SEO has become one of those hyped buzzwords of modern businesses that everyone seems to know but only a few understand.
Startup founders are not an exception. Just like other non-marketing professionals, their idea of SEO is usually vague and narrow. If that viewpoint remains unchanged, it can do serious harm to their new business venture.
Failing to see the actual value of SEO and disregarding it can mean losing the opportunity for their startup to gain a competitive advantage and thrive.
We hope that our list of five essential questions startup founders (want to) ask about SEO can help you drive quality and organic traffic, boost conversions, and contribute to your growth.
1. Do I Really Need SEO?
Absolutely!
If your startup is not visible in online searches, it’s like it doesn’t exist. And visibility is not about whether your business will pop up when someone searches using your startup’s name – that’s pretty basic.
A search engine is a discovery tool. It’s one of the most common ways people will discover your website. Most often, they’re looking for answers to the pain points they’re struggling with and information about products, services, or various yet-to-be-discovered solutions.
To get more qualified leads for your startup, your content needs to fit your potential customers’ searches. This means your name has to show up wherever there is a query related to a product or service you’re offering.
What’s more, your solution has to be the one your potential clients will learn all about when looking for ways to fix their pain points. This is especially important for startups as, more often than not, they offer unique and innovative solutions – new answers to the existing problems that are still to become widely known.
Furthermore, your startup needs to be easy to find by potential customers. That means it needs to rank as high as possible in the searches, surpassing the competitors. If not on the first spot, then at least on the first page, as only 0.63% of searchers open a result from the second page.
Now, this won’t happen by chance or magic. It’s a lot of hard work put into a marketing technique called SEO – Search Engine Optimization.
Plus, there’s another side of the story we shouldn’t overlook.
If your startup doesn’t appear in Google searches, a potential investor or a client could conclude that your company is not professional, as it has neglected a fundamental part of modern-day business management.
And, they would be right.
2. Can We Handle SEO Ourselves?
Unless you have an excellent digital marketeer in your startup team, it’s not a good or particularly effective idea.
If you have a dedicated marketing budget, there are some great SEO agencies that focus on startups, so it’s worth checking them out.
However, if your startup’s marketing budget is limited, you can try a DIY approach to SEO.
Some great tools and resources can help you identify keywords and optimize your website content.
And be aware: learning about SEO to be able to make use of these tools and resources will take a significant portion of your time and energy. You could put those invaluable resources to better use if you delegated these tasks to professionals.
Besides, you will see much better results when you bring in experts to help. There is technical SEO know-how that depends on experience and expertise, which you most probably lack.
It’s similar to hiring an accountant – maybe you can do some taxes on your own, but you still choose a professional because you know it will eventually pay off.
3. What Exactly Is SEO?
Search engines (most often, we’re talking about Google) aim to deliver a person the best possible user experience – the most relevant and competent results for their query.
By using search engine optimization, we are helping the search engine understand the website and its content and rank it accordingly.
In a nutshell, Google will rank your startup’s website based on:
- Crawlability and indexability – how easy it is for Google bots to crawl through your web pages and index them
- Authority – how reputable your website is
- Relevancy – how well the content of your website matches the query of potential visitors
And here’s the catch: you can’t cheat or manipulate Google bots to rank your startup’s website high in searches. You need to play by the rules the search engine defines.
Even though the game is challenging and the competition is harsh, proper SEO is the only way to the top.
4. What Are the Basic Things I Need to Know About SEO?
As a startup founder, besides having a clear idea of what SEO is, you need to be familiar with its primary aspects.
This knowledge won’t make you an SEO expert, but you will know just enough to understand the job of a professional. Basically, there are three main topics: keywords, onsite SEO, and offsite SEO.
Keywords
When thinking about keywords, consider phrases your potential clients would use when looking for the service or product you are offering.
Marketers use different tools to determine the best relevant keywords you can use to achieve better ranking, considering the competition. Typically, these keywords are not as apparent as you may think.
For example, if you are in the email automation business, “personalize email” could be a better solution for your keyword of choice than the quite obvious “email automation.” Once you unearth these words and phrases, sprinkle them throughout your content, but avoid overstuffing.
Onsite SEO
Google will crawl your startup’s website for keywords and rank it whether you optimize it or not. If you don’t optimize to rank for the phrases relevant to your business, you will most likely rank for entirely unrelated keywords.
To avoid this, you need to fix your site so Google can crawl it easily. You also need to structure the website so that your domain and keywords are clear and Google ranks you correctly. Practically, this implies many technicalities, including sitemap, title tags, meta descriptions, responsiveness, loading speed, conversion rates, etc.
Offsite SEO
Your website needs to be authoritative in the eyes of Google bots. You achieve this with inbound links from websites with high domain authority. This is a tricky job, as gaining those backlinks can be difficult, but not impossible.
5. Why Do I Need a Blog for SEO?
Many startup founders don’t see the value in having a blog. They either consider it a complete waste of time or think it’s nice to have but not vital.
Quite the contrary, having a relevant and high-quality blog is invaluable, as it can bring numerous benefits in the long run.
A blog’s apparent purpose for SEO is creating and writing valuable content to achieve a top ranking for a specific keyword. Each blog post is a new chance for Google to crawl your post, judge its relevance, and rank it accordingly.
If you produce and publish high-quality content regularly, you increase your chances of generating clicks and boosting organic website traffic.
And, if you acquire authority backlinks to your page, your domain authority will also grow so that you will find your SEO ranks for keywords easier.
Final Thoughts
If you are a startup founder, digital marketing can help you succeed in numerous ways. However, SEO is the alpha and omega of your startup’s online journey. The earlier you realize its importance, the better chances your startup has to beat its competitors and thrive.