In an ideal world, innovative startups wouldn’t have to invest any money in marketing. People would recognize the value of their products and services, and the good news would spread like wildfire all across the internet.
Unfortunately, startup brands have to deal with massive global competition. Unlike the years prior, when you only had to think about the domestic market, companies are now exposed to fierce opposition from other countries. What’s worse, brands tend to copy from each other, which can shorten your opportunity window.
And while all of this might sound harsh, the global market we live in also opens certain opportunities. It allows you to tap into a limitless number of customers and create interesting partnerships.
The importance of SEO for startups
If you managed to create a completive product and have a solid organizational structure, your last task is to promote the solution online. Unfortunately, this is where many brands fall short.
Business owners often think that the product will find its way to the market with minimal investment. But as you’ll soon find out, even if you have a revolutionary solution, there’s a chance it might get lost among numerous similar products. And this is where SEO comes into play.
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a process of making your site better for Google and other search engines. Specifically, it focuses on improving the technical features of your website, creating viral content, and spreading it across the web.
Organic traffic accounts for 53% of total website traffic. While social media marketing and paid ads can also provide nice results, they won’t drive as many visitors as SEO. More importantly, this is the best method of growing online presence over time.
When should you implement SEO?
As experts like to joke, you should start investing in optimization yesterday.
Hiring a professional SEO agency like MiroMind will provide dividends in the long run. Keep in mind that SEO takes time to kick in, so the sooner you start doing it, the sooner you’ll reap the benefits.
In most cases, you’ll see very little benefit in the first few months. It might take a week or two for Google to index the first pieces on your site. So, if you’re having trouble with your cash flow, you might combine optimization with paid ads.
Nevertheless, no matter what other type of marketing campaign you’re running, you should always set aside a hefty SEO budget. Here are a few reasons for that:
Ideally, you should invest heavily in SEO from the get-go. There’s simply nothing better for startups, as it allows you to make enormous web sales. What’s better, the process is highly scalable, and it can significantly improve your online reputation and users’ trust.
Main drawbacks of SEO for startups
Unfortunately, SEO also has a few issues. The biggest problem has to do with the initial impact and high costs:
During keyword research, you have to see what people are looking for. Do they have long sales cycles? How long does it take to acquire information about a product or a brand? Do they make impulsive purchases, or do they have to interact with a website numerous times before buying?
Unfortunately, as a startup, you won’t have insights into sales data, which makes the whole process a guessing game. Yes, you can check competitors’ sites to see how many clicks they get for every piece of content. But this won’t tell you how many of these visitors they manage to convert.
2. Perform extensive technical SEO
In theory, you don’t need website content marketing or link building for a successful brand. In fact, you don’t even have to create a blog and populate your site with articles. Startup websites can drive leads via social media and paid ads, completely avoiding most SEO tasks.
Still, for any digital marketing strategy to be successful, you’ll need to at least perform technical analysis on your site. Here are a few things you need to pay attention to:
While some people might argue that visuals aren’t necessarily the SEO’s responsibility, the MiroMind team begs to differ. Everything that happens on the site affects your keyword rankings. Having a high bounce rate due to poor visual solutions will quickly bring down your placement within search results.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that SEO experts should become design savants overnight. Still, they need to have a say in everything that’s going on with the startup’s web pages.
4. Create user-centric articles and landing pages
Building a startup website according to search intent should be one of your priorities. A person will judge your organization based on images, videos, and text. You need to create content that will satisfy their inquiries and provide the best possible user experience.
The focus on users has been more noticeable in the last few years. Nowadays, to reach the top spots in Google, you need to master visitor retention. Simply driving a person to your page isn’t enough; you need to keep them there for as long as possible. Here are a few tips on how you can do so:
External
Each one of these metrics can tell us something about a phrase. For example, cost-per-click shows us the commercial potential of a keyword. Even if a phrase doesn’t have a high volume, companies might pay top dollar for it as it’s more likely to generate sales.
On the other hand, related phrases are useful when creating topic clusters and marketing funnels. The general rule of thumb is to pursue phrases that have high volume and low difficulty. These provide the biggest value for your brand as they can significantly increase your growth. However, that doesn’t mean they’ll generate the most sales.
Startups should also be careful with geo-locations. Depending on your business, it might be better to focus on the domestic market. This is especially true if you have brick-and-mortar stores. While getting lots of global clicks might sound enticing, these usually turn out to be vanity metrics.
To execute this SEO strategy, you can use a keyword research tool such as AhRefs or SEMRush.
2. Create content clusters
Content clusters are one of the best ways of increasing a website’s topical authority. By covering all the angles of a specific subject, Google perceives you as an expert on the subject, thus boosting your rankings.
Unfortunately, creating these clusters requires extensive writing and optimization knowledge. Here’s how you can do it:
MiroMind always recommends that you hire a reputable SEO strategy for your link building. Not only will this help you gain better and more links, but it will also ensure you don’t get in trouble with search engines.
4. Create real connections
The problem with SEO and internet marketing, in general, is that people don’t have time for each other. Most entrepreneurs only work for their own pocket and are reluctant to help you out. This is why you need to create real-world connections to propel your website forward.
If we take into account everything that has been said about links, it becomes obvious you need to find a way into people’s hearts. Small tokens of appreciation will increase the likelihood of being featured on other sites before becoming a large brand.
Here are a few tricks that would allow you to build relationships with other industry professionals:
Although traditional optimization will also help your placement in the local results, Google feedback is much more important. So, make sure to emphasize increasing the star score within the search engine.
5 Practices startups should avoid in SEO
The temptation of building your brand the wrong way is often too strong. As a result, startups often implement practices that go against Google’s guidelines. While some of these processes might provide results in the short run, they will come back to bite you sooner than later.
That being said, these are things that can damage your brand reputation, organic placement, and website conversion!
1. Forcing content creation
The content creation process is at the front and center of search optimization. Every article you make has the potential to drive a certain number of visitors to your startup site. In other words, as long as you’re using relevant keywords, every web page might help your sales and brand awareness.
However, that doesn’t mean you should spam articles. Having a valid content strategy is every bit as important as creating all these posts. Rushing the articles usually backfires as it leads to lower-quality posts. What’s worse, this can lead to other issues, such as content cannibalization.
2. Overdoing on-page optimization
Even top-tier SEO experts have a tendency to overdo their on-page optimization. In an attempt to cover all the angles, they might fall into the trap of keyword stuffing, using too many internal links, creating excessively long articles, and so on.
While some of these things won’t directly affect your rankings, they might provide an indirect negative impact. Specifically, they can be extremely bad for user experience. Google will notice that people are bouncing off your site, which will quickly deteriorate your search engine placement.
3. Risky link-building
Historically, shady link-building policies were the most common reason why websites would receive a Google penalty. Over the years, companies tried to implement various approaches, including link exchanges, PBNs, low-quality link spam, and similar tactics.
Although links are crucial for ranking pages, you have to be very careful as to how you use them. Steady and slow is usually much better than fast and chaotic. In fact, it would be much better to focus on producing quality content. If your articles are good enough, they will attract the right kind of attention anyway.
4. Too many visuals
Many companies have the mindset that “the bigger, the better.” Unfortunately, this doesn’t always bring results in the online world. Specifically, it’s really easy for a brand to overdo it with a visual solution. Intricate graphics might look nice, but they won’t help you if people can’t open the pages.
Even if this wasn’t the problem, using too many colors and patterns might be distracting. A visitor might struggle to read your article, which would result in a poor user experience. Not only will this have a negative impact on search optimization, but it might also negatively affect your sales.
5. Using too many pop-ups
In the last few years, web companies have gone crazy with pop-ups and similar solutions. Many entrepreneurs perceive them as an ideal method for increasing conversion. And while having a web chat might be good, it shouldn’t come at the cost of user experience.
We suggest that you perform minor A/B testing if you wish to make any such change on your platform. Even if something feels like a great idea, it might backfire in practice. Always remember that Google tracks metrics such as time spent on site, so it might downgrade your pages if users don’t stick around.