Many new businesses lament their tardy start on search engine optimization (SEO). Most people’s first impressions of something are negative: “you can do it later,” “it doesn’t scale,” “it costs too much time,” or “it’s spammy.”
At some point, they will see the light and realize how important SEO has been all along. Now more than ever, SEO is crucial for any business, but especially for new ventures.
It makes it easier to accomplish the three main objectives of a new business:
Marketing at a Massive Scale,
Finding product market fit more quickly (when a product’s features and benefits are a perfect match for a market’s needs and the company experiences rapid expansion),
Reputation management.
I will explain the importance of search engine optimization (SEO) for new businesses, the costs they incur without it, the best and worst ways to go about it, and some practical advice for getting started.
Having a dominant online presence can help more people find you, learn about what you do, and become familiar with who you are as a leader. Your funding prospects will be enhanced by all of these. You must be kidding yourself if you think venture capitalists will put any money into your business if they don’t first thoroughly investigate it. Exactly!
While serving various objectives, from an investment perspective, your website should:
Disseminate your explanation of your work in an understandable fashion.
Show off your product or prototype, preferably in person.
Disclose your background to the world. who are you, what are you trying to accomplish, and what methods will you use?
That is to say, your website should effectively communicate who you are as a company. Your online presence is certainly important, but your brand has wider reaches. That’s why it’s important to consider your brand holistically, particularly in terms of how it fares in Google searches. (SERPs).
Comparison questions are the second largest danger to your brand after brand searches. Users do this when they look for “[brand] alternative” or “[brand 1] vs [brand 2]” in their search engines.
Users can be at either the very beginning or very very end of the user journey when they make comparisons to similar products. They’re debating whether to join up or jump ship. You need to help them make a choice at any point in the process.
At this time, it is crucial that you engage with people on a personal level to demonstrate why your product is superior to the competition.
Startups can’t win in the long run without chasing authority, one of the two most crucial factors in SEO. The difficulty is how to establish authority, which brings us to the second principle, which is relevance (more on this in chapter 4). One’s own links back to your site is the solution.
Over the past few years, backlinks have gotten a bad rap since spammers abused them to gain an unfair advantage, and Google penalised them harshly. Yet they remain the bedrock of Google’s ranking system, which is often overlooked. Backlinks are important for any startup, but they shouldn’t be pursued aggressively. Building natural links into your website is essential in 2017.
Since Google’s Hummingbird upgrade, pages can give exponential ROI by ranking for many relevant queries. This is a feature typically missed by startup and SEO people.
Consider Airbnb’s “things to do in” pages as an illustration.
They are aimed at people who are looking for information on San Francisco, such as “things to do in San Francisco,” “what to do in San Francisco,” “San Francisco attractions,” and so on. Almost 60,000 keywords point to this single page.
There are a wide variety of startup models, all of which have unique SEO needs. To succeed, social networks must divert their attention from SaaS startups to other endeavors. Search engine optimization can be roughly broken down into three distinct categories: technical optimization, backlinks, and content.
Increasing crawlability is a common focus of technical improvement. It’s important for social networks, e-commerce firms, and marketplaces to give Google a hand in indexing their whole sites.
Backlinks and content aren’t generally the issue; after all, their customers and clients supply that already. All they need are XML sitemaps, some internal links, and some hub pages to start moving the needle.
When it comes to search engine optimization, there are five tremendous opportunities for new businesses.
There are five main reasons why it’s beneficial for new businesses to use search engine optimization techniques: