranking factors in a search engine algorithm is to rank content that is deemed to be valuable to the searcher. Some of the best ways to create valuable content for SEO include outsourcing your content to SEO experts.
If nobody on your startup team possesses great writing, editing, or production skills, don’t hesitate to seek the assistance of an agency or outside hire to get the job done most effectively — you’ll be thankful you did this down the line!
Another way to set your content apart from the crowd is by writing about fresh topics.
If every brand talked about the exact same topic within their digital content, it would be nearly impossible to snag a high placement on search engine results pages.
Think about the relevant industry topics that your startup, and only your startup, can discuss with target audiences (your potential customers/subscribers) to bring something new to the table.
When it comes to SEO, it is crucial to remember there isn’t going to be an overnight shift in your organic traffic. It takes effort, strategy, and most importantly time, to see the results from SEO that you desire.
While it might be tempting to allocate more resources on paid advertisements that help you gain new traffic in the short term, SEO is important for setting your company up for long-term success, as it warrants 70% better sales results than PPC ads.
Using strategic keywords and writing high-quality content isn’t enough to increase your rankings. Solidifying your technical SEO right off the bat is the perfect way to set up your startup’s SEO strategy for success.
Technical SEO refers to the backend tactics that help your page get properly crawled, indexed, and ranked by search engines.
Some important technical SEO tactics to remember include:
When you begin seeing more traction and engagement on your SEO content, an important way to keep the momentum going is by creating a regular posting schedule. This creates a win-win situation for both you and your audiences.
Creating a schedule gives you time to strategise future content and stay organised while also giving your audiences something to look forward to on a specific day or time of the week.
For example, let’s say we are interested in creating biweekly content on topics related to driving tests to promote our drivers prep platform. To create a consistent posting schedule, we would create a content calendar that outlines the days of the week and times of day that we will post, who will create the post, what channels the content will be posted on, and any other relevant logistics.
As a startup, it can be easy to fall into the trap of wanting to get as many people aware of your brand as possible.
In reality, thinking about SEO that attracts a smaller niche of your key target audience will bring you traffic that is more likely to convert into a new lead or sale.
Understanding the key demographics and psychographics of your ideal audience and customer will help you with this process.
One of the many ways to focus on specific audiences is by targeting local SEO. If you are interested in targeting an audience based in a certain country, state, or even neighbourhood, take advantage of local SEO with tactics such as claiming and optimising your Google business profile.
46% of all searches on Google are related to a location.
Low-hanging keywords are keywords that help your content land at the bottom of the first page or the second page of Google. In other words, low-hanging keywords are the phrases that are already performing well for your content and are easier to rank on at first than more competitive keywords in your industry. These are perfect to use while maximising your content to its full ranking potential.
While you might not hit each and every one of your SEO goals in the first year of your startup, implementing our favourite tactics consistently in the next few years will begin to pay off in time. SEO is essential for digital marketing, so don’t miss out on the benefits that it can bring your startup today!
Tim Waldenback is the co-founder of Zutobi, a gamified e-learning platform focused on online driver education to help teens get their license. Tim founded Zutobi to make world-class driver’s education fun, affordable, and easily accessible for all.
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