Seo for Startups
As the SEO Manager at a startup, it is absolutely imperative that your target consumers are able to find your company online.
One of the primary ways to achieve this is through search engines. Unless your audience has already heard of you, they will not be searching directly for your brand.
This is why search engine optimization (SEO) cannot be relegated to the back burner by startups; SEO must be a fundamental consideration right from the initial business planning phase.
A startup that integrates SEO into its strategic planning process stands a better chance of achieving results, as it more consistently embeds the elements essential for SEO success into the very foundations of the company.
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1. Your SEO business goals
SEO can help you achieve your business objectives.
The goal of SEO is far more ambitious than simply generating traffic to your website from search engines.
Depending on your business objectives, an SEO strategy that generates less traffic—but attracts the *right* kind of traffic—could ultimately prove to be the one that benefits you the most.
Here are some of the business objectives that SEO can help you achieve:
- Increased profits, revenue, or return on investment (ROI) (the most obvious long-term goals).
- Brand awareness.
- A stable and growing source of qualified leads.
- Greater business longevity.
- Enhanced customer loyalty.
You will also discover the topics, motivations, and pain points that matter to your audience—as well as those that hold the greatest commercial potential.
If the goal is to increase brand visibility, content relevance becomes secondary.
In this scenario, your objective is to make your brand so familiar to your audience that the likelihood of them purchasing your product increases.
This approach is ideal for companies that design solutions to problems their audience has not yet fully identified.
In other words: if your goal is to generate demand, you can focus less on relevance—except in its broadest sense.
Similarly, you should focus your keyword research and competitive analysis on identifying the topics that will generate the most traffic in the shortest amount of time.
2. Your Brand’s Topic Generation Engine
Almost any SEO strategy you might devise will require content creation, such as:
- Blog posts.
- Guest posts.
- Web tools and applications.
- Lead magnets.
This is because SEO fundamentally revolves around capturing attention—specifically in the form of links and recurring traffic. With category pages, product listings, and similar resources, it is only possible to attract a limited level of attention.
For this reason, you will need a process for regularly generating ideas and topics that will serve as the foundation for your content.
Your business objectives regarding SEO must be a decisive factor in determining the type of content you produce.
For instance, an SEO strategy focused on lead generation will need to create “lead magnets” compelling enough to entice the audience to provide their contact details in exchange; this effort must be accompanied by complementary content designed to generate interest in these resources.
Conversely, if your primary objective were to increase traffic to your product listings, you would need to devise a method for creating blog posts and other content that positions clicking through to a product listing as the logical and natural next step.
Similarly, SEO strategies focused on visibility would require a process for developing ideas with high traffic potential—specifically those ideas that possess broad appeal, face limited competition, and attract numerous influencers likely to be interested in the content—and willing to link to it.
3. An audience of influencers
Any solid SEO plan requires acquiring links from authoritative sources (influential bloggers, trusted companies and organizations, journalists, etc.).
- Smaller-scale influencers—who may not necessarily command a massive audience but possess a loyal community—can also serve as a valuable source of links.
- Any link acquisition strategy must take into account factors beyond just search engines.
- In this regard, links that boost your SEO in the short term but fail to generate referral traffic or enhance your brand visibility represent a wasted effort; not only is the added value lost, but such links are also unlikely to contribute to your long-term SEO positioning.
- To secure links that meet these criteria, it is essential to create content compelling enough to encourage influencers to reference it.
- Consequently, when creating content for your target audience, you should also keep these influencers in mind to identify the topics that interest them.
4. A Technical SEO Gameplan
One of the most common issues that arise when a company fails to integrate SEO into its launch plan is the subsequent emergence of technical SEO problems.
Although Google and other search engines have made significant strides in evaluating websites, technical SEO issues can still create difficulties that complicate your site’s proper indexing and hinder its effective ranking within search results.
To mitigate this problem, it is crucial to address the technical aspects of SEO right from the start of the development phase for your website and other web properties, thereby avoiding costly complications that could prove difficult to resolve later on.
This is a vast subject that would require far more in-depth coverage than this publication allows to be addressed in its entirety; it is therefore highly recommended to enlist the help of a technical SEO expert—whether an internal team member or an external consultant—during the development and launch phases of your website.
Nevertheless, listed below are several common technical issues that frequently occur and become increasingly difficult to resolve the longer their resolution is delayed:
The absence of an automated or consistent procedure for deleting or updating pages without generating broken links (pointing to non-existent pages), without losing the authority gained from external sites linking to those pages, or without redirecting users to irrelevant pages unrelated to the original content.
The presence of query strings in URLs—used notably for campaign tracking, applying user filters and sorting options, content personalization, or generating pages with nearly identical content located at different URLs. These scenarios must be avoid or managed appropriately, particularly through the use of the canonical tag.