When it comes to people launching their startup, SEO is most likely one of the most effective marketing strategies they can take part in. Think about it, it’s free, it’s effective, and ranking on the top of the search results is a lot better than paying for that top spot. However, founders hate it due to the delayed gratification associated with SEO. It’s a time-game, it takes time to rank let alone drive organic traffic to their website. Today, we’ll walk through 3 quick tips founders can follow in order to rank their startups site and drive organic traffic.
Keyword research is at the top of the priority list when anyone is looking to rank and drive organic traffic. The issue most companies face is they don’t allocate the task to anyone and thus they never have time for it. Startups can be hectic, however, you have time to figure out which keywords you want to rank for and which keywords you need to rank for. When doing this research keep these in mind:
With these done and your keywords done, you can start building content (on a good blog page!) and then building backlinks. Startups can get a ton of leads when they focus on these low volume, low difficulty keywords. You aren’t going to rank for the big ones yet, check your competitors and you’ll see that they might be on the second or third page for certain keywords – most likely those higher KD keywords.
No matter what anyone says, there’s always a way to do it. PPC is cool and some what effective, however, you’ll burn a massive hole in your pocket. For startups, money and budget is tight, don’t burn it on something so uncertain. You could also scrape emails from Google and then email them. You could also offer them a free trial or an exclusive offer.
The goal is to make it appealing, use the pain points that they may experience. We usually focus on the “are you sick of this” framework. One of the best things about startups is there are a ton of creative ways to market your company – all of which could be free!
It will never be easy to rank as a startup. Promotion can be easy but it’s still a daunting task. The next step? Build a unique blog. Don’t push on the business just yet though. Find something that will actually help them such as a guide or a top 10 post. “Look at me” content typically fails, and it’s one of the easiest ways to lose a lot of interest in your startup fast.
With blogs, we recommend to keep in mind the fact that your ideal customer will always have an issue. If they always have an issue, you could always have an answer… There’s your blog topic right there. We’ve spoken about it before: Startup founders think if they scale out their content, they will lose engagement. If you’re writing for your ideal customer, you won’t lose out on engagement! You’d just be filtering those who are really interested in your company.
Social media takes time and effort. Founders hate being in front of a camera or whatever else the excuse usually is. But, if you use a personal profile that you can share to groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Slack without getting hit with some sort of ban you can hit 100k member groups for free.
Some effective channels for startups to discover these groups and these channels can be found here or here (you’ll have to dig through to find your ideal group, but they’re there!)
Ranking organically as a startup is difficult. We want to shoot for the stars with the high difficulty keywords and basically rank overnight – it’s inevitable that this is almost never the case. However, startups can perform effective SEO easily following the steps outlined above.
If you’re looking for more tips and tricks, feel free to visit our site. You could also follow us on social media where we outline tips and tricks for not only SEO, but for PPC, email marketing, analytics, and more – all centered around startups!
Happy scaling ;)