The digital space is competitive and every business is trying to reach potential customers by attracting and engaging them. As a startup, it is very important to increase your online presence at a low cost. You must optimize your Search Engine Optimization because it will enhance your brand’s visibility and attract more potential customers organically rather than spending a large amount of budget on advertising. 

SEO strategies for startup companies are a bit different because they must compensate for the low domain authority and relatively limited resources. It is the most affordable way of attracting more customers and fulfilling long-term goals. 

In this article, we’ll learn why SEO is important for startup websites. Some of the tips and strategies for enhancing SEO and understanding the Don’ts of SEO

Why is SEO important for startup websites?

Every moment, millions of users use search engines to search for products and services. This makes SEO the most important channel for increasing online visibility and reach. Users make 6,300,000 Google searches every minute, imagine the potential reach a good SEO strategy can get you. Also, it is an ideal channel and platform for a startup website and business because you don’t have to spend a heavy budget. Advertising your brand costs you a lot of money and you pay to gain online visibility. Let us understand a few more reasons why SEO is important for startup websites 

• Online Traffic: SEO helps in attracting more quality traffic to your website at a considerably low cost. 
• Cost Effective: SEO is more cost-effective than other digital marketing strategies for a startup website. SEO is more affordable for a startup website as compared to influencer marketing, PPC, social media, etc. SEO will benefit you in the long run. According to Terakeet, SEO reduces the cost of customer acquisition by 87.41% on average compared to digital advertising. Similarly, Databox, states that 70% of marketers feel that SEO yields better results than PPC. 
• Content: Your website creates the first impression of your startup brand. Today we live in a content-driven world, so a responsive well well-designed website alone won’t ensure you a reach until and unless you have engaging and informative content.  
• Users make searches: We have learned above that users are making Google searches every minute. So even if your product is niche, chances are that people can be searching for it in one way or another. For example, let’s consider the vegan food category. There are chances that there is a little demand for the vegan-food-items as this is a new concept and consumers are becoming more aware. In such a scenario there is high demand for related searches like vegan protein powder. 
• Macro Trend: Google and Millward Brown Digital in 2014, conducted a study to analyze purchasing habits of B2B decision-makers. The study revealed that 71% of B2B researchers begin their research with generic research rather than a branded result. Even Google stated that “They are looking for a product first, not for you”. 
• Build Trust and Credibility: Enhanced SEO helps in building trust and credibility. If you have a good search engine ranking, it will build confidence in users. They will trust your startup website more as it gives them a sense of assurance. 
• Brand Awareness: SEO helps in enhancing brand awareness. Some of the famous search engines that you must consider are Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Bing, etc. According to a study, SEO drives 1000%+1 more traffic than organic social media. 
• Market Share: With time more and more users are searching for reviews, products, and services online, Alone 3.5 billion searches are made on Google Daily and this number is expected to grow. So ignoring seo means ignoring the huge market potential. SEO is expected to grow further because as every user today possesses a mobile device, they make searches on mobile. 
• Conversion Rate: SEO has the potential to increase conversion rate. You can optimize your SEO by selecting relevant keywords, link-building strategy, content optimization, etc. This will ensure your website is visible on the search engine result page. This will attract more users to your website resulting in a higher conversion rate. According to the Search Engine Journal, 49% of marketers feel that organic search has the best ROI as any of the other marketing strategies.  
• Startups reach the potential market: SEO helps startup websites compete with big brands and lets them reach the potential market more cost-efficiently. 
• Engagement Rate: SEO ensures a higher engagement rate. You can improve your SEO by building a strong link-building strategy, optimizing header tags, attractive title tags, relevant URLs, well-structured internal links, optimized images, mobile-friendly, using relevant keywords, etc. Enhanced SEO will increase your online traffic and your well-optimized engaging content will help in increasing your engagement rate. According to Brightedge, 53.5% of website traffic is from organic search. 
• Website performance: Seo enhances your website performance by making it more accessible and responsive. It enhances user experience as well. 
• Build Brand Authority: Seo helps in building brand authority. A well-ranked brand on SERP not only attracts more customers but also establishes your brand authority. 

Some tips to enhance SEO for your startup website 

• Goals: Define your goals and KPIs. Define the goals that you want to achieve through the SEO. Also, how will you measure the success of your strategy? Startup websites should invest in some specific goals that will impact your business’s success directly. You should focus more on increasing your brand awareness, engagement, and conversion rate. For example, if your goal is to increase your organic traffic then your KPI should be the percentage growth of visitors from organic search over a given period of time. 
• Keyword: Use relevant keywords. Simply keywords are the words or phrases that your users use for making a product or service search. You can use various tools as well for finding keywords. Your keyword should be relevant to your content. Always remember these factors while selecting a keyword, keyword difficulty (Never aim for a keyword that is used by a big brand or a high-domain website, use a keyword that gives you a chance for ranking), Potential (Always consider the value your keyword holds for you and your customers. It should help you in attracting customer’s attention), Search Intent (Type your keyword and see what Google presents. This will help you in understanding the intent and helps you in aligning your content with it) and Search Volume (It helps in boosting your traffic but don’t ignore keywords with low volume because chances are these keywords may have high conversion rate). 
• Internal Links: Internal links are pathways that guide your users and search engines to other relevant pages within your website. It helps search engines identify important pages, discover new pages, and understand the relationship between the pages. Link all the pages that are connected to each other or share similar topics. Use descriptive anchor text for highlighting internal links. It helps in attracting the user’s attention. 
• Content: Create relevant content that answers customers’ queries and solves their problems. According to a study, 75% of users never go beyond the first page of a search engine. To overcome this you must align your content with the search intent. Understanding and matching search intent is very important because it will impact your Google and other search engines’ rank in search engine result pages. Search intent is the purpose behind a user’s query. You must use relevant keywords in your content but don’t indulge in keyword stuffing wherein you repeat the same word and phrases again and again. It’s an outdated technique. You can include keywords in the page title, header tags, URL structure, and metadata. As a startup website, you must create a narrative around your company such as your founding story, case studies, reviews, etc. 
• High-quality backlinks: Backlinks are a very important ranking factor and make a huge difference to your website and ranking. It is not an easy process. Gaining high-quality backlinks is essential. Use platforms such as HARO (Help a Reporter Out) if you want to provide insights to a journalist that can result in valuable backlinks from high-domain platforms. You can create backlinks by sharing your content on platforms that represent your niche. Guest posting is another strategy for creating backlinks. You can also contact a website that has content related to your industry and has linked content similar to theirs. You can request a backlink from them. Startup industry websites such as Startup Tracker, Crunchbase, BetaList, etc provide backlink opportunities. Sometimes you can offer something in return as well such as promoting their content on your website or promoting their products and services. 
• Competitor Strategy: Compare your strategies with companies that are targeting similar keywords and have a similar organic presence. Analyze the keywords that your competitors are targeting and what are their results. 
• Optimize existing content: Optimize your existing content because it will enhance your ranking, and increase organic traffic and conversion rate. Analyze the content that is not working and rectify the errors. You can optimize it again for new keywords. 
• Track and measure: Depending on your goals your KPIs will be different to track the performance. As a startup company, you must consider keyword ranking where you should analyze how your site’s position changes in search engines for a specific search query. To analyze the organic traffic of your website you should analyze how many users come to your website from an organic search. If your organic traffic is increasing it means your SEO is working. Website Health Score will indicate the website quality and you can monitor it. Keep track of your Domain Authority as it will directly impact your ranking. Similarly analyzing Website Core Vitals is important because they are also ranking factors. Keep track of the number of pages indexed and not indexed and how quickly the new pages will be indexed.
• Technical SEO: Technical SEO audit helps in identifying and rectifying issues that hamper your site’s performance in SERP. Try to fix bugs and crawl issues. Enhance user experience and site structure. Give more attention to indexing. Secure your website and follow a strong data protection policy. 
• Mobile-friendly and speed: Make sure your website is mobile-friendly and fast speed. Even search engines consider speed as an important ranking factor. Site audits can help you in identifying the factors that are causing the slowdown in your website and by fixing them you can enhance the website speed. 

Here are some of the SEO Don’ts that you should avoid 

Implementing an SEO strategy for a startup company is not easy and is a simple task. Here are some of the Don’ts that you should avoid. 

• Avoid keyword stuffing 
• Avoid duplicate or copied content
• Don’t buy links 
• Avoid backlinks from spammy methods such as blog comments, forum comments, etc. 
• Don’t over-optimize your content, it makes your content look spammy 
• Never overlook or underestimate mobile-friendliness. 
• Don’t ignore the speed of the website 
• Don’t post boring and irrelevant content
• Avoid using outdated content
• Never overlook analytics
• Avoid hiding links and texts
• Never ignore local and technical SEO
• Avoid overusing internal links
• Never use doorway pages 
• Avoid using manipulative tactics such as cloaking, scraping, etc. 

SEO is a very powerful tool for startup websites to increase visibility, engagement And conversion rate. To make a brand rank organically against big brands requires strategic planning. The lifetime value of organic traffic is higher than the paid traffic. 

Seo is a major part of sustainable business development strategy. For a startup, creating a strategic plan is very difficult, you can hire an SEO Specialist to create strategic plans for your brand and enhance its search engine ranking. By taking advantage of what SEO offers, startups can achieve great results and rewards. Lumia 360 has designed several successful strategies for our clients that have resulted in a 20% increase in lead generation and better search engine ranking. 

Read Also: The Impact of Page Speed on User Experience

Read Also: The Impact of Online Reviews on SEO and Local Search Rankings

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