Step-By-Step Guide on How To Optimize Your Startup for SEO Success

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most reliable methods to grow your startup. It’s a scalable and cost-effective method for building momentum over time. 

Let’s face it, as a startup, it’s more important than ever to generate traffic, and optimizing your SEO strategy is the way to go. 

By setting up the right approach, SEO helps you reach potential customers at key moments and helps you remain updated wherever possible. 

In this article, we’ll dive deeper into learning more about how you can optimize your SEO strategy for your startup. 

1. Create your list of keywords 

Keyword research is more important than you may think and the first legit step into creating an effective SEO strategy. The best way to find keywords that your target customers search for is through search engines like Google. The moment you type in your keyword, you’ll see a list of suggestions. 

This marks up great keywords since they come directly from Google’s suggestions, giving you a better idea of what people are searching for and what they are interested in. 

However, keep in mind that short keywords are much more competitive than long-tail keywords. This is because long-tail keywords have less competition and as a good start, it’s best to have at least 10 keywords to begin with. 

You can use tools like Semrush to analyze keyword search volume and competition levels. The higher the keyword density, the harder it’ll be to rank for keywords. 

2. Start planning your content 

After you set up your keywords, it’s now time to plan your content. Once upon a time, content creators used to stuff keywords to make sure they ranked, but that isn’t possible anymore. To succeed in today’s competitive online world, you need to make sure you are delivering content that solves problems and delivers value to your readers. 

Successful content marketing refers to being consistent (both in quality and quantity). If you are continuously publishing high-quality content, Google will review your website as trustworthy, meaning it’ll recommend you on SERP. 

Even though content marketing is a tough game for startups, here are important steps to follow: 

1. Optimize your content’s structure in a way that is easy to read; 
2. Do a quick search for your target keywords before you write your content; 
3. Analyze how competitive your keywords are; 
4. Analyze how much search intent your keywords have. 

Content marketing requires consistency so whatever you do, make sure you are continuously writing. 

3. Create a competitor analysis

If you want to learn more about your competitors, Semrush is a great tool to go with. They provide you with a competitive positioning map that shows you how you are stacking up against your competitors. 

The competitors you see on the map will show you how ahead you are and if they are targeting similar audiences. Also, you’ll have the option to see how many common keywords you have and the amount of traffic your website is generating. 

Each startup should have at least four to five competitors, and the more common your keywords are with theirs, the more likely they are going to be labeled as competitors. 

4. Focus on technical SEO 

Creating a successful SEO strategy means focusing on technical SEO. In order to do this, you need to follow two main steps: 

1. Verify that Google can index your website and identify different elements; 
2. Improve your website’s readability and user experience. 

Moreover, it’s not just about optimizing one part of your website, but checking that your technical SEO checklist is on the right path. Here’s what you should pay close attention to: 

1. Your XML Sitemap: Your XML sitemap is important if you want Google to effectively index your website. 
2. Title tags: Include the main keyword in your title tags and make them persuasive so users can click on them. For example, ask yourself if you were the consumer, would you click on your link? 
3. Meta descriptions: Although they don’t rank directly, meta descriptions are still important for improving your click-through rate (CTR), which impacts your ranking signal. Meta descriptions have to show readers that you are solving a problem for your audience. 
4. Loading speeds: If your website takes a long time to load, this will increase your bounce rate. In fact, 83% of online users expect websites to load faster than three seconds. 
5. HTTPS: Make sure your URL is HTTPS rather than only possessing an SSL certificate. 
6. Crawl errors: Use the Google Search engine to analyze your website and address any crawling errors. 

Moreover, it’s important to also stop using sub-domains in your website setup. Search engines might recognize them as different entities and will require you to optimize them separately. 

5. Link building efforts 

Regardless of what you do, today’s competitive online world is highly focused on link-building. Off-site SEO practices are important when creating high-quality content and this makes it possible to get endorsed for your content in backlink form. 

A backlink is the same as a “vote” and it’s responsible for improving your website’s authority. Whenever you get a link from a website, it indicates that you have useful and trustworthy content on your website. However, you need to know that the quality of your backlinks is much more important than the quantity. 

Backlinks coming from authoritative websites that are relevant to your niche will be much more worthy than getting a link from new blogs that aren’t related to what you are selling. Acquiring high-quality backlinks is easier said than done, but if you want to know about which tactics you can use for acquiring links, here’s what we recommend to you: 

1. The most important step is to create high-quality content. If your content is well-promoted and valuable, you’ll easily get backlinks. 
2. Give businesses a good reason they should link to your content. 
3. Start collaborating with other websites in your industry and niche to acquire backlinks from their side. 
4. Remain active on social media channels and always seek to link to quality content. 

Backlinks now are highly important and the key here is to make sure you are consistently trying to acquire high-quality backlinks. 

6. Don’t forget about on-page SEO 

While many focus on off-page SEO, never disregard on-page SEO since it plays a huge role in how successful your strategy will be. The first step in setting up a successful on-page SEO strategy is internal linking. 

However, you need to make sure you are linking from high-authority websites to your website. As a general rule, it’s best to link from websites that have a domain rating (DR) of more than 30. 

Other than that, if you are writing blog posts for your website, it’s best to keep your blogs anywhere between 1500 to 2500 words. Of course, you need to keep your quality high since low-quality content won’t make any difference in how long the blog post is. 

7. Evaluate and optimize 

Startup SEO is a long process so monitoring your progress is important and let’s face it, over time, every strategy requires adjustment and re-optimization along the way. Key metrics you have to follow include: 

1. Organic traffic: Generally speaking, your website’s organic traffic represents how your SEO ranking fluctuates. For instance, if your organic traffic goes down, your rankings might go down as well, but of course, this isn’t the only metric that determines your ranking.
2. Conversion rates: Conversion rates strongly depend on your website and differ from email signups to transactions and form submissions. 
3. Link profile: Always check for new backlinks and referring domains. If your referring domains and backlinks increase, this is great for your website. 
4. Local metrics: In case you are also focused on local SEO, then you should check your metrics like Google Maps ranking, session location, and other important information. 

The whole point is to make sure you are making changes to your strategy over time and never stick to one strategy. SEO trends and updates change over time and there are different algorithm updates. 

Never be afraid of making adjustments to your SEO strategy and guess what? When you stay updated, Google will also prioritize fresh content in its Search Engine Results Page (SERP). 

SEO strategies are an ongoing task 

Now that you’ve learned the most important steps in what you should and shouldn’t do when optimizing your startup. 

It’s an important step in making sure you build a strong online presence and drive business growth. By following a structured approach– conducting keyword research, creating high-quality content, and building a strong backlink strategy, you can easily improve your website’s SEO ranking. 

It’s also important to leverage tools like Google Analytics, and other data insights to make sure you are following changing trends and monitoring your SEO performance. Building up your brand awareness is strongly dictated by how patient and consistent you are. It’s a long-term investment and delivers a compounding benefit over time.