SEO is an essential asset to invest in to have a successful startup at early stages. However, many entrepreneurs think of SEO in later stages, either because they underestimate the potential of SEO in driving business growth or think of it the same way they think of a marketing campaign. Some entrepreneurs do not simply have the time to address the complex SEO requirements or find the SEO agency or partner whom they can trust.
If we want to place SEO on the business priority matrix, then it falls within the non-urgent, but highly important tasks. It should be part of the business strategy. Think of it as a stock investment; the earlier you invest it in it, and the more time passes by, the higher the rewards will be.
When should startups focus on SEO?
SEO for startups helps right from the start of a business, especially when there’s not much data of the market or the audiences present. SEO helps you gather that data and develop deeper customer insights over time. Use it in the process of setting the business strategy, and product specifications. Define the language to communicate and attract your audiences using their search terms to build your content.
Let’s take an example. If you deliver local food and use the phrase ‘food delivery’ as the main search term, you do not know whether the majority of your potential customers in your area use that term. They might be searching for your service using a different keyword, like ‘meal delivery service’. Search keywords can vary across different locations. Aligning the keywords with the user intent drives important results.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a powerful strategic tool for any startup.
Here are the five reasons why SEO for startups needs to be a priority:
SEO UNCOVERS MARKET data
The more efforts startups put on search engine optimization, the more knowledge they will develop about their products, services, and niche audiences. They will gain information about how much competitors spend on ads, what search terms they are targeting customers with, and which platforms they use for publicity and PR. Above all, they will capture sources where competitors get their traffic and revenues. Businesses can then develop click funnels for targeting customers with specific content at each stage of the purchase decision.
Generate higher traffic, more leads and sale conversions
Building your SEO army and staying up-to-date with Google’s best practices, is the most sustainable and affordable digital marketing tool to generate traffic.
Instead of spending money on social media ads and other forms of advertisements, investing in search engine optimization results in higher conversion rates. Web users prefer to click on organic search results, rather than a promoted ad. Ranking higher on Google means trust and credibility. SEO for startups is a powerful PR tool which costs less than ads.
In order to start generating organic traffic to your website, you can focus on a few long-tail keywords:
- That best describes your product or service,
- Which have good search volumes,
- And which aren’t very competitive.
Keywords ranking on top of search results are very lucrative assets to businesses.
SEO GENERATES A LONG-TERM AUDIENCE for Startups
Unlike other forms of digital marketing activities that require spending high budgets for short term impressions, SEO is free. It helps to build long term audiences by providing web visitors with the content they are looking for. Therefore SEO has the highest ROI among other channels. The tools you need like Google Analytics and Google Search Console are free.
Google Search Console allows you to monitor your site’s organic performance. Google Analytics provides details on search terms so you can find out how visitors landed on your pages. You can also gain insights about the technical SEO performance of the website, such as indexing and crawling issues affecting how search robots to access, store and display pages of your website.
There are paid tools you can use additionally, such as SEMrush, MOZ and Ahrefs, if you need more advanced and time-saving features.
You invest time to learn search engine optimization factors and apply the process for your website, whether you use WordPress, Magento, Shopify or any other CMS platform.
If you choose to assign the SEO-tasks to a professional SEO agency, there are ways you can reduce costs. A SEO expert can help you prioritize your objectives in terms of time and costs, and come up with the best strategy for your startup growth.
Strengthens brand awareness and reputation
Being on top of search results means a big deal for your brand reputation. Leaving a good impression and enticing customers’ trust. A competitive advantage is to have your website ranking on top of other competitive websites. Indicating that you are the top business for that product or service. Then it is up to the business to take the relation, trust and credibility from there where leads land into your website.
With search engine optimization the game is not how much money a business spends online, it is how it sets the optimization strategy and updates its website with the ever-changing search engine algorithms. Leaving an open door for small businesses to compete with big ones, and the local to compete with global ones.
Essential for driving results continuously- Startups strive for that
Besides email, SEO is the cheapest – yet the most effective way – to build a customer base, to target audiences with content on-demand, to gain credibility and trust, and to access customer data, competition and market performance. The earlier a startup business begins with search engine optimization, the better it is.
This is because SEO has guidelines to apply for building the website structure, content strategy, application integration into the website, and so on. Solving technical issues of a local website and optimizing the content for 3 keywords, can generate an important increment of PQ requests over a few months.
Mind you, SEO is not a one-time solution. It is an on-going process. As Google is constantly updating its algorithms and ranking factors, it is important to stay up-to-date on SEO marketing trends and competition.
SEO helps your business to provide visitors with the content they are looking for. Your website content should match with what users need.
Do you have a startup and would like to discuss your business needs? Get in touch!
