When you’re launching a tech (or any other) startup, employing SEO techniques can be a make-it-or-break-it move. Many entrepreneurs underestimate the importance of this method, and they forget the fact that most people almost never go to the second page of search results. Even research studies have shown that the first page gets 91.5% of Google traffic, while all results on the second page share 4.8% of traffic.
 |
As you can see, your online presence and visibility depend on the use of SEO, so if you want to reach your target audience and grow your customer base, it’s crucial to create a successful SEO strategy.
Capture your audience’s attention
Properly implemented SEO has the power of driving a lot of organic traffic to your website. This means that you can expect new, fresh leads that you could nurture into paying customers. The internet has become a very crowded and busy place, and you have to help people interested in your products and services find you. In other words, SEO will make you stand out and beat your competitors. What’s also great about this method is that it’s measurable so that you can actually calculate your ROI.
Finally, it’s very cost-effective, and you won’t have to spend a fortune before you see the first results. You’ve created great content, and your blog is full of relevant, useful articles? Don’t let all your hard work remain buried in Google’s results because of the lack of optimization.
Keep up with your competition
There’s no doubt that your competitors use SEO, so if you want to outperform them, you should, too. If you’re not sure what to start from, there are SEO tools that you can use to spy on your competitors and identify their keywords and backlinks, which could give you a sense of direction. First of all, it’s important to make a list of relevant keywords and update it on a regular basis.
Apart from turning to your competitors to find out which keywords and phrases are popular in your niche, you should also take advantage of Google AdWords Planner that will give you insight into what your customers are searching for. Basically, your content strategy should be created in a manner that will enable you to incorporate ideas that revolve around your keywords.
Build a top-notch website
Did you know that mobile data traffic has grown 18-fold over the past 5 years? This stat shows that mobile traffic has been picking up steam for some time and even Google has confirmed that more search queries take place on mobile than on computers. This is the reason why you should optimize your website for mobile because your visitors are more likely to bounce if they can’t view it on their mobile devices.
Another important thing that you should take into consideration is compliance with Google Panda and Penguin standards, used to distinguish between high-quality and low-quality websites. These algorithms will punish you severely if you resort to keyword stuffing or duplicating content. Your website loading time is another metric that you should improve because surveys have shown that visitors tend to leave if a page takes more than 3 seconds to load.
Get social
Maintaining active and engaging social media channels is another element of a good SEO strategy. Namely, in order for your website to become relevant, you need to produce great content, as we’ve already mentioned. One of the essential indicators that Google takes into consideration when determining whether your content is good and popular is the fact that it’s liked and shared on social networks. For this reason, you should promote your content across all your social media channels and make it shareable by using videos and producing interactive pieces of content such as quizzes, calculators, or infographics.
It’s worth mentioning that many websites fail to take advantage of Google+ because people believe that it’s dead. However, although it isn’t the most popular social network, if you update it on a regular basis, you can expect that Google will reward you with a better ranking.
Act locally
Yes, even tech startups need to have a solid local SEO strategy as it’s highly beneficial. Even if you don’t have a brick-and-mortar store, and if you don’t serve your customers in person, you need to provide an address and a phone number so that you can be included in local listings. Namely, as lots of startups have limited budgets, it’s difficult for them to launch a big SEO campaign. On the other hand, local SEO is virtually free, and although it’s time-consuming, it’s your best shot for giving your business a visibility boost it needs.
It’s clear that SEO can make a huge difference for any tech startup, and that’s why it should be an integral part of your marketing efforts.
Nate Vickery is a business consultant mostly engaged in researching and implementing latest trends and practices in marketing for startups and SMBs. He is also the executive editor at Bizzmark Blog.