Website with Proper SEO Can Make All the Difference for Your Startup Company

What SEO Provides

Measurable Growth of Audience: At the end of the day, the point of SEO is to have more people find your website naturally through search engine results. Other metrics come into play here as well, such as how well you rank on Google and other engines. With SEO, these are measurable variables. 

Reinforces Extant Marketing: If you already have a marketing plan in place, optimized SEO can help better that goal. If you expect social interaction for the website you build, you’ll gain the most value from sharing when your URLs and pages are fully optimized for SEO. 

When a startup business begins to build a website, it’s natural to aspire for huge growth and branding. However, businesses that make SEO mistakes will often find themselves disappointed at best and in debt at worst. Namely, such businesses will:

• Delay SEO practices
• Expect to get more for less
• Delay On-page

We’ve seen several businesses falter after making the above mistakes. If you’re ready to get an advantage on the competition, you’ll want to set up your new website with proper SEO. While hiring professional services can make the process much easier, this guide will help you eliminate the guesswork and get you started the right way. 

Building an Optimized Website

Step 1: Pick the right domain name
This is one of the most important steps in the entire process. When you’re deciding which domain name to purchase, consider:

• Spelling: A company name that’s easy to misspell will be missed. If you’re marketing right, most folks will spread your brand by word of mouth. If the domain sounds similar to another unrelated thing, they could miss you altogether.
• Branding: People feel more comfortable when visiting and sharing links from a branded domain, such as yourcompanyname.com, rather than something that looks spammy, such as your-chosen-keyword.com.
• Keywords: While keywords are important for your content, they’re no longer as important for the domain. The Exact Match Domain of 2012 by Google no longer ranks domains similar to your-chosen-keyword.com as high as it used to.

Step 2: Research Keywords Extensively
The only way you’ll get the right audience is by utilizing a core component of SEO: correct keyword targeting. As a general rule of thumb, relevant, targeted, high-quality landing pages with optimized search and conversion will offer more potential leads. With this in mind, it’s crucial to have a good keyword base with monthly updates based on performance. 

The following free tools are great to use for this type of research:

• Google Keyword Planner: This is part of the Google Adwords service, allowing you to get the best possible representation of traffic for a chosen keyword. It’s designed to identify keyword volume while offering new suggestions.
• Bing Keyword Research: This service offers suggestions as well as a traffic history spanning 6 months for Bing.
• WordStream: This program can give you an idea of your PPC keyword choices while introducing new ideas for current and future keyword campaigns.
• Uber Suggest: This service can easily find longer keywords by relying on Google’s own auto-complete search forms. This lets you find the ones that don’t have as much competition, which can be quite valuable.

Step 3: Build a Functional, Well-Branded Site
It might go without saying at this point, but people tend to avoid websites that are ugly, poorly built or are hard to use. As the late and great Steve Jobs stated, design goes beyond look and feel: “Design is how it works.” 

Because so much of SEO involves natural inbound links, it only makes sense to make a website that is attractive, easy to use and solidly coded. All websites built under your brand should:

• Be very appealing for the target audience
• Include regular, substantial content
• Feature responsive coding, making it great for all devices

Step 4: Create Content
Before products and services, great content is the way you’re going to interact with customers, which is how you’re going to get the best rankings. By “content,” we mean whatever you put on the website that will attract and “edutain” readers, including but not limited to :

• Blog posts
• Sales pages
• Ebooks or reports
• FAQs
• Tips
• Videos
• Infographics
• Galleries

At this point, you know your keywords, so you must create new content and then optimize it. When posted, a search engine will crawl the site and determine the meaning behind the content, which allows it to decide what keyword the pages will rank higher for.

Of course, as important as keywords may be at this stage, your writing should focus on readers first, and then the search engines. Keep the content exciting and fresh, and then add the best use of SEO on your next edit. Never sacrifice the quality of the article for the sake of the keyword. 

In particular, it’s good to focus on:

• Catchy titles
• Relevant keywords
• Purposeful, unique, high-quality content
• Freshness

Finally, the only thing left is to keep sharing the great content you’ve been producing every few days; in this case, social media is the best bet. Be sure not to reach everyone across every platform–there are too many choices there. Focus on the one or two that your target audience uses most.

By putting together a proper SEO strategy, you can avoid many of the pitfalls that startups find themselves in. For guidance, professional services are readily available.