A 10-Step Search Engine Optimization Plan For Startups

SEO Services For Startups: The Ideal SEO Strategy
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Summary: Yes, it is a slow and gradual process where shortcuts may cause severe problems, but with the right SEO strategy, you’ll be able to achieve all your business goals and consistently produce content that is valuable, shareable, link-worthy, optimized, and visually appealing.

SEO Services For Startups: What Is The Ideal SEO Strategy?

Search Engine Optimization for startups is definitely tricky when it comes to establishing its presence and meeting business goals. It’s a real challenge to make a fast impact with SEO before your limited funds run out.

Amazon.com is rocking eCommerce SEO in almost all aspects by applying User-Generated Content in the form of ratings and reviews, thus helping its customers to make better shopping decisions.

These user comments are of utmost importance for an eCommerce site like Amazon on the SEO level, it provides more fresh content to describe their products to their users. On the other hand, Woot, a deal site, also scaled up its business by creating great site architecture that significantly impacted its rankings and site usability. Woot smartly kept all their products just 2-3 clicks away from their homepage, presenting their content in the most friendly manner to both the users and search engines.

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According to an overall opinion of founders and marketers, startups seem to not solely rely on SEO. But startups should definitely start working on SEO from day one in order to grow and compete with the biggest names in their industry. Google won’t care whether you’re a startup or the smallest online retailer or some major organization. All it will consider is "relevant content" that will serve its users’ queries.

SEO for startup businesses is sometimes ignored as an activity but the sooner you get this right, the faster you’ll be able to establish your startup’s authority, build traffic and brand awareness, improve engagement, and generate interest in your small business, thus building a self-sustaining SEO strategy that certainly won’t bite you in the budget later.

SEO Services For Startups: An SEO Strategy For Organic Traffic Growth

So, here are 10 of the best SEO startup practices to focus on to improve your startup’s online presence and find a new audience.

1. Define Your SEO goals

SEO for startups begins with defining SMART SEO goals that stand for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound SEO goals that would align with your wider business goals. These goals ought to be clear about whether you want to increase blog traffic by 40% in the next three months or increase sales by 30% until the end of the year.

2. Keyword Research

You’re in constant need of new opportunities and content ideas to focus on the right audience in order to bring an understanding of the content your audience would like to consume. Keyword research will provide a strategic way to produce more keyword-focused content that’ll position your startup at the top of search results.

SEO Services For Startups: Organic Traffic Growth After Keyword Research

SEO Services For Startups: SEO Strategy For Organic Traffic Growth

3. Analyze Existing Content

It’s important to create an overview of your existing pieces of content and spot any content gaps that need to be updated. Small business SEO services often create a content audit to understand how your content is currently performing and how it could be improved to achieve your business goals.

The audit takes several features into consideration such as the page URL, page title, word count, meta description, type of content, etc. It also checks on the condition of your content, whether it is off-topic, out of date, re-used, or evergreen.

4. Check For Errors

It’s imperative to check for all possible errors that may have a significant impact on your content’s SEO. Thus, it’s essential to make sure that your original piece of content doesn't resemble any other content, even that of the backlinks you’ve provided to your websites, as it may cannibalize the keywords you wish to target on search.

It’s also very important to improve the first impressions of your content that often come through images. So, check your pages for missing images and also do the same with broken images as well. Broken images can easily appear on your site if you’ve directly taken them from an external source. Similarly, even broken links can hamper User Experience, your site’s reputation, and can adversely affect your page ranking.

Checking for any 404 error pages is also necessary, especially if you’ve recently migrated content or changed any URLs, as the error can not only affect your site’s rankings but will also impact your engagement and User Experience.

5. Optimize Content

On-page SEO will serve the purpose of optimizing your content by fixing a variety of things such as the URL structure, readability, title, meta tags, internal linking, etc. Moreover, putting up meta tags can help visitors find your content in search engines, provided you add great value to it in a limited number of characters.

6. SEO Images

SEO is not only restricted to textual content but also covers up visual content that requires optimization in order to be indexed by search engines. Often the authenticity of your content can be undermined by generic stock photographs, so try using screenshots or sourcing your own informative images wherever possible instead.

SEO services for small businesses can help your users discover your content, not just by optimizing its textual part but also by the images for search as several users today come across an image first through image search and then visit the original web page to read its context.

Dan Morgan at WebSpection made one of his photos rank number 1 for the “best person in Cardiff” in Google Images by merely optimizing his image in less than four days. Similarly, Robbie Richards worked with image alt tags and a few other SEO tricks to generate 150,732 visits.

7. Featured Snippets

Google’s featured snippet, which is also known as "position zero" on the SERP, is a great opportunity to seek in order to rank above your competitors in search results. SEO services for startups can help grab a featured snippet spot and also be a source of potential visibility for the startup aiming at getting its name out there.

8. Improving Backlinks And Public Relations

The game of SEO isn’t necessarily restricted to on-site optimization but also takes into account other external sources, known as off-page SEO. As a startup, you would possibly need all the available coverage for your services and content to make its mark among your potential customers.

Moreover, backlinks are the links gained by your page through other websites and a combination of backlinks and Public Relations (PR) can form a solid base to increase your brand awareness and interest in your small business as asking for professional help will always help expand your startup’s reach. So, instead of spending time on networking all by yourself, SEO services for startups will help boost your SEO, thus making it an authority in your field of interest.

9. Mobile Optimization

In this digital competitive world, it has become critical now to optimize your site for mobile devices. More and more people are now consuming content through their mobile devices, compelling you to boost your site’s performance on mobile and implement full-on mobile optimization by paying attention to image size, improving your site speed, etc.

Shutterfly is a brilliant example here as it is known for its great mobile experience. It is an online service that allows its users to create personalized cards and photo books. They have an excellent User Interface, greeting users with large photos and showcasing what the service is capable of.

10. Measuring SEO

Startups often have a question as to how to measure the success of an SEO campaign. This mainly depends upon your goals, if it is to build authority, improve engagement, increase traffic, or expand your business’s reach.

The engagement metric can be measured by the amount of time your visitors spend on your site, the shares, the number of comments, the bounce rate, etc. Organic traffic will also provide you with the number of people visiting your page through search results.

Keyword performance can also help you in finding out whether your content was successful enough in targeting the right keywords and ranking your page higher in the search results. Another important metric of measuring SEO is the number of links you’ve gained from other sources that lead to your site. These links in turn improve your domain authority, especially if they have come from sources of high quality and relevance.

Summary

SEO is a great strategy and the most cost-effective way to grow your startup, especially in the early stages of your business. Yes, it is a slow and gradual process where shortcuts may cause severe problems, but with the right SEO strategy, you’ll be able to achieve all your business goals and consistently produce content that would be valuable, shareable, link-worthy, optimized, and visually appealing.

You need to understand that if your SEO is poor, then you’re like the TV show that airs on some obscure channel in the middle of the night. No matter how great the show is, it’ll face difficulty in gaining a following as it is hard to find it. This can happen with your wonderful business if your website does not appear on search engines, as your potential customers won’t be able to find it and access information, communicate or make a conversion.

So, if you want to have a great impact on your organic traffic and revenue, then wait no more as the longer you wait, the further you may fall in the search results and lose potential customers, as SEO is still reigning with 70% of the links being organic on which search users click on.

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