I have been saying this time and again that entrepreneurs should include or retain SEO as an essential part of their startup building process. What appears to be disappointing is that many startups don’t take SEO seriously. The matter of the fact is that search engine optimization might be an effective and highly rewarding strategy for startups for many reasons.
SEO for Startups: Why It's Essential?
If you running a startup or planning to float one, I can tell you many reasons why search engine optimized website could help you in growing leads and sales. A great SEO strategy brings traffic and revenue to your website. Since, both the traffic and revenue are very significant for your business, you need to work hard to maintain the rankings and steady stream of quality traffic.
1. SEO Helps to Run Data-driven Campaigns:
We are living in a data driven society where decisions are being made on the basis of demographic and behavioral data available. For startups, SEO may turn out to be a very significant data mining tool. It helps startups or new ventures uncloak crucial data about the potential buyers.
Deeper the startups go in SEO research, more the data they can collect about searchers intent. While in infancy, startups don’t have enough data for decision making, however, over time they accumulate huge chunk of decisive data about searchers. This data helps him in empowering their marketing strategy in long term.
2. SEO Helps to Gain and Sustain Traffic:
A well thought SEO strategy may help you get great visitor traffic. If your social media or other ad campaigns are consuming your budget without delivering, give search engine optimization a try. When SEO is executed in sync with Google’s set practice, the result is indeed overwhelming.
Using SEO best practices if you manage to rank even some of your low competitive keywords, you can drive huge organic traffic to your website. It’s a fact that organic traffic coming from Google search has 400% more chances to get converted if compared to the traffic delivered through social media or Google Ads.
3. SEO Can Be DIY if You Have no Budget:
Unless you have made up your mind to allocate SEO budget, you can get benefitted without spending a penny. There are number of tools available out there that help you manage your SEO from scratch to finish. From free keyword research tools to Google’s own analytics tool, they assist you in having a deeper insight into what the data you have and what’s required.
Google Analytics presents a fair picture of how your audience is behaving on your website. Similarly, with Google’s Search Console, you can find exactly what was searched and how visitors landed there. These free tools can give startups a broader picture about possibilities and opportunities.
4. SEO Helps in Decision Making:
The big data collected during the research will help startups in making critical business decisions. The data that once helped in understanding your buyers will now allow you to launch your campaigns focused at them. This information can be mixed to a laid business strategy to shape the decisions.
The point is very simple. Once you have enough information about the consumers, you can launch your campaign that’s aimed at converting them. SEO data enables you to stacking up against business odds and taking informed decisions.
5. Search Rankings Build Brand Value:
With guided SEO in place, startups can build relationships with potential customers without crunching any extra effort. When your website appears on the top of the search engine ranking pages, it builds brand value for you. Having a high position sends signals that you can be trusted.
Now you can move ahead to build credibility for your brand that’s an important pre-requisite for better conversion rates. When searchers see you ranking high for search phrases, they happily sign up for your newsletter. This is because they perceive you being a reputed and credible brand.
6. SEO Builds a Long Term Audience:
It’s time tested experience that paid advertisements bring shortsighted traffic that goes down by the time if budget allocation is reduced. With SEO, startups offer visitors content specially curated for them.
Fascinating content binds your audience. Its craze remains high and doesn’t lose charm overtime. If that keeps on going, your SEO will build an audience over time.
Only thing that startups need to understand is that Search is something that requires constant process of staying up to date. All these points above are enough to prove that startups should start building their campaigns with SEO in place. This is the only way out to build their brand and grow their business reach.
SEO for Startups 2020: How to Win the Competition?
For a websites, two important items required for better rankings in search engines- awesome content and high quality links. Besides these two factors, Google take note of many other key parameters that contribute to website rankings.
Quality Backlinks
A better content marketing strategy will be helpful in developing backlinks to your website. You should explore other ways also to get people to link to you. This you can do by offering link exchange with quality websites, writing for a large publication, conducting industry interviews and recommending your content to influencers. However, while acquiring backlinks, ensure that they are from reputed websites.
Creating link farms can do much harm than good. Avoid buying spammy links and indulging in any such practices as they may invite Google's Penguin penalty and tank your website rankings.
Mobile Ready:
I made several posts on Google's mobile friendly algorithm Mobilegeddon when it was launched in April 2015. It was Google's major update rolled out to punish websites that didn't have a mobile version of their website and failed to deliver a satisfactory user experience. After Mobilegeddon, such websites lost a significant amount of their rankings in the mobile version of the Google search listings.
Your website needs to be mobile-ready. Google endorses three types of mobile sites- sites with responsive design, sites being set up on a mobile sub-domain or site using dynamic serving. In addition, websites who follow app store optimization best practices to rank their mobile apps in different app stores, now ranks higher in SERPs. So if you have an app, make sure you are taking the time to implement application SEO.
Influencer Marketing
SEO Strategies are all about bringing quality stream of traffic to your website. This is why you should keep your website updated with engaging, informative and binding content. This content must be a well-researched one. If possible, request an influencer or hire a subject-matter-expert to write content for you. They are the people, your audience love to listen to. A content piece written by an influencer will always fetch more exposure for your website online.
Content Marketing
Keywords used in your website content are significant to the website rankings. Irrespective of the type of content your website produces, keywords help people find a specific topic to read and discuss. Content written around popular keywords are searched more. If you have used certain keywords in your content title and body, the post may have a significant ranking boost. The possibility further improves if the post gets linked to from other websites or shared well on social channels.
A well-planned content marketing strategy ensures regular stream of awe-inspiring content on your website. This results into high domain authority and better rankings for your content. This is one of the most used seo strategies content marketers use. A website that generates quality content on a regular basis gets indexed by Google bots frequently. This repository of fresh content results in better rankings for your website.
Tarun Gupta, CEO of Brainpulse Technologies, is a prolific author and digital marketing specialist. His insightful writings span SEO, content marketing, social media strategy, and email campaigns, offering invaluable expertise to businesses worldwide. Tarun’s contributions continue to shape the digital marketing landscape, guiding success in multiple niches.