SEO for Startups: Grow Your Business on a Budget

All budding businesses are always looking for scalable growth strategies that can be executed with minor or negligible investment. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a redeeming tactic that can be used in such scenarios. An SEO strategy doesn’t ask for a big budget; if practiced meticulously, it brings traffic that builds on somewhat of an autopilot. Not just that, the best SEO tools can influence each phase of the marketing funnel and boost marketing tactics. 

Why invest in SEO?

If you’re curious whether SEO is worth your business and require some insight that could support your SEO plan, here are some brief reasons.

Because of the Big Trend
Almost a decade ago, Google researched searching and purchase habits among B2B decision-makers and players. The study revealed that about 70% of B2B searchers conduct their research using a generic rather than a branded search.

Because People are Searching One Way or Another
Even if the product is precisely niche, people most likely search for it in one search word or another. For example, sustainable animal-free dairy (actual product category). Even though this product is a reasonably new phenomenon, it is still searched but probably with different keywords such as “low lactose,” “vegan,” and “lactose-free.”

Because it Strengthens The Organic Traffic
SEO helps businesses build a potential customer base with minimum effort. When a startup shows up somewhat at the top of google search results, it strengthens the customer base and trust.

There are various places to start when trying to employ SEO practices. Here are some listed for your reference.

Start With an SEO Strategy

The foremost tip for startups starting their SEO journey is to start with a well-defined strategy. It is better to explicate why SEO matters concerning your business. If your team has a clear idea about what you desire from your website, they will most likely figure out where to begin. It is common for startups to indulge in product development, and the marketing tactics are asked to shine in later. Instead, it is essential to integrate the strategists at the beginning of a project.

Define Your SEO Goals

To add to the previous point, an entrepreneur must know what they want from his quarter/year. It involves deciding on optimizing keywords and analyzing time spent by people on your website, bounce rates, number of purchases, and brand awareness. For instance, start with defining what “more” traffic means. A growth of 30% in a quarter is more than 50% in a year. Once you decide what you want exactly, you make it achievable. Another example of a wrong approach in this aspect is when businesses focus on traffic- not on quality traffic that potentially converts for you without considering business goals. In the bigger picture, this usually ends up being a waste of their energy, time, and precious dollars.

Allocate Budget for SEO

It goes without saying that to maximize the results of an SEO strategy, one must allocate a budget for it right from the initiation of planning. However, defining a reasonable budget for your SEO plans and addressing coming opportunities can impact your lead generation the most. Therefore, it is better to hire SEO professionals that can create content strategy but simultaneously also give them some time to learn it on the job using learning materials online.

Begin with a Firm Ground

SEO plans should be considered even before you finish your website. You can increase your website growth in months by executing SEO at the development stage. If you go otherwise, you might suffer the opposite. Startups should be on guard for their poorly built websites. In most startups, the business runs on a website created by an inexperienced company founder. Their website is not optimized for search and may have many technical issues on the backend or poor economic capabilities. Quite often, web design and SEO are in conflict. In such cases, it is wiser to cater to your SEO needs as you can build the world’s prettiest website, but if no one can find it, all the effort goes to waste. Whereas even an average-looking website with proper keywords is optimized, makes tons of sales, and traffic is far better than the former.

Focus on Minimizing Load Speeds

The number-one tip for startups is to make your sites load faster. More than how beautiful your theme is, how good your content is, or even how much effort you are willing to give into the promotion: if your site takes too much time to load, you are losing several potential customers. You can use an SSD hosting server, an optimized theme, and CDN plugins so your site loads faster and serve visitors faster than your competitors.

Make Sure Your Site is Mobile-Friendly

Several startups need to pay more attention to the idea of creating a mobile version of their site. In a mobility-driven world, any seller or vendor has less time to grab people’s attention. Attention spans are now shorter than ever, so if your site is not developed keeping mobile friendliness and speedy loading in mind, you will lose clients again.

Indulge in Competitive Research

Doing competitive industry research is crucial. First, it’s essential to know when it is suitable to disrupt industry conventions and when to conform to them. Finding out what your competition is doing and learning things from them that you can adopt is one great way to improve your game. Next, identify and scrape your competitor’s SEO strategy. Find the tactics and terms that are helping them grow, what questions they are answering, capitalize on what they are neglecting- their keyword gaps, content gaps, calls to action, and UI/UX functions, and eliminate the need for guess and check. Popular SEO tools can allow you to analyze and identify competitors like Alexa and Ubersuggest.

Limit Your Focus When Choosing Keywords

According to Drew Cohen from SmartBug Media, it’s better not to limit your focus but to contemplate which top three search terms you wish to be associated with. You can start with brainstorming and identifying essential curiosities of your target audience and then search keywords that align with your company’s focus. After you have explored and chosen the three targeted keywords that will help you build your On-page SEO strategy, your content marketing plan will generate premium content, blog material, and web page copy.

Build a Library for your Readers

Professionals commonly use the advice to view your content as a library, not a publication. Focusing on creating evergreen content that helps your users support your own business’s products and services. Even though regular content is good, startups should ditch the publication mentality and instead build a library of evergreen resources that create organic traffic over time. It’s best not to create content just for content marketing’s sake. Your business needs to generate value that is worth a reader’s time.

Use Free SEO Tools

It has been a common practice among new startup entrepreneurs and even experienced business people to ignore free SEO tools. You don’t always have to pay for all SEO tools, especially when running a new business. It’s better not to spend too big on your SEO practices. There are many free tools that can help you with your SEO efforts, like Google Search Console and  Google Analytics. Many big IT names like the Code Authority agree with this approach and believe that free SEO tools can easily be used for the keyword, competitor, and industry research. Google offers free tools that help you understand where your traffic is coming and bouncing off from and where they are hanging out more or clicking the most. There is also all-in-one marketing software like Ubersuggest that is great for keyword research, competitor analysis, and even backlink analysis.

When starting a new business, it’s wise not to go broke trying to find a marketing strategy for your business. Instead, use the resources and tools available cheaper to you to drive your business further correctly and efficiently. Databox is also a free tool that helps you to analyze and monitor the impact of SEO efforts and collect insights on what’s working right for you and what is not.   

Publish High-Quality Content

While writing content, it is crucial to focus on what people want, not search engines. Creating unique, insightful, well-researched, and high-quality articles, along with favoring quality over quantity, gets you more fruitful respondents than otherwise. High-quality blogs posted every two weeks are a far better approach than two low-value and low-quality blogs every week. It is a common practice to look at SEO as an intimidating volume game, especially among startups. Rather than this, consider publishing two immensely detailed articles that involve your most important keywords and then build a decent amount of links for them.

Final Advice

It is essential to consider your options before blindly opting for SEO and trying to build unknown traffic. SEO may not be the correct way to go if your product is not very popular in google searches. Instead, delve into other types of marketing channels, as SEO is a long-term game, and a new startup doesn’t have much time to lose to drive results.

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