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SEO for Startups
As a SEO for startups, you need your goal consumers to find your business online.
One of the key ways this will happen is through search engines. Unless your audience has already heard of you, they won’t be looking for your brand.
That’s wherefore search engine optimization (SEO) can’t be an extra for startups. Instead, SEO should be a vital consideration when planning your business.
A startup that considers SEO during the business plan development process is more likely to achieve results if it more consistently builds the components necessary for SEO success on the business foundation.
1. Your SEO business goals
SEO can benefit you achieve your business goals.
The purpose of SEO is more significant than simply driving traffic to your website from search engines.
Reliant on your business goals, an SEO strategy that drives less traffic but the right kind of traffic can ultimately help you the most.
Here are nearly business goals SEO can help you achieve:
- More profit, revenue, or ROI (the most apparent long-term goals).
- Brand recognition.
- A constant and growing source of targeted leads.
- Greater business longevity.
- Greater customer loyalty.
You’ll also discover which topics, motives, and issues your audience cares about and which ones generate the most business potential.
If it’s about increasing brand visibility, prioritizing content relevance will be less of a concern.
Your goal in these circumstances is to make your brand so familiar to audiences that they are more likely to buy your product.
This approach is best for companies designing to solve problems that the audience doesn’t fully recognize.
In different words, if your goal is to generate the request, you can shift your focus to relevance, except in the most general sense.
And focus your keyword research and competitive evaluation on which topics will generate the most traffic the fastest.
2. Your Brand’s Topic Generation Engine
Almost every SEO strategy you could devise will require you to generate content, such as: regularly
- Blog posts.
- Guest blogs.
- Podcasts.
- Videos.
- Images.
- Tools and web apps.
- Lead magnets.
SEO is mainly about attracting attention in the form of links and repeat traffic. You can only draw so much attention with shopping pages, product pages, and so on.
For this motive, you will need a process for regularly generating ideas and topics that form the basis of your content.
Your SEO business goals must be critical to the type of content you produce:
- For example, an SEO strategy focused on lead generation should create lead magnets that audiences find tempting enough to provide contact information in return.
- Along with supplemental content that will attract their interest in those lead magnets.
- If, on the extra hand, your primary goal was to increase traffic to your product pages.
- You would need to develop a method for creating blog posts and other content that would make clicking to visit a product page the natural next step.
- And visibility-focused SEO strategies would require a process to develop ideas with high traffic potential because they have high appeal.
- And limited competition and many influencers who would be interested and willing to link to the content.
Here are some ways to identify topics:
- Use KeywordTool.io to see an extensive list of suggestions based on the auto-suggest features of various search engines (including Google, YouTube, Amazon, and more) related to any keyword you enter into the tool.
- Here, Google Keyword Planner (part of Google Ads) to get rough guesses of the popularity of a search term.
- If it’s within your budget, a tool like SEMrush assesses keyword difficulty by determining the problem of competitors who have also targeted your keywords.
- Explore social media forums and hangouts regularly visited by your target audience to identify subcultural concerns.
- Issues, themes, interests, and signifiers that tend to generate attention and interaction. Use these topics as an initial point for keyword research and the generation of ideas.
3. An audience of influencers
Any solid SEO plan requires getting links from authoritative sources (for example, top bloggers, trusted companies and organizations, journalists).
Smaller influencers who don’t necessarily have such a large audience but have a loyal following can also be a valuable source of links.
Any approach to getting links must also be developed with more than search engines in mind.
Here, Links that help your SEO in the short term but don’t send referral traffic or increase brand exposure are a wasted effort.
Not only because you lose added value but because the links themselves are also less likely to help your Long-term SEO. Term anyway.
Obtaining links that meet these standards requires generating content that influencers will find interesting enough to link to.
So, in generating content that targets your consumer audience, you’ll also need to consider these influencers when identifying topics of interest.
Content that is more likely to get this type of intent often:
- Mention or reference an influencer.
- Cross-promote an influencer.
- It is the result of cooperation with an influencer.
- Address a question, problem, or topic of interest to an influencer.
- It is usually written with a handful of influential people in mind.
As you grow your startup business plan, consider the ways your product and business activities could generate press by engaging relevant influencers.
It includes the content you can create and the publicity stunts and actions you can take that count as newsworthy.
It is also a good idea to take advantage of your business experience and any related experience that you have at your disposal to become a trusted source for a journalist or reporter.
We endorse using HARO (Help A Reporter Out) to build relationships with reporters who always need a story.
4. A Technical SEO Gameplan
One of the most common issues when a business fails to incorporate SEO into its startup plan, is the emergence of technical SEO issues later on.
- Though Google and other search engines have made significant strides in evaluating sites.
- Technical SEO issues can still create problems that make it more difficult for your site to be correctly indexed and rank well within search results.
- To combat this issue, it’s essential to have the technical aspects of SEO addressed as you begin developing your site and other web properties.
- To avoid costly complications that could be difficult to fix down the road.
- It is a vast topic that would require far more depth than possible within this post to address fully.
- Which is why it is a good idea to know a technical SEO expert on staff or as a consultant during the process of developing and launching your site.
- Yet, here is a list of several common technical issues that often arise and become more challenging to address the longer they are avoided:
- There is no automated or cohesive course for removing or updating pages without creating links to missing pages.
Losing authority from external sites linked to those pages, or redirecting users to irrelevant pages unrelated to the original.
The presence of URL query strings for campaign following, user filters and sorting operations, customization, and generating pages with essentially identical content but located at different URLs.
- These must be avoided or addressed using the canonical tag.
- Duplicate title tags.
- Deficient original content or excessive duplicate supplementary content on pages.
Relations to “infinite spaces” where a virtually infinite number of pages are dynamically created that would be irrelevant in search results.
However, poorly applied or missing .htaccess, robots.txt, and XML sitemap.
Unwell setup analytics fails to track user actions or loses information about their referral source.
Ensure that your startup game plan addresses the necessity of clean technical SEO. During the development process and is a part of regular site maintenance.
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