General SEO tips for startups
Startup founders and their small agile teams are usually focused on proving their business model, figuring out how they’re going to monetize apps, or building products that satisfy the needs of the target audience.
Usually, SEO is seen as a long-term marketing strategy, and doing SEO is not the priority for startups. Startups need rapid growth of the business. Ironically, ignoring SEO can harm your startup growth and reduce your scalability. Your website is your best marketing asset and, at the very least, you need to make sure it doesn’t hurt your growth.
In this article, you will find low-effort SEO tips for startups that will save you money in the long run. In fact, you don’t need to spend big bucks on it or hire in-house teams to it, but it does need to be factored in decisions, early on, at many levels.
Make SEO the part of your marketing
By being present on Google and major search engines for a variety of keywords, you expose your website to many valuable visitors. Some of whom would never have come across your startup or heard of your products if your site hadn’t been listed on the search result page. People search for information, products, and services using a wide variety of search queries on Google and other search engines. Ensuring your pages are present in the search results for specific search queries will bring in relevant organic traffic to your site.
SEO is actions to connect your target audience with your site through a web search and other digital marketing channels to achieve business goals.
You have to do SEO before you create your startup website. You need to understand who is your target audience, what they need, how your products or services can help your customers. You should conduct keyword research and create a good informational architecture for your website.
Choose the domain name and top-level domain (TLD) for your startup website
Many people mistakenly believe that the domain name and TLD are ranking factors. But domain name and TLD are marketing factors.
The golden rule of domain name choosing is to keep it short and memorable. Avoid numbers and separators.
Next, you’re going to have to decide what your top-level domain (TLD) is going to be. Using a “.com” domain is a good option and it allows you to create specific versions of your site for each country and/or language version of a site by building them on a subfolder or subdomain structure.
If you are going to be targeting one specific country, a country code top-level domain (ccTLD) is going to give you a marketing advantage. Your visitors will know where your business is located.
In other words, it should be a trustworthy TLD. You can read this article How your domain name could be damaging your business or you can conduct your own research.
Find the right framework or CMS for your site
The platforms, CMS, and frameworks you choose will impact your business’s growth on web search. It is worth looking at what the impact on SEO they might have before committing.
If you’re working with a CMS, make sure it’s one that gives you full control over your site functionality.
Usually, the F5 Studio’s team recommends using WordPress to design a startup website. WordPress allows building awesome sites at affordable prices (for instance, see F5 Studio’s fixed price web design). Sure, you can use other CMS or frameworks.
If your site relies heavily on JavaScript, React.js for example, there are some search optimization challenges you’ll have to overcome.
You should know about the benefits of using WordPress with React.js. This article will help you understand the difference between using frameworks and CMS.
Create interesting, useful content
Look at some of the ways in which users search for your competitors and their products, and build content around those search terms. The most common types of content you can build with this strategy will be testimonials, product comparisons, or after-purchase content.
If you have no clue about SEO copywriting, these articles can help you to understand the basics of SEO copywriting and keywords research for business owners.
As you grow there will be searches around your brand too. Make sure that you monitor what users are searching for about your business and build content around it.
If there is no search volume around your brand and products, you can read Why optimizing for 0 search queries is okay. This SEO theory works, just trust the F5 Studio’s SEO team and Michael Martinez.
Help your PR campaigns drive SEO value
If your s enough to be talked about in the press, you have an opportunity to drive SEO value from them. You’re already spending part of your very tight budget on PR and you can improve its ROI.
How can you do that?
Always include a link to your site on press releases and marketing collateral.
Ask journalists who cover your story to kindly add a link to your site.
Share your campaign on social media, where it can get picked up by a wider audience who could also link to your site and talk about your brand and products.
If your startup is a local company you should contact local media.
Sum up
Search optimization is part of your marketing. You should understand your target audience, their needs, and their pains. It will help you to create a great website that can help people. Your startup will gain customers.
It seems easy, but many startups fail here. It’s always just in words, but getting to the real situation, many of us are often frustrated at, because marketing is a challenging task. Even if you entrust your project to a professional marketing agency, that doesn’t guarantee success.
On the other hand, if you know about some marketing and SEO things, you have a good chance of success. F5 Studio’s team hopes that our general SEO tips will help you.
