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What should you consider for your SEO strategy? As a start-up, SEO can be your most potent weapon against more established brands in your niche. Your advantages are that you can start from a blank canvas, have speed and quick implementation on your side, and be relatively low cost compared to other marketing activities. In addition to delivering a more cost efficient and scalable solution, the latest data from one leading Sydney SEO company found that the average conversion rate across e-commerce was more than 26% higher than PPC channels.
Creating a Clear strategy
Without a roadmap for your SEO, you can fall into the all-too-common trap of trying to do everything at once. Instead, you need to focus your resources and prioritise what will give you the best return on your time and budget.
Firstly, we need to understand what SEO does. Search Engine Optimisation is how search engines like Yahoo and Google rank your website by search terms. For example, thousands of sites will come up if you search for “blue long-sleeved shirts”. So how does Google rank the list of sites from 1 to 100,000?
It scrapes each website at regular points to evaluate them using many different variables. Those variables tell Google which site is most relevant to that search term. The most significant variables are, in no particular order;
- how much information is there on the site about “blue long-sleeved shirts”,
- how many other websites (and increasingly social media sites) link to this site, and what is their domain authority,
- how much traffic does the site have in total and
- how often do visitors come to the site after searching for blue long-sleeved shirts?
With this basic understanding, it becomes easier to align all your SEO activity to get more points for each of those variables. According to one Australian search marketing agency, the best litmus test for whether or not SEO can be applied to your start-up is; “Does this activity make my website more relevant for the search terms I am ranking for?”
Identifying Top Search Terms
Here is the critical distinction you must understand for SEO, SEO is not improving the ranking for your company or your products; it is how to improve the ranking of a particular search word or phrase. Within that, your brand name could be the search term you are ranking for, but too many people lose focus on the actual search terms they want to rank for. Therefore, first things first, identify the list of terms you wish to target.
The shorter the search phrase and the more generic it is, the harder it will be to rank. For example, ranking for “best cinema” is much harder than ranking for “Imax Screen in Finsbury”. Create this list and monitor your ranking over time to measure your SEO activity’s effectiveness.
Website and Landing Pages
The asset you are linking to is key to your whole SEO activity. Taking the website or pages, you are driving traffic to and designing them with SEO in mind is very important. Website design involves all the elements that can help or hinder your SEO. Some of the main concerns are speed of page loading, user navigation, low-quality or outdated content, low-quality links and on-page optimisation.
On-Page Optimisation
There are many elements to optimising each page to make it easier for search engines to crawl your webpage. Meta Descriptions are the descriptive text that displays behind the webpage in the HTML of the page for search engines to read. So, they should always match the page’s content and include the keywords and any call-to-action to give you the most points.
Other tags include the title tag that represents your page content. The text will be displayed on the search results pages as the headline, so it should be descriptive and concise with keywords that you are ranking for.
H1 and H2 are the headline tags, H1 is the main headline of the page and H2 the subheadings. Both should have keywords for the particular page and relevant information to indicate what is in each section.
Then it comes to the optimisation of your text; you should incorporate keywords into your text, but not too many. The goal is for it to read naturally and be long enough to expand on the keyword. If it is stuffed with the same keyword and doesn’t read as natural English, it will be penalised by the search engine.
For optimisation of images, they should be optimised for quality and loading speed and named with the target keyword. If here you can include rich media and even video, you get extra brownie points.
Concluding This Guide To Approaching SEO for Start-ups
SEO is a long-term strategy with a lot of work required, and results only arise after some time. Hopefully, this article helps you focus on the important elements. First, measure how well your activity is working by regularly auditing your site for SEO. Having snapshots at the start and as you progress every few weeks will show your progress and things like how many more backlinks you have and areas that need fixing and the overall domain authority.
You may also like: The Top Five Benefits of SEO for Small Business Owners
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