Startups are exciting, but the big question is, how will people discover my business? This is where SEO makes a difference. It’s essential for getting your business the recognition and growth it needs. Without SEO, reaching your audience and building a presence becomes very challenging.
In this guide we will help you understand the importance of SEO for startups, the key components involved in it, and ways you could implement SEO.
You’ve put money into starting your business, but if no one knows you exist, how can you really grow? Without paid ads, getting traction can feel almost impossible.
That’s where SEO comes in. It’s key for helping customers find you online and bringing in the traffic you need to succeed
Creating a website alone doesn’t guarantee growth, but optimizing it for search engines can make all the difference.
To let people know of your website, you have to compete with the hundreds and thousands of other businesses within the same niche as yours.
The good news is, SEO is free and will help with long-term growth for your startup by employing the best strategies.
Here’s the catch, 53% of web traffic comes from organic search. Half of the customers first go through search engines to research products before making a decision to buy them.
More and more people are choosing to shop online rather than physically going to a market. But, 75% of online searchers don’t even go past the first page of search engine results.
Without SEO you will have a hard time getting traffic to your website. This is why your startup needs to be SEO optimized in order to get a chance to rank at the top of search results.
There are a lot more benefits to optimizing your website for SEO than just driving traffic. You have to look at it from different angles and ask the question “how do I get visitors to convert?” To answer that question, here is how SEO can help your startup guarantee success:
When Google ranks sites at the top of search engine results it tells searchers these are the most credible sites for that search and in turn are more likely to get clicks.
High rankings signal trustworthiness, which is the building blocks for your startup business. SEO helps establish your brand as a reliable and authoritative source, earning you customer confidence and loyalty.
Compared to other digital marketing methods, SEO is a cost-efficient way to drive lasting traffic. Once your site ranks well, it continues to bring in organic visitors without the need for constant spending.
This makes SEO a sustainable strategy that not only saves money but also provides long-term ROI by consistently boosting visibility and attracting new leads to your startup over time.
SEO optimizes your site’s overall performance by improving site speed, mobile usability, and ease of navigation.
This helps your visitors to gain a seamless experience that encourages them to stick around and even keep returning to your site in the future.
A great user experience not only helps you convert first-time visitors but also keeps them coming back.
SEO helps you gain traffic from people actively searching for services like yours, but it's not just about getting new visitors.
SEO can help keep your visitors engaged by targeting and optimizing your content for specific queries they are searching for, offering them a satisfying answer and helping you build a loyal audience over time.
SEO is a holistic term that involves many angles. Before you do SEO you need to understand what it involves. Here are the different components of SEO:
On-page SEO focuses on optimizing individual web pages to rank higher on search engine results.
It’s all about making your content relevant, valuable, aligns with user search queries and easy for search engines to understand.
On-page SEO practice focuses on optimizing things like
And that’s just the tip of the tip of the iceberg.
Off-page SEO focuses on strategies outside your website that improve its search engine ranking.
Off-page SEO practices include:
Off-page SEO builds your site’s domain authority (DA), a key factor in improving search engine rankings, especially for startups looking to build credibility.
Technical SEO is all about optimizing your website so that search engines can easily crawl, index, and rank it. It focuses on site performance, loading speed, mobile-friendliness, and security.
By improving these areas, you ensure that search engines can effectively interpret your site and enhance user experience, which ultimately boosts rankings and organic traffic.
Technical SEO practices include:
Content marketing is key to driving SEO success. It focuses on creating valuable, relevant, and engaging content to attract, inform, and convert your audience into loyal customers.
The goal is to build trust, increase organic traffic, and position your brand as an authority in your industry.
Content marketing can include various formats such as blog posts, videos and infographics.
It is an effective way to educate your potential customers, nurture relationships, and drive business growth.
Here are 7 essential steps to kickstart your startup’s SEO and begin building strong online visibility.
The first step you’ll need to take is to set clear and measurable goals in order to know you’re on the right track. Your goals should match up with your business objectives and help you grow:
Think about what your business really needs and what is the end goal of your SEO efforts, if it’s more sales, generating leads, or getting more visibility.
You want to track things like website traffic, how many leads you get, or how well your content converts visitors.
Who are you trying to reach? If you're a local business, make sure your SEO goals focus on attracting people in your area with location-specific searches.
More visitors to your site is great, but what you really want are the people who take action, whether that’s buying something, signing up for a demo, or getting in touch. Make sure your goals are about driving real results.
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Here are some examples of realistic goals you can set up as a startup:
Remember that SEO for startups takes time and effort, so make sure to set goals that are realistic for you to reach within a given timeframe.
If you want your SEO efforts to be successful you’ll definitely need to invest in 2 types of resources:
- People who are skilled in SEO
- Tools that can help you with your SEO tasks
A person who is well versed and experienced in SEO can help you achieve results fast, instead of learning or doing SEO tasks which is possible but time consuming.
you can instead simply rely on someone with enough knowledge and years of experience to do the work for you. This way you are saving time and reaching your goals much faster.
However, If you have a large starting budget and you want to aim big, you can even employ an SEO manager and a small team of SEO specialists where every SEO task is well managed by each individual.
You’ll also need tools to conduct SEO campaigns and track your progress. Fortunately, some of the most useful tools you can use are completely free:
Your website is going to need a tool like Screaming Frog to conduct audits. It helps you analyze up to 500 URLs on your website for free and find broken links, identify duplicate content, spot missing meta tags, and uncover other technical issues that could impact your SEO performance.
For The SEO tools you need:
Ahrefs is another popular SEO toolset, although it is expensive, it still offers free tools that your startup can take advantage of.
An SEO-friendly website is designed to make it easy for search engines to crawl, index, and rank your content while delivering a great user experience.
Here is what you need to do in order to achieve this:
Indexability is all about making sure your website can be found and added to a search engine’s index. If your site isn’t indexable, search engines like Google won’t be able to show your pages in search results, which means users won’t find your content organically.
There could be many reasons why your pages aren’t indexed, to find out why, you can use Google Search Console.
Head over to pages under indexing and scroll down to find the different issues affecting your pages’ indexability.
This refers to how many clicks it takes to get to a page from your homepage. The deeper a page is buried in your site, the less likely search engines are to crawl it regularly.
Your most important pages should be accessible within 3 to 4 clicks from the homepage. Anything beyond that makes it harder for users and search engines to reach them.
By analyzing your website with Screaming Frog, you can easily check the crawl depth of each page.
HTTPS encrypts data exchanged between users and your website, protecting sensitive information and building trust with visitors. Also, Google prioritizes HTTPS sites in search rankings, which means it’s essential for your startup.
Google considers site speed as a major ranking factor, the longer your site loads the more likely visitors are going to bounce off.
You can use a tool like Page Speed Insights to see how fast your site loads and to spot areas of improvement.
Optimizing your website for desktop is great but you shouldn’t ignore mobile optimization.
In fact, more than 50% of searches are done on mobile, meaning that if your site isn’t optimized for mobile users, you could be missing out on a large portion of potential traffic and customers.
For your site to be mobile friendly you need to have a responsive design with readable text and easy navigation.
Keywords are one of the main focuses of your SEO efforts, they help search engines understand and rank your content and pages.
Identify what keywords suit your Business and use a keyword research tool like Ubersuggest to find keywords that are relevant and easy to rank for.
Here is what you need to consider:
Your aim should be to target relevant low SEO difficulty keywords with medium to high search volume.
To maximize your effort, you can target long tail keywords (longer, more specific phrases that attract focused traffic with less competition) that can help you get a list of potential topics you can easily rank for.
Identify the purpose behind keywords people use. Are they looking to buy, learn, or just browse?
This is where you need to consider the search intent of the keyword.
Search intent has four main types:
Google obsesses over content that’s genuinely useful to users, it’s even clearer with its latest Helpful Content Update. This update emphasizes rewarding content that provides real value, answering user questions and meeting their needs effectively
To create this kind of content, ask yourself questions like:
If you check all these boxes, Google will fall in love with your content and will grant you a spot in the top positions.
While backlinks help you increase your website’s overall authority and bring more traffic, it is still a process that takes time and effort.
But what if you could boost your startup’s traffic and improve the authority of your pages simultaneously with less effort?
That’s where internal linking comes in. By linking relevant pages within your own website, you help search engines understand the structure and importance of your content. This not only enhances user navigation but also distributes link equity across your pages.
Here are effective methods your startup business can use to interlink your pages:
Topic clusters are an SEO strategy that organizes content into main topics, with a central "pillar" page covering the core topic broadly and "cluster" pages focusing on specific subtopics.
This structure helps search engines see your site as an authority, which can improve rankings across related pages.
It also makes it easier for users to navigate from general info to more detailed content, keeping them engaged on your site.
1.Choose a Core Topic: Pick a broad, relevant topic like “How to Start a T-Shirt Printing Business”
2.Create a Pillar Page: Write a comprehensive guide on the core topic to serve as the main hub.
3.Develop Cluster Content: Create focused articles that break down the topic into specific subtopics.
Ahrefs internal linking tool is a great way to identify opportunities for improving your site’s link structure. It highlights keywords that could be linked to other relevant pages on your website.
Choose anchor text that tells both users and search engines exactly what they’ll find when they click, making the links more valuable and informative.
Every website has competition, and your startup is no different. The good news? You can turn this into an advantage by learning what your competitors are doing and finding ways to do replicate the same methods on your startup website:
Check if your competitors are using schema markup. You can use a tool like Detailed SEO Extension to help you spot if they're implementing rich snippets (like reviews, ratings, or event details) on their pages.
If they are, it’s worth adding schema markup to your site.
Scaling SEO for your startup doesn’t have to be expensive. You can utilize a lot of free tools to rank up and build a reputation and authority to your website.
By optimizing your website through effective strategies like on-page, off-page, and technical SEO, along with targeted content marketing and competitor analysis, you can significantly skyrocket your organic traffic and visibility.
Regularly tracking your SEO efforts and adjusting strategies based on performance will ensure you stay competitive in your niche.
Higglo is a digital marketing agency offering SEO, PPC, web design services and more. We’ve helped different client industries and brands like Hulu and Blizzard expand their reach and grow their presence worldwide. Ready to transform your digital presence? Contact us today and let’s create something unforgettable together.
"Partnering with Higglo for our SEO needs has been a game-changer for Motivity. We have been overly impressed with how quickly our rankings for critical keywords has improved, and consistently see more and more organic traffic month over month. We are incredibly impressed with the results and whether you're in a niche or broad market, we highly recommend their SEO services to anyone looking to grow their online presence."
Brian Curley
Boost Your Online Presence with Higglo Digital, a leading web and SEO agency offering high-quality services tailored to elevate your brand. Our expert team delivers top-notch SEO strategies, award-winning website designs, and impactful branding solutions. Trust us to optimize your website, drive targeted traffic, and unlock your business's true potential.
From Hulu to Blizzard, we have the experience to take your brand to the next level. With our team across the world from Dubai and Abu Dhabi to Sydney Australia and New York City, we have the experience and background to take your business to the next level. Contact us today to take the first step toward digital success.
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