As a company just beginning to start out in business, you need to target your potential clients online, as over 97% of consumers go online to find a business. One of the most efficient ways to do this is by using search engines, such as Google and Bing. Unless the potential customer has already heard of you or been recommended, they wouldn’t be searching your brand name. This is why Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has to be at the forefront of your marketing strategy and an important consideration when planning your business. A startup that implements a strong SEO strategy during developing a business plan is more likely to achieve success through setting the foundations of the business with necessary SEO components.
So how can a startup achieve SEO success from the start? This blog will address how to consider SEO while developing your business plan, and share with you our top SEO tips for your startup.
The most fundamental SEO tips for Startups
Starting a business is not an easy process and it becomes even harder when rapid expansion in on the cards. If you’re just starting up, you need to be there in as many of your potential customer’s touchpoints and digital platforms to advertise your products or the services you are offering, especially social media platforms and search engines. For any startup or small business, a solid SEO strategy is essential to driving growth and brand awareness, therefore these startup SEO tips will help to take your small business to the next level:
- Know your target audience
- Fix technical issues and optimise your page
- Register and optimise with Google My Business
- Manage the local business listings and citations
- Add schema markup
- Register with Google and Bing webmaster tools
- Register with Google Analytics
Know your audience to master your SEO efforts
The very first step to developing search engine optimized web content for your business is to know your target audience.
Keywords. Conversion. User experience. Search engine optimization.
What do all of these words and phrases have in common?
They all relate to how you will attract, engage, and convert your target audience.
The crux of any good digital marketing campaign is to identify the specific characteristics of your ideal customers, including geographic, demographic, and psychographic variables. This is very important because you will know who you are selling to and your target market. When you know who your target audience is or will be, it becomes easy to market your products or services, create content and search for the keywords to use among other things. Therefore, you need to research your target audience to make the right choices. The more you know about your audience, the more powerful your digital marketing efforts will become.
Fix technical issues and optimise your page
One of the most common issues that come up when a business fails to incorporate SEO into its startup plan is the emergence of technical SEO issues later on down the road. If you do not know much about SEO or you have very limited knowledge about the subject of SEO, it would be advisable to hire an expert SEO agency, such as Generate Leads Online to do a professional job.
Your website should not have any technical issues like duplicate content, broken links and slow page speed. If these issues are not fixed, they will affect your rankings and traffic to your page, making it hard to benefit from SEO strategies. While Google and other search engines have made big strides in their ability to evaluate sites, technical SEO issues can still create problems that make it more difficult for your site to be properly indexed and to rank well within search results.
In order to combat this issue, it’s important to have the technical aspects of SEO addressed as you begin developing your site and other web properties, in order to avoid costly complications that could be difficult to fix down the road.
Nevertheless, here is a list of several common technical issues that often arise and become more difficult to address the longer they are avoided:
- No automated or cohesive process for removing or updating pages without creating links to missing pages, losing authority from external sites that linked to those pages, or redirecting users to irrelevant pages unrelated to the original.
- The inclusion of URL query strings for campaign tracking, user filters and sorting operations, customization, and so on, that generate pages with largely identical content but located at different URLs. These should be avoided or addressed using the canonical tag.
- Duplicate title tags.
- Insufficient original content or excessive duplicate supplementary content on pages.
- Links to “infinite spaces” where a virtually infinite number of pages are dynamically created that would be irrelevant in search results.
- Poorly implemented or missing .htaccess, robots.txt, and XML sitemap.
- Poorly set up analytics that fails to track user actions or loses information about their referral source.
- Make sure that your startup game plan addresses the necessity of clean technical SEO during the development process as well as a part of regular site maintenance.
Once the technical issues are fixed, you need to optimize the page by creating quality content by conducting thorough research. Some of the things you need to optimize when creating content are:
- Titles.
- Meta descriptions.
- Alt text and images.
- Body content.
Register with and optimise Google My Business
Google Local SEO is a tactic that you need to consider when developing a marketing strategy for your business. It boosts the local search traffic and protects you from online fraud as well.
Google is used when you need to know anything from the best barbecue joint to best salon services in the area. With the help of Google Places all the relevant information like addresses, contact number, website link, reviews and available to the targeted audience in an instant.
It is essential for businesses to get the attention of the customers in the area it operates. With Google Local only the local searches are focused. Searches are limited to the business in a certain locality that makes it a great possibility to been seen by potential consumers.
Small businesses can take great advantage of Google Local SEO without spending any money on print ads or television. With the help of Google Places, you can market and promote your products and services in the target locality in a cost-effective manner.
Manage the local business listings and citations (NAP)
When optimizing your business, you need to understand that consistency and accuracy is very important to avoid confusing people. As a result, your business’s name, address and phone number (NAP) should be accurate to improve your local presence. If you don’t know your accurate NAP, you can look for a service that will distribute your NAP information so that you can update the info on your page.
NAP is critical for businesses wishing to rank well in the local organic search results because search engines like Google take the data into account when determining which companies to show for geo-targeted searches.
For starters, make sure that your NAP is correct – both on your website as well as on other sites throughout the web. Local SEO experts believe that Google and the other search engines cross-reference your NAP information across a variety of websites as a validation that you are a legitimate business. The more “local citations” you can build up with consistent NAP information, the better. In terms of local citations, it’s probably worth listing your business on any reputable directory – especially local directories and/or industry-specific directories.
Add Schema markup
Schema markup is one of the most under-utilised SEO techniques out there. This is surprising because it is one of the most valuable and powerful tools available to search engine marketers in 2021.
Schema markup is code you put onto your website to add context to its content for non-human readers (i.e. Google). It gives Google information in a consistent way that is easier for it to process, which in turn allows Google to serve this content to its users in search results.
Schema markup usually sends search engine signals about the components of a page, including:
- Phone number.
- Address.
- Business number.
- Ratings.
- Business hours.
Register with Google and Bing webmaster tools
Google’s Webmaster Tools are essential for any strong SEO effort. To understand their full potential, it’s helpful to think about what Google Webmaster Tools’ role is for webmasters: it helps you see your website as Google sees it. The toolset gives you insights into what pages have been indexed on your site, what links are pointing to it, your most popular keywords, and much more.
If you have a website already, you need to register with search engines such as Google and Bing and submit your sitemap. This is very important because you will find out what the search engines understand and know about your search engine content.
Register with Google Analytics
Even though the webmaster tools can offer you a wide range of information from about search engines, Google Analytics offers a lot of information about users’ views. Knowing your users’ views is important because you will know their experience on your website and understand how you can offer them a better experience by improving your content or services. Google analytics should help you find out the following:
- The most popular landing pages
- The most popular exit pages
- The pages that are commonly visited
- Major traffic sources on your page