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As a startup, do you find search engine optimization (SEO) daunting?

You shouldn’t, especially if you want your site to rank higher in search results.

But how can you achieve that?

Implement an SEO for startups strategy for your business.

But where can you get the budget or technical skills to implement your strategy successfully?

Good question.

But this should not be the reason you don’t leverage SEO. Furthermore, getting to the first page of search results is the best way to organically increase your traffic, click-through rates, and conversions.

Not convinced?

Well, research says that organic search remains a dominant source of traffic for most businesses.

Image via BrightEdge

And even though you may not have a big company budget to hire an SEO specialist, you can succeed with the basics.

But how?

In this post, we list SEO for startups fundamentals you need to grow your business without spending too much money.

Check them out!

1. Choose Reliable Hosting

Would you wait on a website that takes five seconds or more to load?

If you said no, then you know why page speed plays an important role on your website.

But that’s not all.

In a recent update by Google, loading performance is one of the Core Web Vitals in the page experience signals. Poor load speeds can also frustrate your customers and lead to high bounce rates.

Most importantly, there’s a correlation between high conversions and fast-loading pages.

Image via Portent

So what’s the solution?

Find a great hosting provider with fast servers and enough processing power and memory to accommodate fast speeds. You should also reduce the size of your images.

2. Optimize for Search

Most online users rarely go to the second page of search results. And for this reason, conducting SEO for startups becomes crucial, especially if you want to rank on the first page.

But how can you boost your chances of ranking well?

Keyword Research

Keywords are a crucial part of an SEO for startups strategy because they give you the power to control searches your website ranks for.

But how can you find success with keywords?

Use keyword research tools to find both head and long-tail keywords you can use in your content and across your website. 

And once you have a list you can work with, identify the strongest depending on competition, search volume, current rankings, and relevance. Then, include them in your website copy, meta descriptions, titles, URLs, image file names, and headlines.

Fix Technical SEO Issues

To prevent issues with indexing and ranking, every marketer should deal with the technical aspects of their SEO.

But what does that include?

• Improper redirects
• Duplicate tags and content
• 404 pages
• Poor URL structure
• Long load times
• Broken backlinks
• Missing XML sitemap, robot.txt, and .htaccess
• Broken media assets

Address these issues during development and conduct regular checkups as part of your site’s maintenance strategy.

Local SEO

If your website targets a certain location, you need to work on your local SEO.

But why?

Let’s say a searcher wants to order food online from a restaurant near their location. If they do a Google search, they are presented with the first three locations in a box.

Image via Google

And that’s where you want your business to appear.

But how do you get your startup here?

Get an account on Google My Business and present Google with a sitemap that helps bots find, crawl, and index your site. The sitemap also tells search engines what pages you consider most important.

But why bother?

Most local searches have purchase intent, and using these tactics for your SEO for startups strategy can improve your click-through rate.

3. Create Quality Content

Create content that solves your audiences’ problems. Then, leverage the following pointers to ensure it’s properly structured, easy to read, and shareable.

• Use keywords naturally. 
• Use short paragraphs.
• Interlink content.
• Produce quality content other people will want to reference.
• Create content that improves on what’s already ranking (the skyscraper technique).
• Create long-form content that comprehensively covers a topic your audience struggles with.
• Use bullet points.
• Include video and quality images.
• Break content up with subheadings.

Then, after creating great content, promote it to get it in front of more of your target audience and build your backlink profile. And since backlinks are among the most crucial tactics involving SEO for startups, you need to get more of them.

Best of all?

Pages with more backlinks rank higher than those with few.

Image via Backlinko

So, how do you get backlinks?

Guest blog on relevant sites, ask website owners in your niche and thought leaders to share your content and promote it on social media. You can also use your content to provide answers on Q&A sites and forums or collaborate on content creation with other startups.

4. Improve on Design

Can visitors who visit your site determine what your business does immediately?

Can they easily navigate to sections of your website with ease?

If your answers to these questions are no, then you need to re-examine your website design.

But why?

Because as part of your SEO for startups strategy, you need to ensure that your website gives great experiences and complements your content. 

Furthermore, the last thing you want is people landing on your site and leaving immediately due to navigation issues, design flaws, or confusing layouts.

So, how do you fix this?

First, ensure the website builder tool you’ve used offers SEO features that help you improve your site’s visibility.

Then, improve your design by:

• Removing distractions such as complicated animations, stocky website images, etc.
• Adding testimonials and reviews.
• Including calls-to-action that guide visitors to the next step.
• Using quality images.
• Improving navigation so that visitors get to products or services in less than three clicks.
• Including more white space.
• Optimizing for mobile.
• Pricing your products correctly.

Make Your SEO for Startups Strategy a Reality

If you want to compete with those in the big leagues, you need to leverage SEO for startups.

Leverage tactics such as creating optimized content that solves your visitors’ problems and using relevant keywords. Additionally, make it easy for search engines to crawl your site and give users a great experience once they land on it.

Do you need more details on how to make your SEO for startups strategy a reality? Comment below, and we can offer more tactics to help you rank your startup.