Reaching your audience and creating awareness about your business can be challenging for a startup on a small budget. The market space in which you enter is likely to be crowded and reaching through all that competition can be tough and expensive. Well, at least if you focus on the traditional marketing channels. A more effective and completely budget-friendly way of reaching out is to optimize your organic SEO. Organic means that it is not a paid listing but a ”natural” listing on Google. If you have the time and the will, an optimized SEO strategy can bring you the traffic you want and need to your startup's website.
Why does ranking matter?
If your website is a source of leads, sales, or sign-ups for your startup it is fair to say that getting traffic and users to your website will increase your chances of making more revenue. In fact, 48% of traffic to e-commerce sites comes from organic search results from Google (Colehan, 2016). So SEO matters in terms of traffic and in extension revenue to your business, but whether you will get the traffic largely depends on your SERP (search engine result page) listing. The top three results for non-advertisement get more than 50% of the total click-throughs and after that the click rate drops drastically, leaving the last results on the SERP with a very low chance of receiving any traffic from the search query (Chaffey, 2022).How does the Google ranking work?
Google is constantly crawling through the internet looking for new or changed pages. The search engine robots or 'spiders' as the SEO world calls them are looking for ”good enough pages' ' that they decide will be indexed - meaning it will be saved in Google's huge database. Once your pages have been indexed they can also show up on a SERP. The order Google then chooses to rank the indexed pages for a specific search inquiry is chosen in real-time by the google robots by going through all the saved pages in their index. The Google robot does this by ranking them.So what pages does Google rank highly? There are about 200 algorithms and components that google will consider (Chaffey & Ellis-Chadwick, 2019) but in order to make the ranking process as easy to understand as possible, we will only go through the most important ranking factors on which google ranks your startup's page on. These factors are Page quality (which you can read more about here), Keyword relevance, and inbound links. A fourth factor that is essential to understanding your audience and progress and therefore worth focusing equally on is monetization.
Keyword optimization
An important On-page factor that will play a big role in determining your ranking is your keywords. If your keywords are relevant to both your persona and your page content, both your page quality ranking and your SERP ranking will increase.
Keyword research
Before you decide which keyword to use, you need to lay the ground and understand important factors about the market and the persona of your startup. Make sure that you can answer the following:How is your persona searching for your service/product?
Understand your persona's needs and how they are likely to phrase a search query in order to get what they need.
What are the most popular search query phrases for your keywords?
A great way of finding out what people are asking google is to use free tools such as this Answer the Public. Make a list of all the keywords and key phrases that you think are the most relevant for your persona.
How are your keywords ranking now?
Use Google search console This tool will tell you what Google thinks your website is about, what keywords you are ranking highly on and what landing pages are performing the best. This will help you recognize if you have understood your persona correctly and if the keywords you are targeting now are working.
What keywords are your competitors targeting?
Make sure to test your keywords on google and get an understanding of what other companies are competing over the same keyword listings. It could be a good idea in some cases to target similar words as your direct competition seeing that you will be an alternative solution to their persona's need.
Keyword strategy
When you have chosen your keywords you need to make sure that you do the following:
Use them in your tag titles and meta descriptions
Make sure to implement the keywords in your descriptions and titles. If not, it will be extremely hard to ensure a high SERP ranking.
Use them in your content
The keywords that you implement in your tag titles and meta descriptions must be repeated in the content of your page. It should be done so in a natural and helpful way without feeling too cluttered. This will help Google determine that your page is actually what you say it is about. For example, one of this page's keywords is startups, therefore I have used this keyword in the text of the page repeatedly in order to make sure that we can increase our ranking on the keyword startup.
Image optimization
Make sure to name your images with your keywords. This will enable users to reach your page from an image search on Google. Image optimization will also increase your ranking seeing that the keyword is more frequently used on the page.
Tooltips! If you want an overview of your titles and descriptions, you will find a complete list of this in the report from the Screaming Frog tool.
Inbound links
A very important factor for SEO is the inbound links or backlinks links as they are also called. This is part of the off-page factors which are not taking place on your website but on external platforms. What it means is that Google will decide if you are a good page largely based on how many links you have to that page from other websites.
Google is looking for the following:
- The number of link
- The quality of the websites/pages that the links come from
- The relevance of the page that links and the page that it is linking to
- The diversity in different backlinks
It is in this part of SEO where the so-called” black hatters” often can be found, this is a term describing marketers that increase their inbound links by paying other sites for links or aggressively linking to their page from different platforms. Google can detect this and will then ”punish you” by lowering your ranking score. A good strategy is instead to create good content that other websites would want to link to. There are however other ways you can speed up your links through. Some of these are:
Partnerships
There could be other bigger companies in similar fields but not direct competition that you might want to partner up with. This could be for example a hotel chain if your startup is a bus company.
Guest writing
There are lots of blogs and similar websites in most fields. Localize which high-quality communities or blogs exist in your startup's field and offer to write a post within your expertise. Then, of course, include a high-quality link back to your website.
Influencers
Collaborating with influencers is a great way of creating traffic to your website and getting a high-quality link from the influencer.
Social Media Accounts
Make sure to have social media accounts for your startup to which you can link your content. This is also a great way of creating engagement and encouraging your followers to share links.
Digital PR
As a startup, there could be news value in your business and you should capitalize on this by reaching out to industry websites, news sites, social media accounts, and so on. Tell them your unique startup story and make sure to request a link to your page.
Tool Tips! You can monitor the number of inbound links and where they come from by doing a backlink analysis, a great platform where you can do this completely budget-friendly is MOZ. You can find the tool here.
Monitor and analyze your traffic
Lastly, understanding what actually works and how well it works is essential in order to continually improve your ranking. Remember that increasing your SERP ranking is a process that can take time, especially as a startup on a budget that needs to start from zero in many regards. In this process, it is important that you always base your SEO strategy on evidence and facts. Furthermore, if something is not working as well as you thought it would consider rethinking that decision. There are many tools you can use to monitor your SEO traffic.
Use SEOptimer for a free overview of how well your SEO is doing.
For more in-depth analysis and data, I would recommend that you use Google Analytics. It is perfect for startups on a budget seeing that you can receive a lot of relevant data completely free. If your startup does not already have a Google Analytics account, you can set it up here.
Pay extra attention to the Acquisition report which collects data on how users enter your page. A successful SEO strategy would show a high rate of users coming from organic searches. You can go into more useful specifics by controlling the performance of each landing page, conversions, internal searches, and much more.
Furthermore, the Google search console tool that was mentioned in the keyword strategy is also a great way of understanding the performance of both your keyword rankings and a good overview of your overall SEO performance.
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I hope you have found this article useful as you enter the world of SEO for your startup. Remember; once you have been able to build the high rankings that you want, all the time and effort you have put into getting there will be worth it. Best of luck!
This article was written by Elin Jonsson on February 17, 2022.
References
Chaffey, D, and Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2019) ”Digital Marketing - Strategy, implementation and Practice” 7th end. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited
Google, 2021 ”Search quality evaluator guidelines”
Available at: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/sv//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf Assessed on: 14 February 2022
Chaffey, D (2022) ”Search engine marketing statistics 2022”, Smart Insights.
Available at: https://www.smartinsights.com/search-engine-marketing/search-engine-statistics/ Accessed on: 15 February 2022
Colehan, A (2016) ”E-commerce koi benchmarks 2016” Wolfgang Digital.
Available at: https://www.wolfgangdigital.com/uploads/general/eComKPI2016-Public2.pdf Accessed on: 15 February 2022
Digital Marketing institute ”Technical Optimization”
Available at: https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/resources/lessons/seo-search-engine-optimization_technical-optimization_3hcl Accessed on: 15 February 2022
I had no idea to what depth the google rankings were based on organic influx of traffic. Super valuable article and really opened my eyes in regards to how I'm currently running my online ventures. That the top of the funnel are inbound links is something I need to take to heart and act on immediately. Thanks once again for another eye opening article, keep it up!
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As entrepreneurs, we must be aware of the instruments that we may utilize to our advantage. It's critical to think about the suggestions in this post because they could be the deciding factor in whether or not our company survives. Users nowadays live an online life in which your company must emerge and position itself, for example, on Google, in order to compete. The way you advise start-ups on inbound links is fascinating because these are suggestions that are simple and practical to implement in order to improve traffic to our websites. Excellent quality article.
ReplyDeleteI feel that this article would be extremely beneficial to many start-ups as many entrepreneurs may not be familiar with SEO tactics which would help optimize there websites. These tactics can also be applied to all start-ups as you noted how it can be done in a 'budget friendly way". I like how you spoke about google analytics as it is a platform I use for my own clients and one I would advise all people involved in digital marketing to utilise. I also enjoyed your points on The PR aspect of digital marketing as I feel that this area can be easily neglected. Working with other businesses or influencers to create partnerships is a fantastic way to get more eyes on your product. A very interesting and well written article!
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