The digital world is suitable for every kind of business because creative young guns are emerging from everywhere with startup ideas to succeed and build their audience.
By Jaykishan Panchal
With over 100 million startups opening each year, it is becoming critical for new businesses to improve their online visibility and stand out among their competitors. In the digital era, the basic rule for business success is to effectively use SEO to engage customers, establish your brand, and drive profitability.
In this post, I’ll discuss some basic, but effective SEO tips that will maximize your startup’s visibility and connect you with your target audience.
- Know Your Audience
- Optimize Your Website with What Customers Are Looking for
- Utilize Social Websites and Social Media
- Your Blog Page Is a Star
- Leverage Free SEO Tools
1. Know Your Audience
Most businesses assume that SEO comprises preset rules and standard techniques. However, the fact is that your firm’s SEO efforts largely depend on how well you know your audience.
Which industry are you in? Which SEO strategies are your top competitors using to engage audience? Where does your target audience spend most of its time? Which social platform are they active on? How much time do they spend on their smart device? The answers to these questions will help you create and optimize a tailored SEO strategy for your new venture.
More than half of the world’s population is active online looking for solutions to their day-to-day issues, expressing their opinions, and making decisions. Therefore, it is critical to identify your audience’s unique traits, online behavior, and preferences.
Source: https://wearesocial-net.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/DIGITAL-IN-2018-001-GLOBAL-OVERVIEW-V1.00.png
For instance, if you are an online yoga instructor, 80% of your time should be spent on understanding where your audience is likely to find you and take an action in your favour (sign up for the yoga retreat or recommend others).
If you are targeting health-conscious customers, chances are you may find them on health and nutrition tracking apps, fitness blogs, or social media sites. Engaging your audience through these channels will strengthen your brand visibility. Set up your listing in various online directories like Google My Business, Yelp for Business Owners, Bing, and Yoga Trail, enabling your customers to find you.
2. Optimize Your Website with What Customers Are Looking for
Once you have defined your target audience, it is necessary to pinpoint what they are looking for. Here, you need to consider two critical areas: what your audience is searching for and how they are conducting the search.
Study the user’s intent behind typing a particular keyword. For instance, your user initially searches for “musical instruments seller,” however, you eventually discover keyword variations like “musical instruments for sale” or “local musical instruments shop.” Incorporating each of these variations will boost your startup’s SERP ranking.
It is a good idea to do some solid keyword research and design your website in a way that it lands your audience on what they are looking for (your webpage or blog).
Once the searchers are directed to your website or mobile application, your ultimate goal should be to offer an amazing user experience (UX). Firstly, is your website mobile-friendly? With people spending an average of six hours per day on smart devices like mobiles and tablets, it is pertinent that businesses use Responsive Web Design to cater to various device types, thereby improving the user experience.
Users typically take 0.05 seconds to decide whether or not to stay on your site. What’s more, nearly 60% of searches on the internet come from mobile devices. Thus, in order to optimize your SEO efforts, you should leverage responsive web app development.
Focus on user experience to improve the site speed and ensure ease of navigation, thereby converting the clicks into conversions. Browse through the top UX design websites to learn how you can use the best illustrations, user interface, and branding to engage your audience.
3. Utilize Social Websites and Social Media
In 2017, 71% of internet users had an active social media account and this figure has only grown since then. The ever-increasing social network penetration is making it imperative for businesses to stay active on these platforms to engage their target audience and drive conversions.
Image Source Statista
StumbleUpon (now Mix) is one such social networking website that categorizes and recommends tailored content to users based on their personal tastes and interests. Thus, if a user has liked your webpage, it gets added into the StumbleUpon lineup and is featured to other users who are randomly searching on a specific topic using the Stumble button. Submitting your site to StumbleUpon can help you improve your social following and brand awareness.
Social media sites possess the largest demographics globally, making it critical for businesses to build a massive following on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and, Snapchat, among other platforms.
Image Source Statista
People aren’t merely interacting on these social platforms, they are using them to make purchasing decisions and recommend a product or service to their friends. Did you know that 70% of B2C marketers have acquired their customers through Facebook? That’s the power of staying active on social networking platforms.
4. Your Blog Page Is a Star
According to the Content Marketing Institute, 80% of B2B marketers and 75 percent of B2C marketers include blogging in their current marketing strategies. Devising an effective content marketing strategy for your blog can help you retain loyal customers, attract qualified leads, promote your brand, and nurture customer relationships.
The content presented to the target audience should be relevant, insightful, and value-adding. Serving your audience with the content they are looking for on Google is a sure way of getting their attention and engaging them on your website.
In order to improve your startup’s visibility, share knowledge, advice, or entertainment in consumable formats like blog articles, videos, podcasts, emails, infographics, and webinars. When you share informative content on your blog, you come across as a domain expert, thereby increasing your website traffic and generating conversions.
5. Leverage Free SEO Tools
If yours is a young startup, you will need to conduct keyword research, analyze competitor performance, track traffic and conversion trends for your site, and assess the performance of your content marketing strategy. However, technology has made it possible to effortlessly measure new business success with several effective and free SEO tools.
SEO tools, such as Google Analytics, Google PageSpeed Insights, Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, and Ahrefs can help you create a strong online presence without spending a dime. Another free SEO tool, SEO Minion is an amazing Google Chrome extension that analyzes on-page SEO, checks broken links and redirects, simulates multi-location SERP, and improves the CTR by boosting your site’s search engine ranking.
These SEO tools can help you gain organic traffic and nail the SERP ranking with the least marketing budget.
With the world going digital, new ventures heavily depend on fresh and organic traffic to stand out from the competition and drive business profits. Building your startup’s visibility allows potential customers to know about your products/services and helps strengthen your online brand reputation.
SEO has been a key marketing tool used by startups to thrive in today’s competitive business environment. Use the effective SEO tips shared in this post to improve your brand performance and conversions.
Jaykishan Panchal is an SEO & Content Marketing Manager at E2M Solutions Inc. and implements cutting edge SEO strategies to help businesses strengthen their online presence. Apart from helping small and big businesses he loves to jot down valuable resources for Entrepreneurs, Start Ups, and Technology Geeks.
SEO stock photo by marekuliasz/Shutterstock
